Holistic Management Training

A Tool for Developing Multi-Dimensional Capacity

in Research, Education, and Farming

                                                                                                                                                                            - Karl North
 

Decision-making, from research design to field harvest and market, drives everything we do.  Every decision affects the world around us in ever widening ripples, because the real world functions in wholes, and will never be adequately understood by studying the parts, even as interconnected parts.  That is the premise of Holistic Management, a decision-making model developed for understanding and managing these whole systems that we must work with, wholes that include any landscape and the resources on it and the human stakeholders.  As such, Holistic Management is a model that ensures that each decision made is (simultaneously) ecologically, economically, and socially sound enough to permit long term sustainability.

As holism comes of age as a scientific revolution, there is an increasing need for models to train, or in most cases, retrain people in the knowledge business to think and work in this new cultural paradigm.  Among these, Holistic Management is perhaps unique in several ways:
 

1. It was originally designed for people who generate and use  agricultural knowledge; it  has since seen wider application outside of agriculture;

2. It is clear and simple enough to be widely accessible: training sessions can be a place  where farmers, educators, and  people can meet and learn from each other as they  develop common ground in the new perspective;

3. There exists a nationwide group of educators trained and licensed to teach Holistic  Management;

4. Its development occurred largely outside academic institutions where it did not have to  contend with disciplinary barriers to multidimensional thinking.  Indeed it was intended  to provide an alternative route to agricultural knowledge at a  time when land grant  institutions have been generally resistant to holism.

Regarded by its creators as a work in progress, Holistic Management is currently not a refined research tool. Its distinction is its capacity to constantly reform piecemeal, specialist ways of thought as management decisions are fed through the model.  It does this by holding all decisions accountable to a well-developed goal statement, by subjecting decisions to multi-dimensional testing, and by monitoring the effects of decisions taken on the whole system under management.
 

 A common experience of Holistic Management trainers has been that multidimensional thinking, while relatively easily understood at the abstract, conceptual level, runs into serious resistance from old habits and unstated assumptions at the level of practice. The following example is from personal experience.  An extension project brought a group of business, finance, communications, academic, and development professionals  together to discuss revitalization of their region, which is largely rural, and economically depressed.  Talk quickly centered on jobs and development.  Two farmers in the group, accustomed to looking at problems in a holistic framework, immediately begged the question: Jobs for what?  Development toward what end?  For most of the people at the table the answers were self-evident and the questions a waste of time.  But further probing revealed many conflicting, unstated ideological assumptions which most of the group found too unsettling to deal with.  Since these questions were never fully explored, the group never accomplished much, although it met regularly for over a year.

An example of this resistance relating directly to agricultural practice is the view of soluble salt nitrogen compounds that considers only its impact on fertility. Potential negative impacts on watershed water quality, on the health of the community of soil organisms, on the health of the growing crop, and on its nutritional quality, are often disregarded. Thus a local extension report to farmers in a recent drought year warned of nitrate toxicity to livestock in the feed corn harvest, but blamed it on the drought rather than the root cause: the heavy dependance on nitrate fertilization. An alternative, reliance on high soil organic matter, is often dismissed, again because many of the long-term positive impacts are missed: significant on-farm crop nutrient production, a high level of nutrient retention in the soil that avoids the economic waste and environmental pollution of the salt fertilizers, better air and water levels in the soil, a healthier soil community, and a higher quality farm product.

Defining the Whole

 The Holistic Management decision-making process tackles this problem head on.  The first step is to define the whole to be managed (a business, organization or community and its landscape and primary stakeholders).  One practitioner calls it "a description of a minimal sustainable unit upon which the management decisions must focus." In conventional thinking there are often blind spots in this definition of the whole, which the Holistic Management process seeks to avoid.

For example, by asking the question, "Who is a stakeholder?", that is, whose collaboration is essential to the long run success of the enterprise, people are brought into the management process early at the goal-setting stage. These include people who might otherwise be dismissed as, for example,  a convenient labor pool, a passive neighboring community, or as simple objects of technology transfer.  When decisions must recognize the values and goals of those people, management may take a whole new direction.

