Henri Bortoft on wholeness in organizations

Simon Robinson inspired me to read Henri Bortoft’s two books The Wholeness of Nature and Taking Appearance Seriously. While reading these books I was struck by the thought that in order to see life in work we need to a dynamic way of seeing.

I am currently re-reading Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson’s book Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter. I found an interesting section on Henri Bortoft’s work on organizational wholeness.

Simon and Maria writes:

It was Bohm’s interest in the hologram that would inspire Henri’s work on the wholeness in organisations.¹

This led Henri and a few other researchers to begin to contemplate the perceptions in a holographic manner, and not via that of the General Systems Theory, a methodology which Henri described as leading to concepts of ‘counterfeit wholeness’, an incorrect perception of what exactly the whole organisation is.²

In saying that the whole organisation ‘comes to presence’ in each person, we begin to realise that the concept of the whole organisation cannot be written down… It is not an object as we normally think of them…³

In a hologram, neither the whole nor the parts dominate each other. You cannot analyse a hologram in either a bottom-up or a top-down matter. …you also need to consider another aspect of the hologram, which is the ability to be broken up into parts, but still remain whole.⁴

With systems theory, you take a step back in order to see the whole, whereas for Henri, you can gain an intuition or feeling of the whole by going into the parts…⁵

Intuitions and feelings about the organisation cannot easily be expressed in language, but we need to avoid getting stuck in only an analytic, verbal and logical mode of thinking. Our experience of life as it is lived in our organizations requires a dynamic way of seeing.

Notes:
1. Henri Bortoft, Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter, p. 51.
2. Ibid..
3. Ibid., p. 52.
4. Ibid..
5. Ibid., p. 53.

Related posts:
Book Review: Holonomics
Book Review: First Steps to Seeing
Henri Bortoft on human organizations and relationships
Henri Bortoft’s Schumacher Lectures 2009
Henri Bortoft on seeing life itself
The very quality of livingness
BELONGING together vs. belonging TOGETHER
Henri Bortoft on taking the ‘appearance’ seriously
The ‘totalitarian’ tendency of systems theory
Organizational metamorphosis