Interview with Marwane El Harbili
Kumar: Hi, everyone. Kumar Dattatreyan here with the Meridian Point. Today I am excited to welcome to the stage Marwane El Harbili. I hope I said that right. I practiced, but I don't know if I got it perfect, but I think I may be a little close.
Marwane is a systems thinker whose expertise spans product management, strategy, and AI engineering. With a background that uniquely combines rigorous management principles with a lifelong passion for systems theory, Marwane brings fresh perspectives on how organizations can navigate disruption and foster sustainable innovation. As someone who's advised startups across Europe and co-manages a micro investment fund, he's developed fascinating insights about what makes some companies thrive while others falter during times of change.
So without further ado, I'm going to bring Marwane on stage. How did I do, Marwane, with your last name?
Marwane: Perfect. I was just going to jump in and say, bravo, bravo. Very well done.
Kumar: Thank you. I feel like I did better when we were off stage before we went live than I did when I was on stage. But as long as you approve, I'm happy.
All right, so let's get started. I'm really fascinated by your experience, Marwane, and you've been very passionate about strategy and systems thinking since childhood. How has this perspective shaped your approach to helping organizations navigate disruption and innovation?
Marwane: Yeah, great. Thanks for that comment. Actually, yes, it is indeed a passion that goes back to my childhood. I think it's because millions of other kids playing video games or millions of other kids liking to play with small soldiers or simulations have understood intuitively very early that the world we're living in, our place in that world, our interactions with that world is systemic in nature.
What does that mean? It means that it's a combination of many dependent parts, and each part requires sometimes a whole different discipline, a whole theory to understand, but it cannot be understood independently of the other parts.
Together with strategy—my interest in strategy dates back to my childhood years waiting for my parents to get out of work or pick me up from school—I was reading books about military strategy, and I was passionate about everything from Persian, Indian, Chinese, Roman, Arab, even African armies, battle stories and strategies. And against popular beliefs, it's not just battle strategy. It's also logistics, politics. And so it was systemic in nature.
I think those two fields together joined very, very well. And it's, to me, completely obvious that understanding, applying, and practicing strategy needs to be done in a systemic way.
Kumar: That's very interesting. So as a child, you started thinking in this manner. How did that manifest in your childhood, you know, with playing games with your friends? Did you always win the games that you played because you had a more holistic view of the games?
Marwane: Well, unfortunately, like many things in life, knowing or understanding things does not mean you master them. In fact, I would postulate even that many times in life, if you overthink things, like I tend to do, you end up performing way worse than other people who don't do that. And I have learned to be careful around that by just watching and analyzing what I'm doing, what other people are doing, just observing, analyzing.
However, I really think that with really complex phenomena or situations or challenges or complex problem solving, without having that systemic and complex adaptive system approach, if you want—it's one of the disciplines that bring both complexity theory and systemics together. Systemics is for me the discipline of systems thinking, but it encompasses other ones. Without having that approach, those skills, you will end up sometimes having a very great solution to the wrong problem because you don't understand the real problem. You just modeled a very different problem than the real problem.
And it happens everywhere. It can happen in economics like we're seeing at the moment. It can happen in companies all the time. I'll give you an example. We both are from the area of agile and enterprise agile or agility, depending on who you ask. And without having a systemic perspective on it—psychology, anthropology, group psychology, developmental psychology, but also the techno-social aspects of it—you are doomed to fail.
So that's why most approaches, be it understanding the systems or trying to improve the systems or transform them, that are purely one-sided, so focused on one dimension, like, for example, the mechanistic aspects of Agile, let's say a method or a framework, are doomed to fail by definition. That's my view on this.
Yeah, I didn't end up winning a lot of games as a kid because of that. I actually was winning what I wanted or losing what I lost because of factors completely independent of that, I guess.
Kumar: One thing I'm sure you've learned from that, right? And your fascination and your passion for systems theory has grown, I'm sure. You talked about examples in the current economic climate. What can you say about applying systems theory and systems thinking to the current economic climate?
Marwane: So very nice bridge, because the last point I wanted to make just as the previous question was related to learning. Having a systemic approach or lens on things allows you to learn, because what you do by dissecting is trying to understand for a purpose. And if your purpose is learning, then you are dissecting from a perspective of learning.
Kumar: You mentioned about the current economic climate and how it's an example of systems theory or systems thinking not applied appropriately. So I was wondering about that.
