B2P122 – Holistic Management – Allan Savory

Transcript - B2P122 – Holistic Management – Allan Savory

Allan: The biggest problem facing humanity is not atomic warfare, threats,

Allan: arms race, space travel, it's none of those things.

Allan: It's the destruction of human habitat.

Allan: You can live without food and water longer than you can without habitat.

Allan: The country ran on the black market. It was more honest, more integrity,

Allan: and the whole country ran on barter and trade and honest dealing between people.

Allan: There's far more dishonesty in the banking, the legal, the conventional system

Allan: than there is in the black market.

Allan: In the black market, if you're dishonest, you're out. Nobody trades with you.

Allan: So we suddenly found things much more honest, and the country kept going.

Allan: And as you travel around here, you will see thousands of trees that have planted

Allan: themselves without a dollar.

Allan: While the Chinese and other countries, UAE, are spending billions,

Allan: probably trillions of dollars planting trees.

Allan: And never asking, why do you need to plant them?

Allan: If your management's right, they'll plant themselves. They did for millions

Allan: of years. They didn't need us to plant them.

Allan: The fact that you're having to plant them indicates something's wrong.

Allan: I don't even defend the holistic framework

Allan: if you or anybody came up with a better way simpler way of managing complexity

Allan: tomorrow I drop everything I've spent my life on and adopted because I have

Allan: no other desire than to be a good scientist and leave a better world.

Music: Music

Willy: Bauer to the People, der Podcast für Perspektiven rund um Essen,

Willy: Menschen und Landwirtschaft.

Willy: Weil nur durchs Reden kommen die Leute zusammen.

Willy: Hello everyone and grüß euch. Yeah, in this episode of the Bauer to the People

Willy: podcast, I visited Alan Savory at his home at the Dimbangombe Nature Reserve

Willy: in Zimbabwe at the African Center for Holistic Management.

Willy: Alan spoke English, and I fired off my questions in a sort of Englishish.

Willy: But I guess ever since Arnold bulldozed his accent into the US,

Willy: people have somehow been learning to cope with it.

Willy: So pardon my French and thank you, Alan, for your understanding in every sense of the word.

Willy: Not even we here at Bauer to the People could cover the full scope of Alan Savory in just one episode.

Willy: Now 89 years old, he's not only

Willy: lived a long life, it actually feels like multiple lives wrapped into one.

Willy: He's a bit like Indiana Jones, but of course completely different.

Willy: If you want to dive into Alan's story and the many stories about him,

Willy: there are plenty of videos and articles available.

Willy: Considering that he paved the way for many of today's prominent figures in regenerative

Willy: agriculture, essentially the guru of the gurus, it's surprising how relatively

Willy: little is still known about him and his work.

Willy: He became widely known to the general public in 2013 with his TED talk How to

Willy: Green the World's Deserts and Reverse Climate Change.

Willy: Though he himself much prefers to point listeners to his message from COP26 in 2021.

Willy: Why is that? Alan Savory wasn't just a farmer.

Willy: His holistic management, or how he more accurately calls it,

Willy: managing holistically, stems from decades of observations and experience as

Willy: a biologist, farmer, politician, and more.

Willy: But it goes well beyond a mere management system for agriculture.

Willy: On the macro level, according to Alan, we are managing ourselves,

Willy: our institutions and the essential environment.

Willy: A key challenge, he says, is overcoming our own egos.

Willy: When this approach is applied to a particular location, of course,

Willy: and centered on agricultural practices, it then leads directly to the solution

Willy: Alan presented in the 2013 TED Talk. But it goes well beyond that.

Willy: In our conversation, Alan patiently and with almost fatherly firmness guided

Willy: me towards an understanding of the principles behind holistic management.

Willy: This is a life's work we're talking about.

Willy: I'm curious what you will take away from this episode and how you will understand

Willy: managing holistically.

