Holistic Thinking: Creating Innovative Solutions to Complex Problems

While the skills to identify and solve problems are becoming recognised as being increasingly important, there are not many good ways to help you acquire those skills. This book is designed to help you help you acquire those skills so as to be able to deal with undesirable situations, identify the right problem and provide the optimal acceptable solution from the range of prospective solutions. The needed skill for providing acceptable solutions is the ability to think differently to that of your contemporaries. You need to go beyond systems thinking and apply holistic thinking to the matter at hand. This book helps you develop that skill, building on the works of W. Edwards Deming (Quality), Peter Senge (systems thinking), Tom Peters, Peter Drucker and Michael Hammer and James Champy (management) to tell you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and provide you with the understanding of why it must be done. For example, in school, generally, you are taught to solve problems by being given a problem and then asked to find the solution. The assumption being that there is a well-defined problem and a single well-defined correct solution. Well, unfortunately the real world is not like that, because often more than one correct solution can be found. For example, you are hungry which is generally an undesirable situation. Your problem is to figure out a way to remedy that undesirable situation by consuming some food to satisfy the hunger. There are a number of solutions to this problem including cooking something, going to a restaurant, collecting some takeaway food, and telephoning for home delivery. Then there is the choice of what type of food; Italian, French, Chinese, pizza, lamb, chicken, beef, fish, vegetarian etc. Now consider the vegetables, sauces and drinks. There are many solutions because there are many combinations of types of food, meat, vegetables and method of getting the food to the table. Which solution is the right one? The answer is that the right solution is the one that satisfies your hunger in a timely and affordable manner and does not cause any gastric problems. If several of the solution options can perform this function and you have no preference between them, then each of them are just as correct as any of the other ones that satisfy your hunger. The words 'right solution' or 'correct solution' should be thought of as meaning 'one or more acceptable solutions'. While systems thinking can help you to understand relationships in situations and think systemically and systematically, systems thinking alone cannot help you provide innovative solutions to complex problems. This is because understanding situations is only the first step on the journey that provides those innovative solutions. This book takes you along that journey going beyond systems thinking to help you find innovative solutions. This book provides you with frameworks and classifications systemically and systematically starting by discussing thinking, then taking you through thinking about undesirable situations and problems and how to convert them to acceptable solutions.