Holistic Mnagement - What is it You Really Want

Holistic Management, A New Framework for Decision Making, by Alan Savory

A Book Summary

In this summary of Holistic Management I quote freely from Alan Savory's book but summarize the main points. Kind of a Cliff Notes version. Don't be put off by the focus on grazing and agriculture. This is great stuff for managing your family or business.

Forming a Holistic Goal: What is it You Really Want?

Start with a statement of purpose that reflects in a very few words what you were formed to do.

A quality of life statement expresses how you want your life to be in the whole you have defined based on what you value the most. It expresses the reason you are doing what you are doing, what you are about, and what you want to become. It includes your short term needs and long term mission. Things like economic well being, relationships, challenge, growth, purpose and contribution.

Forms of production are the things you will have to produce some of which will be products derived from your resource base, others will be derived solely from the creativity and skills of the decision makers. Each of the needs in the quality of life statement will have to be met by some form of production. You must ensure that what is produced meets your stated purpose.

Future resource base must describe how it must be many years from now to sustain what you have to produce to create the quality of life you want. This 100 to 500 years from now. Consider the people, how we must be far into the future. The land, arising from almost every transaction there is an effect on the land that is experienced months or years later that is far removed fro the original transaction. Create a statement you can test decisions against. Typically this includes how fundamental processes work in any environment such as, water cycle, mineral cycle, community dynamics, and energy flow. You may also want to describe the community you want to live in or work in and the services available to your community.

Holistic Management - What Are You Managing

Holistic Management, A New Framework for Decision Making, by Alan Savory

A Book Summary

In this summary of Holistic Management I quote freely from Alan Savory's book but summarize the main points. Kind of a Cliff Notes version. Don't be put off by the focus on grazing and agriculture. This is great stuff for managing your family or business.

Defining the Whole: What Are You Managing?

The holistic goal is the driving force in Holistic Management and will guide every significant decision you make. Before you can begin, you first have to define the whole your management encompasses. A minimum whole at which point Holistic Management becomes impossible would include the people involved in management, the resources they have available and the money on hand.

Holistic Management - Predator Prey and Timing

Holistic Management, A New Framework for Decision Making, by Alan Savory

A Book Summary

In this summary of Holistic Management I quote freely from Alan Savory's book but summarize the main points. Kind of a Cliff Notes version. Don't be put off by the focus on grazing and agriculture. This is great stuff for managing your family or business.

The Predator Prey Connection

The third key insight is that in brittle environments, relatively high numbers of large, herding animals, concentrated and moving as they naturally do in the presence of pack-hunting predators, are vital to maintain the health of the lands we thought they destroyed. Acceptance of this insight will help to reverse damage humankind has inflicted on the more brittle environments. Overgrazing is not in fact a function of animal numbers.

Timing is Everything

The identification of the brittleness scale and the role of herding animals and their predators in maintaining the health of brittle environments has shown why these environments were prone to desertification. This is the fourth key insight.

Holistic Management - The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

Holistic Management, A New Framework for Decision Making, by Alan Savory

A Book Summary

In this summary of Holistic Management I quote freely from Alan Savory's book but summarize the main points. Kind of a Cliff Notes version. Don't be put off by the focus on grazing and agriculture. This is great stuff for managing your family or business.

The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

No whole, be it a family, a business, a community, or a nation, can be managed without looking inward to the lesser wholes that combine to form it, and outward to the greater wholes of which it is a member. As a society we have had good success managing mechanical systems that can be viewed in isolation. We have had ever increasing problems with large environments and systems that are non-mechanical. Frequently, advice that appears sound from a specialists point of view (such as an engineer or economist) proves unsound holistically in a particular situation. A new generation must be trained to think holistically for themselves and then weigh and select expertise that really fits the case. Only the whole is the reality.

Viewing Environments in a Whole New Way

The second insight overturns the belief that all environments respond in the same way to the same influences. They don't. Specifically the old belief that all land should be rested or left undisturbed in order to reverse deterioration has proven wrong. Rest only works in a nonbrittle environment, rest in a brittle environment damages it.

This second insight raises the question of how grazing animals might provide the disturbance necessary to the health of a brittle environment, without overgrazing.

Holistic Management - The Power of Paradigms

Holistic Management, A New Framework for Decision Making, by Alan Savory

A Book Summary

In this summary of Holistic Management I quote freely from Alan Savory's book but summarize the main points. Kind of a Cliff Notes version. Don't be put off by the focus on grazing and agriculture. This is great stuff for managing your family or business.

The Power of Paradigms

A 100 years ago we would not have had the knowledge or tools to make good decisions on land management in brittle environments, we now have four key insights that can influence our decisions, they are:

1. A holistic perspective is essential in management. If we base management decisions on any other perspective, we are likely to experience results different from those we desire because only the whole is reality.
2. Environments can be classified as nonbrittle to very brittle according to how well humidity is distributed through out the year and how quickly vegetation breaks down. Resting land restores nonbrittle environments, but damages the land in very brittle environments.
3. In brittle environments, relatively high numbers of large, herding animals, concentrated and moving as they naturally do in the presence of pack-hunting predators, are vital to maintaining the health of lands we thought they destroyed.
4. In any environment, overgrazing and damage from trampling bear little relationship to the numbers of animals, but rather to the amount of time plants and soils are exposed to the animals.

Holistic Management

Holistic comes from a Greek word meaning whole, entire and total. Holistic management in agriculture is a system thinking approach to managing resources that was originally developed by Allan Savory for reversing desertification. Savory concluded that the spread of deserts, the loss of wildlife, and the human impoverishment that always resulted were related to the reduction of the natural herds of large grazers and even more, the change in the behavior of the remaining herds. Livestock could be substituted to provide ecosystem modification like nutrient cycling when mimicking the wild grasses and grazers.

Managers found that while rotational grazing systems can work for diverse management purposes, scientific experiments had demonstrated that they do not necessarily work for specific ecological purposes. An adaptive management plan was needed for the integration of the experiental with the experimental,  as well as the social with biophysical, to provide a more comprehensive framework for the management of rangeland systems. None of these sources of knowledge could be understood except in the context of the whole. Holistic management was developed to meet this need.

While developed as a tool for range land use and restoring desertified land, the holistic management system can be applied to other areas with multiple complex socioeconomic and environmental factors.