Wholeness is one of the main attributes of Nature

In Umberto Eco’s famous novel “The Name of the Rose”, William of Baskerville reflects on why they failed to understand early enough what was really going on in the abbey, and tells his young mentee (my own paraphrase): “We understood crucial things, young Adso, but remained blind to the relationships between those things”.

In Nature, everything is part of a bigger whole, both contributing to that bigger whole – and thus shaping its reality – and, in return, being influenced by that bigger whole. Nothing in fact can actually exist on its own, in the shape and with the attributes that we observe: everything constantly shapes and is being shaped at the same time.

A cell in our liver affects the functioning of our liver, which in turns affects the functioning of our whole body – which in turn affects the functioning of our liver, and therefore of its cells.

The worms in the soil contribute to its fertility, which in turn enables plants to blossom that will then eventually produce compostable material that will then feed the worms. In Nature, plants cannot exist without worms, and vice versa.

For the sake of simplicity, I have presented interconnections between 2 elements, but in reality, of course, elements tend to be interconnected with many others – hence providing adaptability, resilience, and vitality to the overall system.

Wholeness is therefore the way that our natural world constantly unfolds. There is no separation between any of its elements, even though we may not see what connects them. We are often blind to that reality because of the way that our rational mind has evolved: in order to make sense of what we observe, we tend to separate elements from one another, analyse them, and get very knowledgeable about them; there is nothing wrong about that – it has in fact helped us grow an amazing wealth of knowledge – as long as we don’t forget the bigger, more systemic picture.

In fact, it is a bit like with paintings: it’s helpful to zoom in on a particular detail (one of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, or one of Turner’s ships) to explore how the artist produced it, and what they tried to convey through it, but in the end we step back and allow ourselves to be touched by the experience we have of the whole painting.

 

Permaculture tries to mimic Wholeness in Nature

Permaculture is a design system, that seeks inspiration from Nature to build resilient, self-sustaining food production systems. At the heart of that design activity is the issue of relationships between the elements. I gave one example in the previous post on Principle #7, with the design of a chicken-house / greenhouse, where each element provides something interesting for the other. But there are countless other examples in permaculture:

  • Growing sweetcorn, marrow and beans together: the sweetcorn grows up straight, providing support for the beans to climb around it (and therefore removing the need for the gardener to bring bamboo canes for example); the beans, in return, fix nitrogen into the soil, which benefit the corn and the marrow – the latter, by growing horizontally, provides a very useful ground cover that helps prevent weeds and evaporation
  • Raising ducks near lettuce rows: lettuce tends to attract slugs, and ducks love slugs! By raising them near your lettuce rows, they’ll be able to wander through your lettuces, feed on slugs, and fertilise the soil with their excrements; so you end up with healthy ducks and healthy lettuces, without any other input than the initial design
  • Growing vines in front of a south facing bay window: by the time the vines produce plenty of foliage (May-June), that foliage will block out some of the sun, therefore preventing the house from taking in too much heat through the bay-window; conversely, in the winter, having shed their foliage, vines will let the winter sun shine through the window and contribute to heating the house

Again, these are individual examples. What permaculture design invites us to – and perhaps this principle in particular – is to step back and look at the whole system we are designing. How healthy and fertile is it, as a whole? How much quantity of food, but also beauty and pleasure does it produce? And for how much energy invested?

Since diversity is a key element of permaculture design, you will end up producing lots of different types of food, but perhaps each in less quantity than if you had applied yourself to growing a handful of monocultures; you might get less, overall, of say iceberg lettuce, but you’ll have plenty of different types of salads and green leaves, with much less energy invested.

 

Wholeness in organisations

Sadly, wholeness is rarely a criteria that we look out for in organisations. The various organisational theories that have blossomed in the 20th century and tend to shape organisations even today, rely mainly on a mechanistic, reductionist approach, organised around two paramount objectives: growth and value for shareholders. The company is then ‘broken down’ into components for which specific objectives are set, under the rationale that the overall performance of the organisation is dependent on the best performance of each of its parts.