Setting the Goal
 

The next step is an in-depth goal setting process that articulates and integrates three components: fundamental values, activities such as production or other goals that express those values, and long term goals for the landscape ecosystem, its resource base, and other support systems, that will allow the chosen activities to be sustainable.  The outcome is a written vision or mission statement that accomplishes several important objectives:
 

1. It gets fundamental values and what people really want out in the open;

2. It creates a reference by which all subsequent holistic decisions are evaluated;

3. It allows stakeholders to identify common ground on which they can build a   sustainable collaborative enterprise.

It has been Holistic Management experience that people who disagree at the level of superficial goals often find that if they dig down to the level of fundamental values and quality of life goals, they have more to agree on, and can build from there. This has happened where stakeholders included initially hostile parties such as ranchers and environmentalists inhabiting the same landscape along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains.

The goal setting process has emerged as a key element in the success of Holistic Management and in its continuing refinement as a decision-making craft.  Goal-setting seems so simple and self-evident as to be banal, as in the quotation attributed to Casey Stengel, "If you don't know where you're going, you might end up somewhere else." But when undertaken and then constantly used and revised, as it is in Holistic Management practice, not left to gather dust on a shelf, as mission statements often are, a well-articulated goal can subject to sophisticated scrutiny any agricultural technology or practice under consideration for adoption.

Holistic managers learn to look for the goals implicit in every new piece of machinery, field practice, or genetic hybrid, goals that do not necessarily match the holistic goal of the farmer.  And Holistic Management forces the issue of superficial versus deep, quality of life goals, as well as short versus long term goals.  As people responsible for research and education, as well as farmers, begin to evaluate agricultural knowledge this way, their goals will change, or at least be held to account by the process.

Choosing Management Options

The next step in the Holistic Management process is the choice of a tool or management option to solve a given problem. In addition to testing against the goal statement for agreement, managers submit potential solutions to a series of other tests.  Some of these are in accord with conventional business management, comparing options as to marginal return or for ability to strengthen the weak link in the operation, for example.  Others test how well a decision addresses the long term ecosystem needs for sustainable operation, asking questions such as: Are the sources of energy and other natural resources constant or finite?  Benign or potentially damaging?  Does the decision make the most of the special opportunity farmers have to convert solar energy into dollars?  To facilitate matters, evaluation of ecological impact focuses on four ecosystem processes in particular: the water cycle, the mineral cycle, energy flow, and changes in the biological community with respect to biodiversity.  A last test considers the social and cultural dimensions of a decision.  Underlying the testing strategy is the assumption that all management decisions are multidimensional in impact, and that all the bases must be covered, every time.

Monitoring and More Planning

A final step requires careful monitoring and revision of decisions made. The assumption here is that, however much scientific knowledge is brought to bear, the management of complex biological systems ultimately requires decisions that are site-specific and dependant on a process of trial and error, not on a package of "best management practices"applied across the board.  In this way Holistic Management acknowledges the legitimacy of anecdotal, experiential knowledge, accumulated and fed back into the management practice.

Learning Holistic Management

Every new cultural paradigm needs language and a conceptual framework in which to communicate the new perspective.  Holistic Management has begun to develop language specific enough to at least replace current buzz words that can mean different things to different people.  It also incorporates most of the important concepts of the new perspective.  And it was designed to help people work through their differences to find a common ground for collaboration.  For these reasons it can be a useful catalyst: people from the somewhat isolated subcultures of research, education outreach, and farming, who learn together the practice of holistic decision-making, go on to create permanent networks and organizations out of the common experience. In Minnesota the Land Stewardship Project has benefited from Holistic Management.  In Vermont and elsewhere around the country and in other parts of the world Holistic Management has helped bring into existence groups concerned with sustainable livestock management, sustainable rural community, and holistic management of both business and nonprofit enterprise.

The creators of Holistic Management see it as an idea under development. They have established theCenter for Holistic Management as a clearinghouse and source of information that builds on the original idea. Indeed the model has taken on a life of its own as people around the country have adapted and elaborated it to fit local needs.  Learning materials are available from the Center for Holistic Management, 1010 Tijeras NW, Albuquerque, NM 87102.  Tel: 505/842-5252.  Fax: 505/843-7900.  E-mail: [email protected].  Materials vary from a comprehensive text by Allan Savory, the founding director, to a pocket-size flow chart and question list.  The best quick introduction to Holistic Management is a special 20 page "intro" edition of the Center's journal, Holistic Management Quarterly.  The journal also carries a nationwide list of Center-trained and licensed educators.

Much of the original literature reflected an initial preoccupation with management of land containing livestock, and many educators have begun to create new materials adapted to holistic management of institutions, nonprofit organizations, industrial enterprises, and farms whose main products are not livestock. Some element of the original livestock emphasis has been retained, however, in recognition of the importance of ruminants to sustainability in most agro-ecosystems.