Marwane: Yeah, okay. Thanks for bringing me back to that. So I think we humans have a lot of properties across cultures and across time. And one of them is we don't learn from mistakes very well. And I think that applies, for example, to my personal life.
But in terms of economics, I'm referring to the fact that there is a tendency of people to really believe and buy into any discourse that tells them "we found the problem, it's this trend—if we pull on this trend everything will unfold and everything will be way better than it is, it will be good again."
And in the case of economics now, we are thinking that because we are breaking down existing structures that we think have some flaws, things will suddenly become better again. And I think we are being sold another lie, which is just rhetoric, which is, "Oh, yeah, well, things, when you do change, will get bad before they get better again."
I don't think it's really true when you look at it from a systemic lens and you see you can deconstruct an entire complex network of economic interdependencies that brought welfare and economic development to people, you know, three, four, five orders of magnitude from your end of the chain. So from the U.S., let's say, impacting countries in Africa, like my home country, and you don't see that impact it has in those other countries. And you don't even see the impact it has on the farmers in your own country.
Kumar: Yeah, that's a really good point. And I think that a lot of that is lost on the average person that watches the news and buys into the rhetoric. I don't know what can be done about that except to instill in people more of a curiosity as to how things work.
I'm going to shift here a little bit. In our prior conversations before we got on this podcast, you've mentioned that whether it's martial arts, which I know that you have a history with, or business strategy, the same core design principles apply to all systems. Can you share some examples of how insights that you've gained from seemingly unrelated fields have informed your work with the companies that you work with?
Marwane: You know, very early in my life, I discovered a word, a really nice word that I've forgotten for many years now. It's the word "epiphany." And that came while looking at the way things were going in school with teachers or with other kids, all the conflicts you'd have with other people or can witness in society, comparing them to, in my case, I was doing a lot of Taekwondo and comparing them to the struggle that it is to learn and practice and do combats in Taekwondo—so mock-up combats, the tournament combats—and I was seeing a lot of parallels.
And that's when I remember having learned that the thing that I was witnessing, I was probably the billionth person in history, or maybe I'm a bit exaggerating, that had come to that observation. I wasn't certainly the first one and definitely not the last one to see those parallels.
And those parallels led me to learn about the fact that you can analyze systems or phenomena that are observed in systems by using the angle of looking for first principles that are ruling or describing a system. So let's take the system of having a combat in Taekwondo—you can see the same interaction dynamics happening between you and your counterpart, the other fighter, but also with the system, the tournament, the public, the referee, very much parallel to individualistic interactions you have at school. So it's you and, let's say, the exam, and the exam is basically your opponent, but you also have other people witnessing you, supporting you, the people referring you or grading you, etc.
And that's when I started seeing those parallels. But to be honest, the real parallels became totally evident to me later in my life when I was doing my first internships and when I was doing work in my first projects with problem solving later in consulting. That's when it became evident to me that looking at first principles in a system is a very useful—and I would argue maybe the most efficient way I know of—approach for trying to understand that system, looking for those first principles ruling it.
And in martial arts, first principles are the mind, the heart, and then the body. These three need to be in coherence, in alignment. That's one of those principles. And then there are other ones that you end up discovering while you're practicing and learning.
Kumar: That's really enlightening for me. I think the general public has heard more about first principles thinking in the last few years in reference to how Elon Musk runs his companies. I mean, you read about it, you hear about it, and his focus is on first principles thinking. Let's not be biased by how things have been done in the past, like his work with SpaceX, to design rockets that are reusable, that can land again, you know, on a platform or get caught by the little toothpicks and things like that. You see these amazing things that seem like they come right out of science fiction, but he's made it a reality.
And regardless of what you think about Musk the politician, Musk the engineer is one that's driven by first principles thinking. And I don't know that everyone has a common understanding of what that is. You described it in Taekwondo terms, right? First the heart, the mind, and then the body. What is first principle thinking when you're talking about designing systems?
Marwane: Yes, that's a great question. And also I love the parallel you made to Musk because I have immense respect for Musk, the engineer. I compared what I've always thought I would achieve in my life, being a scientist, being a mathematician, to what I've actually achieved. And of course, you can only be in awe and humbled by that if you haven't been humbled before.
But in terms of the example I gave with Taekwondo, it was one of the most shallow or highest level principles you can learn to start understanding how your body and mind interact together with other parts of you—so the soul, the heart that you have that define your identity in combat. So your fears, your reactions, your reflexes, my avoidance patterns, whatever I was learning about myself and my own skill style and also my own strengths and weaknesses, but also my own fighting style. These were made easier for me by looking at first principles, my first principles of me as a system, but also the first principles that have been agreed upon and crystallized by practitioners of Taekwondo over centuries, possibly millennia. I don't know how old the art is.