Willy: Anyhow, enjoy listening and on our YouTube channel watching.

Willy: And yes, once again, pardon my upcoming French.

Willy: Ellen are you ready yeah yeah okay let's start

Willy: um i will start with a short introduction um

Willy: yeah and after that you tell me

Willy: if i was true about it or if i made the

Willy: first mistake already before i've been starting the interview um well uh welcome

Willy: to the audience uh to the new Bauer to the people episode uh i'm here in the

Willy: african center for holistic uh management at Dimbangombe Yes.

Willy: Is it right? Yes, first, first.

Willy: Conservancy in Zimbabwe. Today I'm talking with Alan Savory,

Willy: and you're an ecologist, and you're so much more, but you're a global pioneer

Willy: on holistic management.

Willy: And in general, holistic management in general, and the application of holistic

Willy: management on agriculture or pasture management.

Allan: Well, any walk of life. It's not just about agriculture, but agriculture features

Allan: greatly for reasons I'm sure we'll explain.

Willy: Yeah, of course. So it's a general concept, holistic management,

Willy: but you're broadly known, at least to farmers in Austria, where I heard first

Willy: of you, in terms of agriculture or pastoral management, right?

Willy: Um yeah uh and with

Willy: an slight age of 89 uh

Willy: years of age yeah uh you are

Willy: so much more than uh just an ecologist or

Willy: the pioneer uh you lived a

Willy: life that people like myself can't even

Willy: imagine how to live a life like that there was

Willy: so much you did but today we want to focus on your concept of holistic management

Willy: uh and try to understand what it is all about and how to apply to agriculture

Willy: or to life itself yeah so that should be the focus for today i

Allan: Can tell you right now you can't apply it.

Willy: Yeah okay let's go done you

Allan: Don't apply management okay it's management and you if somebody says applying

Allan: management it's like sending your daughter for music lessons and she comes back

Allan: and says, I've learned to apply the violin,

Allan: you would say, there's something wrong there.

Allan: So it is just holistic management or managing holistically, and you can only

Allan: practice that. You can't apply it.

Willy: Yeah, like tools.

Allan: Yeah, and people have completely misconstrued it, and there are so many derivations

Allan: of my work because of academic and human egos, and those you can apply, but they will fail.

Allan: Because they've converted my work to some sort of management system.

Willy: And you're not a fan of the term management system by Alan Savory.

Allan: Oh, absolutely. You must use a management system where everything is predictable.

Allan: So in any business, army, anything, you need a management system for inventory

Allan: control, accounting, anything of that nature where everything is accountable

Allan: or reasonably predictable.

Allan: But you would never dream of a management system for your life,

Allan: a management system for a business, an army running on the management system. You'd lose a war.

Allan: So why the hell are people talking about management systems for agriculture?

Allan: That's doomed to failure. And all these adaptive management grazings,

Allan: mob grazing adaptations of my work, they're all doomed to failure.

Allan: Because people are not getting the idea, it's just about managing realistically.

Willy: And to get the idea, first glimpse of your idea, I'm here today.

Willy: But before we start on the term holistic and the term management,

Willy: as you understand it, Let's just

Willy: briefly, a very brief history of Alan Savory. We are here in Zimbabwe.

Willy: Did we end up here today so how do you you were born in Zimbabwe but you traveled

Willy: all over the world and you had to live all over the world but you came back

Willy: to Zimbabwe and to do what now so what brought you here well

Allan: What brings me here is this land I donated this for the good of the nation and

Allan: the world as a place where people could see management holistically in practice

Allan: like this, as you can here.

Allan: The results here are phenomenal.

Allan: I mean, they've even amazed me.

Allan: I was just thinking today, we've probably increased the production of the land

Allan: here more than tenfold, probably twentyfold in the last 30 years.

Allan: It's just mind-blowing.

