Chapter 56: Seam as an Organization Development Intervention: Fifty Years of Common Ground

This chapter reviews SEAM within the context of Organization Development (OD) and Change. It compares the foundation and basic principles of SEAM with the origins and classic OD work of Beckhard and Blake, the two early contributors to whom the term Organization Development is attributed. We also address the parallels between recent developments in the field—Appreciative Inquiry, Agile concepts, and Strategic OD. The common ground of SEAM principles originated by Henri Savall in 1973 and 1974, almost 50 years ago, parallel concepts in Organization Development.