Alain explores how Ernest Gmunder uses tree metaphors to explain the benefits of an hybrid operating model to the companies he advises. In this hybrid model, a company is considered as a “tree”. This is his way to go beyond the “agile” buzzword. Ernest recognises that the organisation behind a product line, the “branches” in the tree, needs agility to serve well its customers. But these branches need to be supported by a common "trunk" of shared functions, like billing, that provides scale and efficiency. This is a very original and elegant illustration of what was presented in the “Living Being Everywhere” episode.

In this episode, Alain Wegmann defines and discusses the power and importance of analogies and of metaphors in our reasoning. They are central to our languages and for understanding complex concepts. By using metaphors, we can reason rationally and emotionally. Using analogies and metaphors is essential in service design and systems thinking. 

In this first episode of Beyond the Buzzwords, Alain Wegmann explains his approach to entrepreneurship and business and IT alignment. He illustrates how people can better work together by reasoning about themselves and about companies as if they were living beings. The concept of living beings is an amazingly powerful metaphor for analyzing exchanges between people and people’s motivations.

Alain, our dearest friend and the host of this show, passed away a few days after recording the last episode of the season. In it, he honored Bruno Latour, a fellow academic and a leading figure in Social Sciences, until his own recent passing. In this episode, Alain paid tribute to Latour’s work and offered insights into the shared goals of their respective research. In his memory, we in turn share this episode with you, his public and followers, posthumously.

Bruno Latour was a French anthropologist, philosopher, and sociologist. He was born in 1947 and died at the age of 75 in 2022 in Paris. Latour was considered an iconoclast as he challenged many of the buzzwords we use to guide our actions. He calls these buzzwords ‘factish’ gods which people worship. Latour believes that facts should be developed through a long social process in which objectivity is constructed through negotiations.

In the first part of this episode, Alain Wegmann makes his synthesis of Latour’s works and illustrates how he worked on the destitution of these “factish gods” and on the restitution of meanings for our society.

In this episode, Alain Wegmann interviews Lucien Etzlinger, Senior Consultant of customer-relationship management, with whom he collaborated for over ten years on developing the SEAM method. In this episode, Lucien explains how he discovered, during his career in the world of finance, the importance of relationship management. He describes how the SEAM patterns, called CASA (for curiosity, appreciation, service, and action), help him in his consulting practice. He also talks about the concept of living beings and the importance of the concept for understanding the challenges in promoting changes in companies.

Alain Wegmann asks Holly Cogliati-Bauereis, an English editor with whom he collaborates, to present a project for redefining her position in their department at their university. In this episode, through Holly’s project, Alain describes the use of the Seam method, focusing mainly on the Seam patterns called CASA. Her project was a simple sales process applied to a business/IT alignment problem. Their story illustrates that the essence of selling is building and maintaining relationships. This is more universal than engineers would think. They also sketch how a project developed using Seam is an intuitive exploration that leads to a rational conclusion that can be implemented for the benefit of all parties involved. Tune in to this episode now!

Weeks into the Beyond the Buzzwords podcast, we're now down to the conclusion of the show's first season. What better way to celebrate this milestone than a good recap of the wisdom shared across the episodes? Alain Wegmann does just that and puts it all together.

In the first two episodes, he introduced a metaphor about living beings and explained the usefulness of metaphors. In the third episode, he interviewed Ernest Gmunder about his use of metaphors in consulting. In the remaining episodes, he introduced the four main patterns proposed in the Seam method. These patterns are:

(1) Curiosity, essential for discovering our reality and the reality of others and for shaping our lives;

(2) Appreciation, a tool for forming agreements about possible changes between people and organizations;

(3) Service, a conceptual tool for understanding exchanges of information, matter, and energy between people and organizations;

(4) Action, the actions necessary to motivate people to accept the changes.

These four - curiosity, appreciation, service, and action - are the CASA patterns (CASA in Italian and Spanish). The CASA is our home where we keep our tools for any and all our projects in our professional and private lives.

In this last episode, Alain Wegmann summarises all of the above.