But in order to give a definition, for me, the easiest way to understand this and why it seemed always very evident to me, it's because at school, you learn physics. And physics is learned by looking at first principles, because that allows you to focus on the essence of what your physical instruments or physics instruments allow you to be able to describe the world and interact with it in a meaningful, deterministic way, something that is reliable.
So you define those principles because these are not polluted by context, by environmental factors, by opinions. It can't change an energy conservation formula. It is what it is. But then you move to another system where you move from Newtonian physics to a quantum physics system or even string theory system, and then the principles change. So you have to know which principles hold under which conditions. And these conditions are referred to in physics and engineering and sciences as a paradigm.
Paradigm is the philosophy and the approach, the model you have of the world. You pick the paradigm and then you start designing or understanding or describing or researching the first principles that allow you to describe all systems evolving inside that paradigm. But if you want to go one level deeper, keeping the parallel, the analogy I used to physics—so the first principles of physics, for example, the law of conservation of energy, that's a principle, right? Then you have principles built on top of these first level, first principles, right? But the essence, the thing that remains always constant inside the paradigm are called first level principles.
Kumar: I feel like I'm in a graduate program, college level course, with the information that you're sharing. It's just fantastic, Marwane. How would you say that—let's bring this back down to the people that we help in the organizations, whether it's folks in product management or organizational change or whatever. How do we bring this type of thinking and these types of principles to organizational design or product development? What's been your go-to method to help people start thinking more in a systems manner and applying first principles thinking to the work that they do?
Marwane: Thanks for bringing me back to the floor of reality. I tend to fly away from reality in those abstract moments. I think it was fascinating, and I think the audience will enjoy that because it's important to understand what it means. What is it? That's where we can say, okay, how do we apply this to the work that we do every day? And it's equally fascinating to understand how it looks like in reality. That's where you learn a lot about those theories that I was describing earlier.
In the context of organizational engineering, which is what we do a lot of, whether it's transformation or strategy, I have my own favorite tools of choice. So I am a proponent of modeling, including method engineering modeling. What I do is I personally prefer to have my own tools that allow me to describe the environment, the system I'm trying to interact with—trying to improve or transform or analyze or define a strategy for, defining implementation or delivery for, or running an improvement initiative for, it doesn't matter. No matter what kind of work you do on that system, I personally prefer to have a model in a modeling language to be able to build models for that system because the model is what you're actually working with, not the system. You never work with the system; the system is there, it does not depend on you. What you work with, what your brain needs, is a model of that system.
Whether you want it or not, it is there. It's like saying "I don't have a strategy." Well, not having a strategy is a strategy, and whether or not you're aware or conscious or you made your strategy explicit, it is there. You just didn't describe it enough. And in our case, that's what we do with models. You need a model.
So I love modeling languages. And I became an addict of modeling languages during my research years and my PhD years and my postdoc years because I was a practitioner of an art discipline called enterprise modeling. And it's a fascinating area of computation and computer science with implications across different disciplines, even in economics, etc. It's a discipline where you invent languages. In the same way we invent languages for programming, for software engineering, this is the same thing. These are languages that can be formal, semi-formal, not formal. And they allow you to build models.
So what you have is you have a system. You want to work on that system. To do that, you need a model. If you want to do that professionally and in a disciplined, rigorous way, you would need a modeling language to build those models. But if you don't want to, you can just sketch things or describe them in text, etc. But you need a model to work with it. Whether or not you have that artifact, the model is there.
Some people don't have that. They have it in their heads, and they put parts of those models on slides, which make them fragmented, ill-described, incomplete, contradictory, etc. That's where modeling languages come in place. And I can give you examples of modeling languages. In the area of business process management, you have a whole plethora of modeling languages. One of them is called BPMN.
We can talk about that more, but let me summarize my idea. System, model, better than that is a modeling language. And with a modeling language, you can describe systems. For example, there is a model that I love for modeling systems with dependencies of parts and systems, and it's called causal loop diagrams. We can talk more about that.
Kumar: Yes, yes, yes. I've used very, very briefly, touched the surface of causal loop diagramming. Yeah, and now I know, and it's connecting for me. So that's great.
