Holistic Approach to Strategy, Policy Development, and Planning — Part 4
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There is one other inefficiency that gets lost in the looking for the biggest challenge in existence and working to solve them by priority setting. That is the silos, and all the budgeting and staffing processes that attend them, that produced people and groups of people who have, at best, a perspective that is limited, and ideas which they are attached to as truth, thereby blocking additional perspective. And at worst, they have defensive positions on turf that throws reason to the wind and substitutes rationalization. These divisions cannot be reassembled by integration and dialogue processes any more than humpty dumpty can be put together again. You have to start with whole eggs.
Key to getting to Systemic thinking for Wholes
Essence is core
Revealing essence via a story of place process in a naturally defined place or engaging in an essence revelation process for persons and other entities (e.g. animals, species, communities, raw material in nature and customers). Preferably, revealing essence for all the wholes in the greater whole of the entities that they impact. This is also true for a corporation understanding its story and unique work, as well as each unique consumer or customer guild.
Understand the working of specific systems
Looking at the systems inside and outside the Whole and understanding their working in producing the vitality, viability, and evolution of the whole. “Storying” a place is the most effect way to do this connecting to a whole. It provides a means of revealing patterns that exist in both the landscape and the culture, simultaneously. It makes possible innovation that has staying power because it comes out of something real that has always been there and is in everything. Essence is still unfolding in our present time. And it will continue to be there beyond our time. Humans have a role in the natural process since we are a nested system inside of the place.
Both humans and the landscape have work to do today. This is where the potential exists. In the essence, not the problems or even the reframing each problem as an opportunity.