Allan: And as you travel around here, you will see thousands of trees that have planted

Allan: themselves without a dollar, while the Chinese and other countries,

Allan: UAE, are spending billions,

Allan: probably trillions of dollars planting trees and never asking,

Allan: why do you need to plant them?

Allan: If your management's right, they'll plant themselves. They did for millions

Allan: of years. They didn't need us to plant them.

Allan: The fact that you're having to plant them indicates something's wrong.

Allan: So anyway, that's what brings me back here all the time.

Allan: And yes, you're right, my life's been

Allan: very varied, and that's why I'm just completing now a memoir of the years,

Allan: and the circumstances that led to us being able to discuss as we are today.

Allan: The managing holistically, which

Allan: we'll come to, could never have been developed by me or any one person.

Allan: It could never have been developed by any university, environmental organization, government, never.

Allan: Could never have been developed in any one country.

Allan: It could never have been developed at any time in history.

Allan: It developed from a unique set of circumstances in this country.

Allan: Dying empire, dying colonialism, violence, war, change, and very small population governing the country.

Allan: And from that it arose, but it still couldn't have if I hadn't been forced into exile.

Allan: And because of my military role, scientific role, political role. Many roles.

Allan: Yes, many roles, all at the same time because of small population,

Allan: and then I was forced into exile.

Allan: And then far-sighted bureaucrats in the USDA, the U.S.

Allan: Department of Agriculture Soil Conservation Service, they'd been watching my work.

Allan: And when I went there as an exile, they commissioned me to put 2,000 scientists

Allan: through training over two years in the management framework I was known to be developing.

Willy: They were already watching you before you

Allan: Went to exile. Yes, at least in Texas, universities there had plagiarized my work in 1978.

Allan: As I learned, when I got to America, I was told, oh, this was developed in Texas.

Allan: And I was presented with my own work.

Willy: How was that?

Allan: Well, I just changed the name because they'd got the ball by the udder. They'd got it wrong.

Willy: They got it wrong then?

Allan: Oh, yeah. Like all the derivatives, they'd got it wrong. They'd converted my

Allan: work to a grazing system, which it wasn't.

Allan: So anyway, that's the history. So yes, it could only have been developed in

Allan: those circumstances, and I've written a memoir about that.

Allan: Because that'll help people understand.

Willy: The context of it all. But if a system like yours, like a general approach...

Allan: Well, it's not a system, so get that straight.

Willy: Get it straight. How would you, holistic, you call it holistic management.

Allan: Just managing holistically.

Willy: Managing holistically.

Allan: Or holistic management. Can I say approach?

Willy: Can I say your approach?

Allan: Well, would you, I mean you are managing your life, would I say your approach?

Allan: You see how awkward it is for us. Because it's just a new paradigm and adults

Allan: find it hard to learn something new like this.

Allan: We get very uncomfortable if we talk about going up south for holiday why is south down,

Allan: It isn't. But we've come to think of it that way. We don't go, say,

Allan: we're going right-east on holiday, or left-west on holiday, or anything like

Allan: that. But we say up and down for south and north.

Allan: You see, the human mind just gets into a rut like that.

Allan: We've known for centuries that the world is not flat and that the sun doesn't go around us.

Allan: But everybody listening to us today, I bet they talk about the sun rising and

Allan: setting and the moon rising and setting, because we didn't change our language.

Allan: And we've known for centuries that the sun doesn't rise, the sun doesn't set,

Allan: we spin into the dawn, we spin into the evening, but the moon does rise and set.

Allan: You see, so again, we're having that difficulty with language because this is a new paradigm.

Allan: Managing our lives holistically instead of what we've done for a million years,

Allan: which is, like all tools and animals, to manage in a reductionist manner.

Willy: So how can managing life holistically, which is very broad, would apply for

Willy: everyone, everywhere, all the time, right?

Willy: Can develop under such very, very specific circumstances that you had here in

Willy: Zimbabwe when you grew up.

Willy: How could that general evolve out of something that specific?

