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  • From: Victor Guest <vic@daena.eepo.com.au>
  • To: Permaculture WA <perma@eepo.com.au>
  • Subject: Re: What is Hol. Mgmt.? - Reply (fwd)
  • Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 16:55:20 WST

Errors-To: owner-chrm-general@igc.apc.org

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.



  • Re: What is Hol. Mgmt.? - Reply (fwd), Victor Guest, 12/12/1997

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