Practice

Holistic Management

Also known as: HM, Holistic Decision Making

A decision-making framework developed by Allan Savory in the 1970s and 1980s for managing complex ecological, social, and financial systems together. Practitioners define a 'holistic context' — the quality of life they want, the production they need, and the future resource base required to sustain both — and test every significant decision against that context across seven testing questions. Most associated with grassland and ranching practice (Holistic Planned Grazing is its operational sibling), but applied across forestry, fisheries, urban planning, and family-business decision-making globally.

What it is

Holistic Management is a structured way to make decisions in [[complexity|complex systems]] where ecological, social, and financial outcomes are entangled. Its central move is to require that decision-makers articulate a holistic context — what they want their lives, work, and land to be — before deciding what to do. Decisions are then tested against that context.

The seven testing questions

Practitioners run candidate actions through a sequence of tests:

Cause and effect — does this address the underlying cause or only a symptom?
Weak link — does this strengthen the weakest link in the chain (social, biological, or financial)?
Marginal reaction — among similar options, which gives the highest return per resource spent?
Gross profit analysis — does the financial return justify the resource use?
Energy & money source/use — is the energy or money internal/external, building/consuming?
Sustainability — does this move toward the future resource base the holistic context describes?
Society and culture — how does this affect the people living in the system?

Decisions that pass move forward; decisions that fail get redesigned.

Where it shows up

[[holistic-planned-grazing|Holistic Planned Grazing]] — the operational form for managed-livestock grasslands; the most-developed application
Holistic Land Planning — for whole-farm/ranch design
Holistic Financial Planning — for the family/operation budget
Holistic Biological Monitoring — for measuring whether outcomes are tracking the context

[[savory-institute|The Savory Institute]] and a global network of regional Hubs train and certify practitioners.

Sources

Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making, [[allan-savory|Allan Savory]] and Jody Butterfield (Island Press, multiple editions through 2016)
[[savory-institute|Savory Institute]] training materials

Rooted in life.

What links here, and how

Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.

Scientific

practices

Studio Hill Savory Institute–style holistic-management framework — multi-paddock rotation, planned grazing for ecosystem restoration

Practical

shares approach with

Dirt to Soil Brown's work draws on Savory's holistic-management framework; the books are commonly read together
Holism Allan Savory's holistic-management agricultural framework is the principal modern application of holism to working agriculture
Livestock Guardian Dogs LGDs are part of the ecological-rather-than-extractive predator-management toolkit that holistic management treats as primary
Mob Stocking — High Density fits within the Savory holistic-planned-grazing framework as a tool for specific soil-rebuilding objectives
Regenerative agriculture Allan Savory's grazing framework is one of the principal regenerative-livestock systems

subset of

Holistic Planned Grazing HPG is the livestock-grazing application of the broader HM decision-making framework
Mob Grazing mob-grazing is one of the canonical operational forms of holistic planned grazing in the Savory framework

8 inbound links · 4 outbound