So let's maybe dive a little deeper. You've expressed in our conversations before, expressed frustration with how innovation is approached in consulting, right? Lots of actionism, but little substance to what innovation really is. So applying the model, understanding, to understand the system, you need a model to understand it. How does that help you help the client that you're working with view innovation in a different way, in a different manner?
Marwane: So contrary to what one might expect, I don't actually tend to badmouth innovation in enterprise because I know it's a very tough thing. I was involved in innovation initiatives or projects or business cases even. It's also a very early stage. And I know how tough it is. Why? Because it is not something tangible. It is not something graspable. And to be able to do innovation, you need a whole set of prerequisites. And a lot of them are not available. Some of them are just having tools and artifacts to work with, so modeling, ways to describe what you want, what the problems are, etc.
But also, you need insights about the environment you are in and also the paradigm you use to understand that environment you're in. Let's take the example of strategic innovation. So basically, innovation strategies—coming up with innovative strategies, not just improvement strategies or iterative or functional or incremental ones, stuff like that. Let's take that example. It is very frustrating when people see no immediate or no impactful results of all the effort they have put into innovation, as an example, so strategic innovation in our example.
And the best way to help people make progress with that is to really have tools that allow you to achieve clarity. And that's a loaded term. We can get back to that later if you want. Clarity about what it is that we are talking about. And the most fundamental level of this is semantics and vocabulary, meaning two of the most basic components of language. If we want, we can also get back to that later. It's very much related to what I was talking about earlier with modeling, language engineering, software language engineering, etc. It's very much related to that.
So vocabulary, semantics, language, basically. And these two building blocks are, you will notice, and I invite all guests and all listeners to check that and share their views on this, often not given. Sometimes we talk about, we use the same terms and we don't even understand what each one of us means with those terms.
And so having paradigms to describe these is, I think, a lot more helpful than having formats, well-executed formats like design sprints or other innovation methods. There is really a ton published and unpublished in books and in papers, etc. I think it's a lot more useful than that. You can do whiteboard exercises with your innovation team and achieve way better results with just drawing on a whiteboard if you have a clear, rigorous language around understanding your environment, understanding your goals, and understanding what it is that you are solving for, what it is that you want to achieve.
And I think this is—if I would share anything of value with anybody around innovation and strategic innovation—it would be those two most fundamental, lowest level (in a good sense, the lowest level meaning foundational level) competencies to have in any team involved in innovation.
Kumar: That makes a lot of sense, and it kind of matches up with my experience where teams that are considered more innovative do have a shared language. They understand what they mean when they say something and they have a shared vocabulary for describing the models that they work with, and they're definitely more successful.
I wonder what your thoughts are for companies like Tesla or SpaceX that are seemingly always innovating and always pushing the boundaries, even though they're led by mercurial CEOs like Elon Musk, or even Apple back when Steve Jobs was still around—Apple 1.0, and then he left and then came back and Apple 2.0. He was a little different in both cases. But Apple back then and certainly Tesla and SpaceX and all the other companies that Musk runs are incredibly innovative.
And I wonder what your thinking is there because certainly these folks, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, they share some traits. In some ways there must be psychological safety within the teams that are doing the work. And there must be a focus on innovation with these teams that are doing the work. They're incredibly talented teams that are doing incredibly complicated things. So they must have something in common there between Apple back in Steve Jobs' days, and maybe even now, and the Musk-led companies today. What are your thoughts on that?
Marwane: It was a long question. No, but it's actually in my mind, it's a very clear and simple question because it attacks one core topic, which is what are critical success factors and also critical competencies or critical success companies. If you want, these are two concepts I use when I try to think about these things.
So to me, it's very clear. I've never worked for these companies. In fact, I'm very, very far away from them because in Europe, where I live and work, we don't have, I don't know companies that do that. There must be. I've just never been lucky to work with them. And if they do, they are very successful in their niches. So I can name you companies in professional tool manufacturing or device or electronic machinery manufacturing that I did projects for that have units, pockets, that in some ways perform, let's say, or not really behave, let's say perform or generate similar outcomes to what you have been describing. But these are pop companies, tech pop examples that are known to everybody.
And what I know about companies like Musk's companies is from books, mostly books, but also tons of podcasts and listening to people who have worked there like Joe Justice, who are really kind to share their experience.
Here is my take on this. And it's just one take. It could be thousands of others. I think what I said in my answer about your previous question when I was mentioning vocabulary and semantics and language and clarity leading to clarity having a much higher impact is also a factor for these companies because they don't only involve their teams in these discussions requiring vocabulary, language, semantics and clarity. They are relentlessly, almost religiously focused on involving their customers in this. And their customers are not only the buyers, the users, or the customers in classical sense—it's also people like government people funding them like banks or VCs or investors, people involved in the supply chain. These are all different kinds of customers.
