Holistic Business Consulting: An Approach for Modern Entrepreneurs
Holistic business consulting is integrating and operating outside the box – far outside! Of course, the concept of that now-cliched expression “thinking outside of the box” was formulated in the 1970s by a psychologist named J. P. Guilford.
He gained a bit of fame for coming up with what appeared to be an intellectual challenge: three rows of three dots each appear on a sheet of paper. You’re instructed to connect all nine dots using just four straight lines.
The solution turned out to have less to do with intelligence and more to do with an innate ability to see beyond the imaginary box “created” by the three rows of dots.
Only twenty percent of the people in Guilford’s studies were able to recognize that the solution to the puzzle came from drawing lines that extended outside that imaginary “box.” 20%!!! Hence the expression: Thinking outside the box.
Holistic business consulting employs techniques throughout the entire organization and its processes and policies, as opposed to focusing only on specific components
However, as Chuck Swoboda explains in his article “Why Thinking Outside the Box is the Wrong Way to Approach Innovation” (https://bit.ly/3F0e4RO), the problem arises from the assumption that there is any box at all. It is exactly that type of assumption–that imaginary limitations on creativity, innovation, success–actually exist, when in fact there is no earthly reason to believe that they do.
It is with that lack of boundaries on one’s opportunities that we discuss the concept of Holistic Business Consulting. A holistic business approach is a relatively new concept that is increasingly being accepted by the business world. To be a business that uses holistic techniques, it means that the entire organization is considered in its processes and policies, as opposed to focusing only on its specific components. By using the holistic approach to running a business, you will make certain that your business is running at its full potential, as opposed to simply having strong areas and weak areas.
To begin, let’s stop thinking of a business (your business) as a lathering of different departments and hierarchies of leadership and begin conceiving of the business (again, your business) as an integrated whole, where the policies and procedures are not self-perpetuating albatrosses, but rather interlocking components that may or may not be fostering success. As the writer of Street Directory’s Business and Finance section opines, “Holistic approaches to business, such as the increasingly popular Six Sigma business strategy developed by Motorola, involve the consideration of the entire business situation instead of only a single time or portion of it.” (https://bit.ly/32ZHqlZ) Many contemporary business experts have expressed the view that this type of holistic approach is essential to a company’s success and long-term profitability.
We must begin to dig, ask the hard questions
One such practitioner of the holistic approach to business posits certain questions to what the client may consider a boggling quandary:
Are all of the tasks actually necessary? Is the amount of time taken reasonable? Does the owner need to perform all the tasks? Does the owner want to do them? Does the owner enjoy doing them? What externals might influence the owner in deciding to do (or not to do) the tasks, as opposed to the influences in deciding to have someone else do (or not do) those same tasks? (https://bit.ly/3sXhi6e).
As you may begin to see from these examples, Holistic Business Consulting is all about helping the business owner (or other decision-makers) to contemplate the business as an interconnected whole, where every action taken by each individual potentially affects everyone and everything else in the business.
Think of your business as a human body. A problem in one part of the body can have horrible consequences for other parts.
You are walking along the sidewalk and step on a rusty nail that tears through your shoe and punctures the arch of your foot.
The oxidation on the nail causes a bacterial infection to begin in your foot, but because you did not get your Tetanus shot, you are now in the process of developing lockjaw from the gangrene traveling unchecked throughout your body and two weeks after stepping on that nail, which, it turns out, bounced out of a truck bed on its way to a construction site that you personally own, your oxygen-starved right arm is gangrenous and must be amputated in order to keep the infection from killing you.
Empowering and strengthening your brand
To push the nail metaphor to its ultimate conclusion, it behooves us to recall the unhorsing of King Richard III during the Battle of Bosworth Field back in 1485.
That incident, where the good King’s horse lost its footing, led to the prescient proverb of the late fifteenth century, one that yields wisdom even unto this day:
For the want of a nail the shoe was lost
For the want of a show the horse was lost
For the want of a horse the rider was lost
For the want of a rider the message was lost
For the want of a message the battle was lost
For the want of a battle the war was lost
For the want of a war the kingdom was lost.
And it was all for the want of a nail.
An holistic approach to thinking about your business has many advantages, not the least of which being that it allows you to see which areas of your company are failing or are weaker than others (https://bit.ly/3qU4wTo).
But that is not all. Other benefits you should expect to gain from using the services of a Holistic Business Consultant include:
- The empowerment of employees
- Gaining fresh perspectives
- Identifying challenges and finding solutions
Strengthening your brand. (https://indeedhi.re/3mUkk7c)
The undoubtedly most important aspect of holistic business consulting is implementation
The job site company Indeed discusses four ways to begin a holistic business strategy.
First, conduct research to discover the most efficient way to implement your holistic style.
Second, talk with your employees to discuss both short and long-term goals and even think about using some team-building exercises.
Third, use project management and team communication applications to ease the work flow and provide virtual connections.
And fourth, hire an holistic business consultant, someone who can offer unbiased viewpoints of your company, someone who, perhaps, does not see the organizational box the same way you do, someone who just maybe does not see the box at all.
The company Swaay takes it a step further. They have looked at how a company can actually go about implementing this holistic approach. Here are some of the steps your Holistic Business Consultant will help you operationalize.
Step one: everyone in the company has to know what is going on, to the extent that each person should be able, in his or her own way, to articulate where the company is headed and why.
Step two: stop talking about how you have an open-door policy and actually implement one so that innovation and exceptionalism can thrive.
Step three: Empathy should be endemic to your business’ culture.
And step four: Be transparent. Drop the games and think of yourself for a moment as working in air traffic control at an airport–there are no secrets and everyone knows what everyone else knows–or else.
In the final analysis, a strong consultation with an Holistic Business expert can set your feet moving in the right direction–and help you dodge the rusty nails while you learn to not have them bounce off the truck in the first place.
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