Subject: Re: What is Hol. Mgmt.? - Reply (fwd)

From: Victor Guest <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 16:55:20 WST

Errors-To: [email-masked]

Here's a brief thing I wrote up for a permaculture readership, so it's 
slanted  in that direction and assumes a certain set of prior understanding. 
Included with it on the same page is a schematic of the decision-making 
model and the five points to answer the question, how do you know holistic 
management is being practiced? The following article referred to is about 
holistic management and what permaculture folks could learn from it. I also 
include a mind map of holistic management in the following article. Please 
feel free to use whatever you would like.
 Christopher Peck
 Santa Fe, NM USA

                           What is holistic management?
If you take patterns as the ultimate structure of the world, if it is
 arrangements and not stuff that makes up the world, this new concept 
leads you to the concept of wholes. Wholes have no stuff, they are 
arrangements. Science has come round to the view that the world consists 
of patterns, and I construe that to be that the world consists of wholes.
								-Jan Smuts

 Holistic management is a decision-making model that incorporates 
goal-setting, the appropriate use of tools, and careful monitoring of 
effects to move a "whole" under management towards social, financial, and 
ecological sustainability. As a challenge to conventional decision-making, 
it creates a process and a place for holistic thinking to take place.

Holistic management was devised originally to be a practical way to apply 
the concept of holism. In 1926 South African philosopher Jan Smuts coined 
the word holism and articulated the theory in his book Holism and Evolution. 
The idea, familiar to practitioners of permaculture, is that nature only 
operates in wholes, not in interconnecting parts. Wholes are stacked or 
nested inside larger wholes, and relationship is the fundamental mode of 
organization.
 Holistic management applies this realization to the management of farms,
 ranches, businesses, and the lives of individuals.

 The decision-making model proceeds through several stages. It begins by
 convening the whole, that idea concerning a certain set of resources. 
The next step is to create a holistic goal, which will be explained in 
more detail in the following article. The holistic goal is used as a single
statement, and all decisions are directed towards achieving it in its 
entirety. Holistic management insists that all decisions simultaneously 
satisfy social, ecological, and economic criteria.
 Decisions are based on an understanding of the fundamentals of ecosystem
 processes and how the use of various tools affects them. The next stage 
in the decision-making model is the use of seven testing guidelines to 
ensure that proposed decisions actually will be leading the whole towards 
its stated holistic goal. Every guideline does not apply for every proposed 
action, but the testing questions as a whole are intended to help the mind 
think in a holistic fashion. The management guidelines and the planning 
procedures give the details of using certain tools developed for specific 
situations. The following article goes into more detail on several of these.
The final stage is critical: plan-monitor-control-replan. Here is the 
acknowledgment that all design and decision-making models are prone to 
error, ignorance or newly emerged knowledge. Design must be heuristic, 
it must be open to learning from itself and from the effects of decisions.

A global movement, holistic management empowers individuals and 
communities to take responsibility for their destiny and create the kind 
of life that they desire.