What are the learning elements of integrative (holistic) thinking?

Hello. My name is Guntram Werther. And I'm going to be talking today about what are the learning elements of Integrative or Holistic Thinking. I'm a professor at Temple University, I've been working in this area for about 30 years. And the main theme I have for you today is that this is a taught skill within a found talent.

What I want to do today is essentially go through a couple of issues. The first is, best practice and regulatory mandates are moving to manage for whole-system risk and longer-term performance. This is happening across a multiple number of disciplines and it's not going to change anytime soon. I think what we're going to see is that the demand for a whole-system analysis and the reality that most of the time it isn't whole-system analysis is going to come into conflict, and I want to talk about that a little bit as we go along. We're missing the obvious far too often and I don't think that's a career enhancing strategy for much of anybody in the field, and I think therefore this is an area that we need to improve rather directly.

What is the problem? Basically in my view, we have a bunch of lost experts in a rather holistic world. This is not quite as bad as it sounds in the sense that, I'm not saying these people are incompetent. What I am saying is, they don't think in a holistic fashion because for the most part, they've been trained not to think in a holistic fashion. We've done that through university training and also professional training. And I think that's one of the areas that needs to change. Over a long period of time now, I've been asking individuals that are essentially mid-career about 15 years in their profession, sometimes in government service, more often in the private sector, insurance, risk management, and so forth, to give me an assessment of their view of the average integrative thinking ability of experienced analysts in their field. And for the most part in the government side what they're saying is, about 1.5 on a 5-scale, where five is excellent. This was actually done at the director of national intelligence conference with senior people in the room and that was their assessment. So not very good at the government side. On the industry side, the average ability for taking machine or arithmetic outputs and creating effective real world judgments varies between about two and three on a 5-scale. Remember I'm doing this informally so as not to embarrass anybody, but uniformly they're basically saying two to three on a 5-scale, which in academic terms is a D or a C level for normal change kinds of things. When we change the question slightly and we ask experienced analysts, what is their ability for creating effective solutions for crisis or rare event kind of real world judgments, their self evaluations drop to one or two on a 5-scale, in academic terms that is a D or an F. So not only are most analysts not very good at this, they recognize that they're not very good at this. This is something they understand about themselves and they would like to do better. We've had some round tables on this with senior people, I've talked to people about this in terms of various professional organizations. They are very well aware of this. And my sense of the thing is that, we need to move ahead on this across the professions to undo some of the damage I believe we've done in academia and the way we train people, and move ahead toward getting a much more integrative and holistic view of how the world changes and the techniques we use to address those kinds of issues.