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This article presents two formative interventions using the change laboratory methodology in France and Brazil, in a university teacher training institute and a hospital respectively. Based on cultural-historical activity theory and the theory of expansive learning, the interventions aim to enable participants to discover new meaning by reconceptualizing the object of their activity. In this reconceptualization process, the identification of historically inherited contradictions within activity systems plays a key role. The two interventions present the process as a reorientation of the historical trajectory of the object of activity, requiring the linking of experiential points of view and a third-person systemic point of view.