Most problems remain unsolved not because solutions don’t exist — but because we are only looking in one direction. And we keep looking in that same direction because we hold the same operating assumptions about whatever we are trying to solve.
Whole Systems Thinking is An Imperative
Whole Systems Thinking asks questions outside the familiar domain of a problem and finds solutions, discoveries, and breakthroughs in places conventional thinking too often doesn’t consider.
The results can be startling.
Decades of applying this across industries, disciplines, and domains most people would never think to connect — this short video uses a vivid real world examples that will change the way you think about problem solving entirely.
Watch and find out what whole systems thinking could open up in your world — and why the solution you’ve been looking for may be closer than you think, just in a direction you haven’t looked yet.
Read the Full Verbatim Transcript: “Whole Systems Thinking” with Kim Greenhouse
Whole Systems Thinking
I want to talk to you a little bit about whole systems and what whole systems thinking and a whole systems approach is about. First of all, it’s not just something that’s holistic about the whole. It is holistic in its essence and approach. But whole systems thinking is about considering many facets of something that you’re trying to solve.
So for example, we all have experienced either living or hearing about others that are living in a drought for which rainfall’s not abundant, or severely not happening. And we know that that exists, and we know that certain parts of the world experience it worse than others. And many of us attribute that to a lack of rainfall. And most of us would be correct. It is a lack of rainfall, or rainfall that’s not happening enough abundantly to take care of whoever’s living there and whatever’s living there. Okay.
So in a whole systems approach and in whole systems thinking, we open the expansive aperture — we open that aperture up to be asking questions that are not just narrowed inside the domain in which we’re normally used to looking.
So for example, we would look at all the ways — not only whether it’s raining or not, what is happening with the rain. This is an example. What is happening with the rain when it’s collected? How is it collected? How is it distributed? Who is it distributed to? What’s really happening with it? That’s one gestalt having to do with rainfall.
Then we would look at where else can we get water — or they get water that they need abundantly — that may or may not be considered. And in that, we would begin identifying other ways of getting water that have not only been not proven, but that have also been proven.
Primary Water — proven for over a hundred years — water that’s down beneath the ground, that comes from inside the earth and a different geological location than we’re used to looking for it. Snow melt — is snow melt a possibility? The ocean — is that a possibility for desalination and clearing that water? Is there a way to get water from the air? How prevalent is it? How much is it really working? Etc.
So if you’re a water principality, you’re a state, you’re a county, you’re an area of the world — at a whole systems level, we look at the whole gestalt, not just one avenue called rainwater. Also, we may ask the question and look at what’s happening to the rain.
What is happening to the air at a molecular level? Is there anything being done to the air and the clouds — from time to time, daily, weekly, or by the hour — that’s changing the nature of what humans and the animal and the plant population is receiving? This is the whole systems approach to looking at that matter and attempting to solve it.
If you only look in the direction of rainwater, you may solve it, but you may not solve it. I lived in California before I went to live in Europe, and before I left in 2014 there was an announced, formalized declaration of a drought. There were many things happening that I know about that the public doesn’t know about, that was happening in California as to why that was happening. But one of the reasons, completely separate than the rainwater matter — and the rainwater collected from aquifers, because there’s like ten strands in there — why there was a real drought, if there was a real drought, and if so, why it was happening.
But there’s another part, which is: why weren’t people contacted about primary water? It’s been working for over a hundred years. We have evidence of it. Water down below the ground, having nothing to do with the aquifers — why wasn’t this accessed? Why isn’t it the most talked about thing at that time in California and in other parts of the world?
That’s the other part of looking at something on a whole systems approach. A whole systems approach can bring in solutions and discoveries from areas you never looked directionally. You’re looking here — and it’s there, or it’s there.
Whole systems brings in totally different directions in which to identify a solution, a discovery, a product, a service, an invention. And it can also be called upon to heal, to soothe, to bring about peace, to end conflict.
It’s not just conflict resolution — it’s conflict prevention that has ever been considered before.
Whole systems is an approach to everything — health, wellness, everything.
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