MANAGING HOLISTICALLY

Managing Holistically

Managing Holistically

Introduction

In today's world the only thing that is constant is change which is the key factor for the holistic management. In this rapidly advancing world, managers have to deal with the issues of change and diversity. These changes and diversity give rise to complexity and complexity in turn generates problems. But the complicated thing is that these problems do not come into existence in isolation instead they arise in bundle and quite closely relate to each other. So, in order to deal with these sets of interlinked complexities managers adopt a holistic approach or system thinking. This holistic approach enables managers to combat the variegated problems and also lend a hand in continuous growth in terms of learning and improving overall system of the organization.

Discussion

Significance of system thinking

The process of systematic thinking allows managers to think in a way that encompasses all the facets of the system. This thought process does not break the system into different parts instead analyzes the system as a whole. It shed lights on all the parts of the organization instead of concentrating only on one part or department. For instance; Flood (1993) explained that if concentrating only one department say quality management may bring improvement in the process of that department but it may ignore overall structure, politics or culture of the organization. This example suggests that system thinking pay importance to the overall organizational structure and its interdependence to different parts of the organization.

Moreover, with the help of system thinking managers can critically analyze different systems of the organization as a whole. Thus, in order to introduce a new process and to know its importance it is vital to know overall system. One of the advantages of system thinking is that creating link between theory and practice becomes easy for the managers if they use system thinking. In system thinking we consider different patterns and paradigms of environment in order to develop theoretical awareness which in turn elevates the level of knowledge and information. (Copacino, 2003)

System of system methodologies (SOSM)

System methodology is a system that works in a cyclic way. This cyclic system of system methodologies interact with the different systems of human activities and reveal the factors those cause problems and readiness and ways of managers to deal with these problems.

System of system methodology presents a well devised method to face different problems. In this system the whole system is considered as interdependent on different sub-systems while different parts of the organization make choices and act independently. The nub of this system is the interaction among four basic components. (Checkland and Holwell, 1998) These four components are:

Holistic thinking

Operational thinking

System theories

Interactive design

Holistic thinking takes into consideration structure, function, process and context of the dilemma that is confronted by the organization. Then, with the aid of operational thinking, managers try to understand the chaos or complexity of the situation. After understanding the structure, context and context interactive design help in devising feasible whole with infeasible parts and ...