EdGrimshaw.com

In a strategy lecture in Manchester Business school I remember the lecturer taking exception to the word "holistic". He thought it was bullshit in relation to an explanation of developing a company's strategy within a competitive environment. He may have been right as an evaluation of my explanation. However there is a skill in thinking holistically.

Thinking is not taught as skill usually in NLP,Business or Education. Most teaching and training is content orientated, the patterns of thinking are assumed to be assimilated through the immersion in a subject or field. Just think back to times when you were stuck in a subject how often did the teaching involve explicit explanations of how to process rather than what to process?

One test for holistic thinking, just at a subject level, how does this connect to the rest of the subject and even beyond that?

The relationship between parts and wholes is critical in thinking holistically. One whole may be a part of something else. One part may also be a whole.Therefore scoping and bounding in the exploration of a field, subject or question is fundamental in considering the whole and larger whole.

Tackling  Soccer Sport

If tackling then became the whole.

The parts might include ball, movement, opponnent, positioning,contact, ball-player relationship etc.

Each part could then become a whole, however it is essential to keep the whole relationships in mind and not to drop or separate out the connecting and connections.

In recent years football clubs have become much more holistic in their thinking bringing in diet, sleep patterns, psychology,match preparation, player flexibility, relationship with the community, player development.

In dealing with business issues the thinking is similar, strategy cannot be dealt with in isolation without considering the management and operational implications and how all of that is managed as a single whole. If we lose the relationship between part, whole and larger then we can no longer be thinking holistically. 

Holistic thinking is covered within the DBM® syllabus.