Consulting Journal: Words

Words: 'Holistic'

by David Blakey

Is your approach holistic? Really holistic?

[Monday 6 August 2001]

Management consultants have a habit of taking English words and giving them an entirely new meaning. Often, that meaning only applies in management consulting. Sometimes, the meaning used in management consulting is directly opposite to the meaning used in some other discipline.

This final instance may seem unbelievable. Can we really use a word in management consulting so that it has a completely different meaning from that used in philosophy or medicine, for example?

The word ‘holistic’ is such a word.

In philosophy, ‘holism’ is the theory that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. If you are ever looking for a short and simple way to say of something that its whole is greater than the sum of its parts then ‘holistic’ is the word you want.

In medicine, holistic treatments are intended to treat the whole person rather than just a diseased part. Holistic treatments are psychological as well as physical. This continues on from the philosophical view. Holistic treatments recognize that the whole person is greater than the sum of their body parts. These treatments are aimed, therefore, at applying a number of medical disciplines in order to treat that whole person.

In management consulting, we talk of a ‘holistic approach’ to some business problem.

When we do, we are not talking about a total business being greater than the sum of its parts. Our ‘holistic approaches’ rarely work through the whole company.

Financial accounting systems may be applied through much of a business. They rarely have any positive impact upon any part of the business other than the finance department. Even there, they are hardly likely to produce significant results.

Supply chain management does not apply to the whole business. Whatever any SCM consultants may say, there will be some parts of the business that are likely to be excluded from consideration for SCM. Some candidates for this are the advertising and marketing departments, planning departments, finance department and IS department.

Even ‘enterprise-wide’ systems do not apply to the whole business.

As management consultants, we rarely have an approach that applies to the whole business, from shareholders to customers, from the chairman of the board to a new trainee, from the marketing department to the warehouse.

Some applications of business process re-engineering may have worked through an entire company, but these were rare. Many more applications of BPRE actually focused on downsizing a few departments. It is a very rare management consulting assignment that will affect an entire business enterprise.

In the medical definition of holism there are two important aspects. The first is that the entire person is treated: we have just seen that our ‘holistic approaches’ rarely affect an entire company. The second is that a variety of disciplines - psychological and physical - can be applied.

Again, our ‘holistic approaches’ rarely match this second aspect. They mainly use a single discipline. It is rare - even for the big generalistic consulting practices - for assignments to extend across a number of disciplines. I can recall only two from my own experience: a government department and a producer board. In these assignments, there was a focus on a very specific area of the client's business. If these were holistic assignments in the sense that they were multi-disciplinary, they were certainly not holistic in terms of dealing with the entire business. At best, they can be described as ‘cross-functional’.

So, let's drop ‘holistic’ from our presentations and marketing material before too many of our clients and prospects realize that we don't know what we're talking about.

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