It's not always in complex products—you don't always have the end product. You have a lot of intermediary transient products from inception all the way to delivery of the end product to the one final end user and customer, right? And I can give you examples from the military industry or let's say rocket or space industry, for example.
So that's one factor for me. Relentless, almost religious focus on the end, on understanding really what customers are talking about and then talking about the same thing, sometimes modeling them. And I think that's why design and product has risen to prominence in the past twenty-three years. I mean, the first examples I've heard about the core place made for design in tech products was reading about Steve Jobs' return to Apple. And then later I discovered, no, there was a practice done in U.S., North American companies since a very long time. I just was never aware of it because as an engineer, we were very far away from there. But people at the very top of the company gave that area a critical importance in their companies.
There are other factors. There could be hundreds of factors, right? But there are other factors for me. I just took a note while you were asking me the question. I think the spirit and the mindset really—it's also an overused term, mindset—but the spirit, the energy, the heart that leaders at the top put into a focus for a company really does resonate throughout the whole company. It really does. I really think that the personality of the leaders in a company really do impact the way everybody in a company does work.
And so when you're extremely focused on doing work in a clear, innovative, impact and value-adding way for your customers, that does impact the work done by everybody in your company. And that is definitely a huge difference I see between those companies you mentioned as an example and other not-as-equally-impactful companies.
Kumar: I agree, I share your analysis of this. And I think that last point is especially true—that the companies like Apple and Musk-led companies all seem to have a purpose-led mission that attracts the type of people that are willing to put up with long hours and maybe less than ideal work-life balance and things like that because they believe in the mission of that company.
For Tesla, it was to replace internal combustion cars. For SpaceX, it was to make humans a multi-planetary species. For Neuralink, it's to provide the ability for people that have impairments, paraplegics or whatever, to be able to walk again or see again or whatever it might be. And so there's a certain purpose there that drives people, and I think that's maybe what is one of the factors as you mentioned, right? It's not certainly universal, but certainly one of the factors that helps drive it.
Marwane: Thank you for that. I just want to add one thing that unfortunately I was planning to add to my answer, but I forgot it. There is a big difference between those two factors that I mentioned. Like I said, there are hundreds of others. And there's two more properties to what I was talking about.
One of them is how sustainable is your approach to innovation and your strategy around innovation in your company. So you know, everything is bad when pushed to the extremes, so burning out people is no solution, right? You can have that attitude of saying "yeah, people are commodities, are replaceable, I would bring in new people," but you're losing an immense amount. And so that is one thing. So it's not an easy problem. We're talking about complexity at the beginning and systems and social aspects and psychology aspects and stuff.
This is where it comes to place. This is not easy—these are the dark arts of performance and of strategy, etc. This is not something you learn a script about in some advanced postgraduate program at Wharton and suddenly your company is going to outperform everybody else. That's not how it works. That's why leadership is really core to all these things.
The other aspect I forgot to mention is these companies, I've noticed one thing, do not treat innovation as a luxury or a nice-to-have thing, something that you can tackle with ROI calculations and stuff. It's not something where you can apply some measurement model, some arbitrary dumb measurement model to and say, "Yeah, but the return is too low. We're not going to do this procedure anymore." It's not that measurable.
There was a book I really love called "How to Measure Anything." I've got to find the author again. And it discusses that. It discusses how to measure value. And it brings us to the topic that these things are not really reproducible. And so it's a craft. Our area in tech and innovation and strategy and complex adaptive systems is really a craft. And we remain a craft with or without any generation of AI. It's not a—how can I say—it's not a method that we apply. It's a craft. You learn it.
And every two people, you or me, are going to be very different. And that's why you need us, both of us, although we're very different because every system needs a big variety, big heterogeneity, big richness in terms of approaches to deal with problem solving, because you never know. It's not deterministic. You don't know which approach we really need to which outcomes. That's what I wanted to say. And ROI is misleading.
Kumar: That's beautiful. I love it. Thank you for adding to that. I think that added even more to the conversation.
So we're getting a little bit long here, so I'm going to end with a few fun questions for you, Marwane. You're multilingual, right? What's your native tongue?
Marwane: Yeah, my native tongue is called Moroccan. I speak six languages fluently or natively in total plus two that I have speech halfway knowledge in.