Whilst this approach has undeniably produced plenty of successes, in business terms, it has also shown its limits, both internally (staff morale, turnover, lay-offs in case of downturn, etc.), and also externally (social and environmental impacts for example).

It bears a lot of resemblance with the way intensive agriculture operates: producing lots of food, therefore conveying an air of high efficiency, but in fact bearing dreadful environmental and social impact (pollution of rivers, killing and eroding our soils, high debt and suicide rates amongst farmers, etc.). But these are considered externalities, and are therefore not taken into account when evaluating the model.

Such organisations can also be particularly difficult to manage: when you divide the whole into parts, and make specific people responsible for specific parts, they will, quite naturally and honestly, do everything they can for their part to succeed – even when that means fighting against other parts of the organisation. Executive meetings can therefore become a time spent at managing everyone’s interests and containing the dynamics that this creates, rather than doing real work.

Thank God there are interesting approaches that have demonstrated how integrating rather than segregating can prove a much better approach.

One of them, often quoted, is Favi, a French gearbox manufacturer that radically shifted its organisational model to become a “liberated company”. It decided to reorganise its activities around 2 principles: 1) Man is good; 2) Love your client. It then broke down the whole factory into several mini-factories, of between 12 and 20 staff, each factory being responsible for everything from marketing, to production, to sales, to HR, etc. The same people who build gearboxes are responsible for assessing clients’ needs and evaluating their customer satisfaction; they also decide on the price to charge their clients, and the salaries to award themselves, so that the whole mini-factory could continue to strive.

This new organisation cut down on most central support services, thus becoming much more efficient financially. Direct contact with customers, and with the market in general, meant that customer needs were much better catered for – quicker, with less errors, and better adjustments to new elements arising from those customers or their context.

Favi has been charging the same price to their customers for decades, whilst continuing to grow at a slow rate in terms of staff. In fact, during the 2008 crisis, sales of cars (and therefore requirements for gearbox) dropped sharply, and the CEO of Favi, Jean-François Zobrist, had to contemplate laying off some staff. But such a decision would have gone against the very culture he had introduced; so rather than take a decision on his own, he gathered all the 4-500 staff in the big factory hall, and presented them with the facts: drop in sales, costs of salaries, etc. He then said: “what do you think we should do?”. It took the whole crowd about 10 minutes to generate consensus around the following idea: let us all continue to work 5 days, but be paid for 4 days, and this for 1 month, and then let’s reassess. Zobrist himself was amazed at how this organic, whole system just produced such an elegant and easy solution.

As it happened, Favi was able to stay afloat during that time, when some of its competitors went bankrupt, so it was then able to pick up some of their market share and get back to a full week worked for a full week paid.

Integrating rather than segregating can also happen in the way that you design the workplace, so that the system as a whole can produce things that none of its parts can on their own. That was the rationale behind the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt, hosts of many great scientists in their own highly specific discipline, in the way it designed its building.

The institute’s management team faced the following dilemma: how can we provide each of our resident scientist with the best conditions for them to follow up their research, whilst at the same encouraging them to exchange ideas and innovate together, so that we don’t become simply an office-renting center?

They therefore decided to enlist the help of an interior design architect, who developed the ergonomics of the place in such a way that scientist had to bump into each other and chat several times a day. From a permacultural design point of view, it’s like placing plants, shrubs and animals close together, in such a way as to ensure that beneficial relationships will develop – and then leave it up to them, and to Life, to self-organise what relationships will develop and how.

And this is precisely what happened at the Max Planck Institute.

Now, you: what could you be doing to embody this principle? Where is integration lacking, and where has segregation spread too far? How could you rethink some of your teams, to encourage more connections across the different parts of your organisation? Which ones, amongst your key processes, could be redesigned in order to make them leaner, more agile and more responsive? And what authority and power are you prepared to delegate for this to happen?

Finally: what new conversations, ideas and mode of operating might emerge if you switch from a ‘growth’ paradigm to a ‘vitality’ paradigm?