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Business Management based on the Whole System Model – Part I of three. This article is being written to show how the Whole System Model can improve business management. If only because business is the integral institutional instrument with which the Whole System accelerates its own transformation. We have all grown up regarding Reality as an incomprehensibly fragmented and disorderly collection of different systems, many of which cannot be integrated. This makes for confusion and conflict, among not only us as a species, but also between us and the rest of Nature. Every one of us struggles, throughout our lives, to make sense of the increasing complexity and turbulence that surrounds us. Managing businesses is likewise becoming increasingly difficult. There are ever larger amounts of information raining upon us ever faster. It is becoming increasingly difficult to process all this information into meaning and clarity for better decisions. Our deteriorating inability to integrate all this information into a coherent understanding of what is going on both within and outside a business is bewildering. Much of our efforts and investments for business continue to be expended wastefully, simply because our conventional fragmented and scattered knowledge of Reality is not up to the task of enabling us to make sense of everything that is going on around us. It is making it even more difficult to know the surest way to success. We still make wrong decisions too often, and this results in wasteful expenditures of the limited resources we have. All this disorder, confusion, and waste is tragic, because it need not really happen. Scientists already know that Reality is NOT the way we regard it. They have known, now, for over a century, that Reality is NOT an incomprehensibly fragmented and disorderly collection of different systems, many of which cannot be integrated. On the contrary, Reality is actually a single integrated order of interrelated and interacting subsystems, comprised of components, structures, relationships, dynamics, and processes among them. All we have to do, in order to make fewer wasteful business decisions, and instead become able to make more effective ones, is to correct the conceptual subsystem with which we interpret our experiences – to be more and more consistent with the systems nature of Reality. All we have to do is to replace our outdated and mistaken fragmented and disorderly conceptual framework – with the Whole System Model - to be consistent with the Whole System Order of Reality. In part I here, we will look at the Whole System Model. Then, in part II, we will look at how business functions as the evolutionary cutting edge of the Whole System Model. Finally, in part III, we will look at how to optimize business management by maximizing business’ innovative function by harnessing the forces of the Whole System Model. The Whole System Model is a conceptual framework for making sense of Reality as the single and integrated system it already is. As business is the primary engine of self-transformation within the Whole System, we must regard business operations as the cutting edge of change and begin to regard, understand, and manage business – with the Whole System Model. The Whole System comprises several domains and has three key feedback loops operating among them. By getting familiar with these domains and feedback loops, and by understanding how interactions among them generate business, we will become ever less wasteful and ever more effective at business. This article will briefly explore the key domains and feedback loops in the Whole System, and how these work together to accelerate the Whole System’s self-transformation through business. Specifically, the article will provide a sense of the structure, relationships, processes of the Whole System, and our place and functions within it. We will discover that business is primarily about managing pre-existing dynamics in the Whole System, specifically, managing the unbundled domains and feedback loops that comprise the human component in the Whole System. Whole System Development Before we look into the role of business in the Whole System, let us, for foundation’s sake, consider the development of the Whole System so far. Let us begin with the most familiar component that is matter-energy. Then we can gradually, step by step, layer after layer, overlay the development over matter-energy in order to constitute, first life, then responsive intelligence, and then humanity. We will see how the ‘human’ components and activities relate to, and interact with the base component of matter-energy generate business to accelerate the self-transformation of the Whole System. The Domain of Matter-Energy – Nature For some time now, Science has been regarding reality as being made up of matter-energy. The laws of physics, inorganic chemistry, geology, and astronomy all show reality to be a complex and dynamic system. It is comprised of several layers of subsystems, universes made up of galaxies, which are made up of star/solar systems, which are made up of stars and planets, which are made up of gaseous, liquid and solid objects, which are made up of molecules, which are made up of waves/particles, and so on. Sentience and Basic Life Forms Then emerged the Sentience function, giving rise to new formations in the Whole System we call basic life forms, which can be mapped with sciences like organic chemistry, botany, biology, and combinations of these with material sciences such as biophysics. Basic life forms are formations of matter/energy that move to the tune of a different drummer than that of Raw Nature. Sentience is the intrinsic capacity of Reality to observe itself. Hence, Sentience may be regarded as Reality’s feedback function. Wherever Sentience is present in the system, there is a formation that is fundamentally different from other formations, feedback in the form of positive or negative experienced content, and motion that is different from the ‘blind’ movement of inanimate matter-energy, by virtue of being driven by the positive and negative responses by the formation. The positive or negative feedback to any experience is familiar to us as ‘emotion’. Such emotional feedback occurs in a spectrum ranging from extreme attraction to