Jack of all trades, master of some, constantly learning more. Over the years, Florian has been called a polymath, by some he has been seen as being obsessed with particular topics, while others called him a genius. All are true… or  is he just a nerd obsessed with truth and pragmatic action??

Florian Boulais has been living in the Yukon for more than 25 years. Son of a French father and a German mother, he spent his youth between France, Germany and Switzerland. He grew up on a small farm, and very early on, showed an unquenchable thirst for understanding how things work: from bicycles to mopeds, then motorbikes and cars, wood working and building. He went on to study mechanical assembly, electricity, electronics, laser technologies, holograms, and computers. He is a licensed jet engine mechanic and a certified Apple technician.

It is noteworthy that in school, Florian had a hard time. His school results went from bad to average — and that was with a heroic amount of effort (and possibly some strategic charm with teachers). He felt ashamed about his lousy results, not realizing that the problem wasn’t lack of intelligence, but an inconvenient habit of seeing everything — not just the pieces of a system, but also the invisible threads connecting them.

Naturally, processing that much extra information takes time — lots of it. Unfortunately, the school system wasn’t designed for kids who insist on mentally mapping the universe before answering question two. On the other hand, it explained why he was light-years ahead of his classmates when it came to three-dimensional visioning, mechanical assembly, engineering, problem solving, or logical thinking.

His mind simply refused to move on until it understood every angle of a concept and how it fit into the bigger picture — less speed, more depth, in other words. These days, he’s learned to appreciate this quirk for what it is: a cognitive bias toward systems thinking (and, perhaps, the world’s slowest but most thorough way of doing homework).

After spending time in the French navy and working on commercial jets, Florian moved to Canada 22 years ago. He found the landscape and the people to be an endless source of inspiration and energy. When first landing in Canada, Florian spent one year on the land, learning from Ojibwa First Nation people in Ontario. This time was a game changer. From this moment on, Florian applied his mind to a different realm: the realm of ideas: art, philosophy, psychology, systemic risk, emotional intelligence, economy, sociology, history, meditation, the great spiritual traditions and more. He shifted his focus from “Complicated Mechanical System” to “Complex Dynamic Systems” – the world of what is alive. During this time two major shifts in his worldview occurred, namely

• One cannot separate the natural world and the human world as they are interlinked,
• There is profound ageless wisdom in how nature organizes itself.

After that, he relocated to the Yukon, where he has since been striving to both enhance the quality of his life there and spread as broadly as possible his love of resilience and thirst for learning and understanding how things work. Florian follows his questions and the connections between the fields named above. As a life-long learner, Florian studies and hones his skills 10 to 20 hours a week until today.

In the Yukon, Florian worked in many businesses, institutions and non-profits. While he loves to have fun, the guiding principle behind his choices has been to contribute to the resilience of people, businesses and institutions in the Yukon. Florian established and ran a successful business – the Alchemy Café – aimed at connecting people and fostering awareness about food security in the North through consuming delicious local food. He built the building where he ran the company with his hands out of local logs that he fell himself, while networking with other businesses around the Yukon and developing good working ties. In parallel to this, Florian has been studying resiliency across various domains and disciplines.

Aside from this consulting business, Florian currently runs another business, is an EMS volunteer, a volunteer firefighter and he is involved with multiple non-profits dealing with systemic and personal resilience.

Florian plays one of his three instruments daily, speaks three languages, works out daily, ice dips weekly, meditates for one hour daily and creates visual arts (such as this website 🙂 ). His near future wish is to weigh 80kg and have big muscles! (But this will likely not happen considering his fast metabolism)

(The background of this page is the blueprint of the Textron ALF 502 Jet engine Florian used to work on)