Holistic Thinking in Management
Course No.: SMV 795
Systems Thinking
Course Coordinator: Prof. Sushil
Assignment No. 1
Title of Assignment:
Take a sector and map the trends towards holistic thinking in management
Date of submission: August 17, 2009
TITLE: Take a sector and map the trends towards holistic thinking in management
1 Introduction
Numerous activities and processes must be managed within a company. In order to satisfy the customers and to be commercially successful in the business environment, these activities and processes must be optimally coordinated which involves various kinds of thinking. There are many different ways of thinking, namely, (i) Logical thinking; (ii) Casual thninking; and (iii) Holistic thinking, among others. Although most of these thinking ways can not be applied in isolation with the other thinking patterns, as a much generalized comparison it can be said that the Logic alone is inadequate to deal with complex situations because it deals with simple, timeless cause and effect links between statements. Causal thinking, on the contary, underlies much of science where the tendency is to look at simple cause and effects by isolating components or parts of a whole. However, in the morden management techniques, stress has been laid upon the overall perspective of the problems in order to explore a sytematic and sustainable solution for it. Systems thinking tries to look at the complicated pattern of multiple causes that make up a whole, and to simplify by taking multiple partial views or perspectives. Another method of comparison between the various cognitive style is (i) analytic style; and (ii) holistic styles. While, an analytic thinking involves understanding a system by thinking about its parts and how they work together to produce larger-scale effects; the holistic thinking involves understanding a system by sensing its large-scale patterns and reacting to them.
The Holistic thinking is the pattern of thinking in which resources of a
Systems Thinking
Course Coordinator: Prof. Sushil
Assignment No. 1
Title of Assignment:
Take a sector and map the trends towards holistic thinking in management
Date of submission: August 17, 2009
TITLE: Take a sector and map the trends towards holistic thinking in management
1 Introduction
Numerous activities and processes must be managed within a company. In order to satisfy the customers and to be commercially successful in the business environment, these activities and processes must be optimally coordinated which involves various kinds of thinking. There are many different ways of thinking, namely, (i) Logical thinking; (ii) Casual thninking; and (iii) Holistic thinking, among others. Although most of these thinking ways can not be applied in isolation with the other thinking patterns, as a much generalized comparison it can be said that the Logic alone is inadequate to deal with complex situations because it deals with simple, timeless cause and effect links between statements. Causal thinking, on the contary, underlies much of science where the tendency is to look at simple cause and effects by isolating components or parts of a whole. However, in the morden management techniques, stress has been laid upon the overall perspective of the problems in order to explore a sytematic and sustainable solution for it. Systems thinking tries to look at the complicated pattern of multiple causes that make up a whole, and to simplify by taking multiple partial views or perspectives. Another method of comparison between the various cognitive style is (i) analytic style; and (ii) holistic styles. While, an analytic thinking involves understanding a system by thinking about its parts and how they work together to produce larger-scale effects; the holistic thinking involves understanding a system by sensing its large-scale patterns and reacting to them.
The Holistic thinking is the pattern of thinking in which resources of a