Sarah Savory

I am a mum responsible for the future of 2 young children: Luke and Mika...and I am passionate about securing the future, not just for our children, but for all life on earth by helping people to understand how the stability of our societies and livelihoods depend entirely on nature. And by showing the world an exciting new way of making decisions which ensures that our management reflects and balances that complexity. This is why I am a Holistic Management Educator and Consultant. 

We only manage three things on the planet: 

PEOPLE. ECONOMIES. NATURE

Everything else is made or produced (from our food to spacecraft) using tools and technology. Unlike the things we manage, nothing we make can self-organise: if anything causes problems, we can just change it, or stop producing it. 

Almost every single one of our mounting global issues are social, financial or ecological, so isn’t it glaringly obvious that our management is the problem? 

Societies, economies and nature are intricately connected to each other and have a life of their own - they are self-organising and complex: we cannot predict, control or stop them and no society or economy can exist without healthy ecosystems. Which means they are connected: whatever we do to one will knock-on to affect the others at some point. 

The whole world is getting into increasing conflict because we have thousands of narrowly trained experts with PhDs telling governments what to do, and it is a mess, because the advice is coming from thousands of narrowly trained experts in: agricultural production, economics, social welfare, conservation, technology, etc, but none of them have any expertise on how to develop policy and how to manage the whole web of interwoven complexity involving people, nature and economies that the policies will impact. It’s just like trying to manage a glass of water by calling in a top expert on oxygen and and another top expert on hydrogen but neither of them has any knowledge of water as a whole.

I teach children (and their adults) how they can reverse this global issue and make far better decisions when they use the Holistic Management Framework. It is a decision-making process which is based on the universal principle that the security of all societies and economies are intricately connected to and entirely dependent on the stability of earth’s ecosystems. 

Holistic Managers utilise a decision-making framework and use a holistic context as a “magnetic north” to guide their decisions and then filter them through a series of 7 quick-and-easy context checks.

The context checks make sure managers will never lose sight of the whole picture by simultaneously considering the social, economic and environmental impacts that inevitably result from most of our actions. 

By running any decision, or policy, through this simple process, regardless of whether we’re managing a family, a farm, a business, a country, or any other complex system, we are able to successfully and simultaneously manage and balance the ever-present and unpredictable social, financial and ecological complexity of the whole situation.

Ultimately, this process helps us to shift from the current, conventional mindset of reductionist management to making our decisions from a far broader perspective and never losing sight of the whole picture.  

In an effort to simplify the framework, I have written illustrated, educational children’s books on Holistic Management and I have also begun teaching it as a subject in both rural and urban Zimbabwean schools, with demand for education and educational materials growing rapidly. I am now writing the first school curriculum for Holistic Decision Making and Ecological Literacy to be taught as a subject. 

I have a class of 7 year olds who have developed their own holistic context and are running their decisions through the context checking questions. 

If only governments could learn to do the same.