whatever is being experienced through the formation, or extreme repulsion to it, or any point between these two extremes of the spectrum. Hence with the emergence of basic life forms, three additional new orders emerged simultaneously in the Whole System, a) the life forms themselves, b) the Sentience function, and c) the new kind of motion of these life forms. The new kind of motion depended upon whether the feedback was positive (attractive sentient content) or negative (repulsive sentient content), and how much, or little, of either. Basic life forms that move according to such feedback are what we might call responsive complex systems. Because their motions responded according to the quality of their sentient content, their motions were different from the motions of the rest of matter-energy. Sentience and Smart Life Forms Then came yet other domains of the Whole System with we call smart life forms, which have been studied with sciences like the zoology of animals. Like basic life forms, smart life forms also involve Sentience. However, instead of merely responding immediately according to the experience that Sentience makes possible, these creatures can also COPY their experiences in an abstract ‘conceptual’ form, and STORE these copies of their experiences, RETRIEVE these as memories, and thus also interpret experiences based on similar earlier experiences, and respond to these interpretations, generating a new kind of motion in matter-energy. Smart Life Forms can respond not just to what is experienced by Sentience through them, but also to the memory of what followed the previous similar experience, even though, the following experience has not yet occurred this time around. As such, these creatures represent more sophisticated feedback subsystems in the Whole System. Smart life forms therefore move in a way that is different not only from just the natural dynamics of insentient matter-energy forms, but in ways that are also different from the motions of basic life forms that move merely in direct response to what is experienced. Smart life forms go one step beyond and respond according to memories of experiences that followed prior experiences that are similar to the current experience. That makes these smart life forms anticipative complex systems. The emergence of Anticipative Complex Systems gave rise to a completely new kind of feedback loop. Whenever creatures move in novel ways because of remembering the results of prior movements, they are anticipating (imagining) the possible result from the immediate experience. Finally came yet new part of the Whole System we can call transforming life forms. Transforming life forms which are being studied with sciences like psychology, cognitive science, sociology, politics, and economics. Transforming life forms also involve Sentience and anticipation based on earlier experiences, but instead of merely being confined to anticipating according to past experience, these creatures can also PROCESS their prior experiences to develop sequential (causal) knowledge and speculative possibilities in the form of ideas. Also importantly, they are also able to transfer their processed memories in the form of both knowledge and ideas among one another via immediate and deferred linguistic media, such as conversations and books, newspapers, magazines, etc. This further enables these forms to organize themselves into various kinds of organizations such as governments, political parties, and businesses. As such, transforming life forms have a much more sophisticated feedback subsystem in the Whole System than did anticipative life forms such as animals, and basic life forms, such as early life forms and plants. Above all, transforming life forms, i.e., human life forms are able to change their environment proactively by engaging in motions to transform their environment according to their experiences, knowledge, imagination, and communications. At this time, the human species are the only known life forms that possess high intelligence and comprise instruments of the Whole System that are self-transforming. However, it must be said here that these high-intelligence life forms may eventually include some other life forms on Earth and possible extra-terrestrial life forms as well. In this diagram, for convenience, we have collapsed all non-human life forms with all other non-transforming forms. This enables us to distinguish the salient domains of the Whole System, i.e., the functions through which the Whole System transforms itself. Overall, this makes for several layers of reality within the Whole System Model. Of course, there is matter/energy, then basic life forms, then anticipative life forms, transformative life forms, and the motions and actions of all these layers of different motions in the matter energy dimension of the Whole System. Then we have the non-matter/energy dimensions or layers of the Whole System. These are Sentience, the Valuation function, the interpretive function, the imagination function, the action function, each of which, both individually, and in concert with other functions, transform all the other layers of the physical (matter-energy) and have even begun to transform the transformative life forms themselves via genetic tinkering, and technology based surgical procedures. Business involves the organization of human forms in ways that accelerate the self-transforming capability of the Whole System. Over the last couple of hundred years, primarily through business organizations, initially such as the British and Dutch East India Companies, and since through other more recent businesses like Carnegie Steel, Standard Oil, Caterpillar, AT&T, ABB, Bechtel, General Motors, Boeing, IBM, HP, Microsoft and Google, to mention a minuscule few, there has been an accelerating explosion of self-transforming activity in on the planet Earth corner of the Whole System – in the form of the emergence of more and bigger cities, buildings, highways, railways, bridges, tunnels, dams, and all the other technological products and services so many of us take granted. When we regard business from the Whole System perspective, i.e., view IT via sentience and knowledge from within the Whole System; we must wonder what additional feedback functions were added, that made possible. But that is for Part II of this Article.