Kumar: Wow, that's amazing. So what language do you find yourself thinking in when tackling these complex systems problems?
Marwane: It really is a phenomenon that gave me a lot of headache many years ago. About twenty years ago, I noticed that I was talking to myself in German. And when I was younger, yeah, even having dreams in German or talking to myself in German, solving problems in German, or talking to myself while walking, etc.
And until then, it was not so worrying because I was doing that in Moroccan or French. French is also my native tongue, just like Moroccan. Arabic was very tough to learn. It took me fourteen years plus in school. But it's a huge advantage because it's so complex that everything after that is easy. You know, Japanese or etc., nothing scares you anymore.
But it really is... your brain decides on its own, has its own personality I think, or multiple personalities, and it really vehiculates messages to you in many different languages. There is also a kind of phenomenon called linguistic dilution that happens when you start speaking many languages. It's different from person to person, where your mind comes up with—because our minds are magic, they really see the nuance and the difference, sometimes imperceptible differences in concepts and semantics that we don't perceive, we never learned, but our minds are able to acquire that knowledge—and they give you a word when you speak in English to a colleague in French or in Moroccan or in German, and your brain just does not come up with the word in English because you don't find anything that fits what you're trying to say.
Kumar: That's very interesting. I'm not multilingual. I mean, I understand a couple of languages from India, but my parents spoke English at home, and so I never learned anything but English. But I wish I had that ability. It must be really difficult and also, I think in some ways, exciting to be able to think in different languages as you're working through a problem or being able to substitute a word that doesn't have an immediate corollary in English or whatever language you're speaking.
Marwane: There's a nice parallel I'd like to make. I don't want to overextend the time, but I want to make a parallel to the beginning of our conversation with systems thinking and strategy and organizational engineering. We're talking about different lenses or models to approach a system. So I can have two different models giving me very different opportunities or possibilities working on a system, right?
Yeah, everything happens with language. Language really influences the way our psyche and also neurologically, biochemically our brain works. Languages really influence the way we exist, we are, our inner voice, the way we perceive the world, the way we think, really. And that's why languages and cultures or cultural studies or anthropology are really interrelated.
So the people with a given language will have different properties than, let's say, people speaking German will be very different than people raised or thinking in Moroccan, very different. And that's just the way it is. Take a kid from a German family and let him grow in Morocco, he will be much closer to Moroccans in his way of perceiving the world than the same cousin growing in Germany.
And so the parallel I'm seeing to organization engineering is this: We were talking earlier about models and having languages to describe those models. So a simple version of a language could be a notation, visual notation for workflows. So these models that we're using will allow us to interact and work and perceive even our limitations in working with a system will be very, very different depending on the paradigm or the language you use to attack that system.
And so we have to be very careful in which methods or which languages, which paradigms we are using to work on the systems that we are working on. Because sometimes we can be limited by our own expertise, our own history, our own strengths in using particular paradigms or particular methods.
Kumar: Yeah, that makes sense. And I think that it would be amazing to have you back to do a podcast just on language and the system of language and how people think and how it influences the way you think, because I think that would be a fascinating topic to explore.
I have one more question for you. What is a Moroccan concept or proverb that you wish more business leaders understood?
Marwane: Yeah, I saw that. I was thinking about that today, this evening. There's a lot that I really like, but there is one that I would like to share today, which is: when you don't know where you're going anymore, sit down and touch the ground.
And it's so simple, but it impacted me deeply in so many ways in my life, through life crisis or difficulties, etc. And I finally saw the wisdom. I started seeing the wisdom in the toughest phases of my life. And, you know, sometimes you just don't know what the right path is. You don't even see the paths anymore. You just lose it. It's like your inner ear lost any sense of balance. And that Moroccan proverb, it's so trivial, but it's so deep, so precise. Just sit down, make contact with the ground.
Kumar: I love that. Yeah, it helps you get grounded, right? Find your center, if you will, connect you to the earth from which you came.
Marwane: Yes, in a way. So yeah, I love that. Where you come from, and then you have a lot more clarity about what your options are.
Kumar: That's very powerful. Well, thank you for sharing. Any last thoughts before we sign off?
Marwane: I'm really grateful for this forum, and I really love the multidisciplinary approach to this. It's classic systems, systemics, the system of approach to thinking. I really invite everybody to look a bit deeper into language engineering or, sorry, modeling languages. And I think they can be extremely powerful. I think they are widely underused across disciplines, including in engineering. And I think they can really make a huge difference in how people build and design transformative systems