Allan: Yeah. Let me put it this way. Humans, we're a tool-using animal,

Allan: and we've had a framework that we weren't aware of because we used it for a

Allan: million years. So like fish in a bowl, they don't see the water.

Allan: And in 1983, when I was in exile and working with 2,000 scientists who were

Allan: brilliant, bright people,

Allan: etc., that's when we broke through and realized, oh my God, we've always had

Allan: a simple framework for every bit of management from the household to government policy and beyond.

Allan: But we didn't recognize it. Now we recognized it and we've made some modifications to it.

Allan: Handle the fact that we've already destroyed more than 20 civilizations,

Allan: and we're now heading for global destruction of civilization.

Allan: And it's because there are two glitches. So think of the management framework

Allan: that humans have always used as though it was software.

Allan: We have a brilliant mind, but it uses software. And there were two glitches in the software.

Allan: We discovered those in 1983. Now, one of those I discovered in this country.

Allan: The second of those we discovered. Two thousands aren't just working with me. That's why I say we and I.

Allan: Now, only the first of them we discovered here, and that was,

Allan: goes against all human belief.

Allan: Humans believed that livestock, cattle, sheep, goats, camels,

Allan: caused desertification.

Allan: And the 20-odd civilizations, the biblical civilizations that had gone under

Allan: desert sands were blamed on the shepherds with too much livestock.

Allan: That became a scientific truth, even though there was no science behind it,

Allan: in every university in the world.

Allan: And what I discovered in the 1960s was that's false and that we cannot reverse

Allan: global biodiversity loss, desertification, megafires,

Allan: fueling climate change, now feeding on each other.

Allan: We cannot reverse that with fire and technology, Any technology,

Allan: even imaginable in science fiction, cannot because it's an oxidation problem.

Allan: It's a problem of biological decay turning to chemical breakdown or oxidation,

Allan: which we can see right here.

Allan: You've got me under a thatch roof, and it's yellow on the inside.

Allan: If you look on the outside, it's dark black. Why?

Allan: On the outside, it's in sunlight, and it's oxidizing. This is only dry grass.

Allan: And this was happening in this country, and when I recognized what was happening,

Allan: I realized only animals with a moisture in their gut can deal with that.

Allan: No technology can. Over millions of hectares of the world every year.

Allan: There's no way you can deal with that with some technology, and fire can't do it.

Allan: And humans only had two tools, fire and technology. We've never had any other

Allan: tool except the idea of resting the environment to let biodiversity recover.

Allan: Now, that's a wonderful idea if you're in London or Paris or humid areas of

Allan: the world or in a wetland or an ocean, marine environment,

Allan: anywhere where moisture is pretty consistent through the world.

Allan: If you rest the environment, no matter how badly you've damaged it,

Allan: biodiversity will begin to recover.

Allan: Now, what we discovered here and then confirmed in America,

Allan: where they had dozens of research plots put in, when you're in seasonal erratic

Allan: environments, as this is, whether the rain is high or low, So if you rest the land.

Allan: Grass and brush and trees, as you will see here, if you come a few months from

Allan: now, everything out there will be dry.

Allan: And if it's in the air, in sunlight, it'll be oxidizing and not biologically

Allan: decaying if you don't have enough animals.

Willy: It will become the roof.

Allan: It'll become like the outside of the roof.

Willy: Leaving no water into the soil.

Allan: Well, it starts to kill the vegetation when you start to get bare ground, etc.

Willy: And therefore you need livestock to manage?

Allan: Well, you have to, in the areas where the humidity was pretty permanent, like much of Austria,

Allan: right, where it's fairly permanent, then if you damage the environment,

Allan: it will recover, as I said,

Allan: because biological decay continues and nature fills the vacuum.

Allan: Now, in these environments, there used to be millions and millions and millions

Allan: of animals in numbers that humans can't even imagine today.

Allan: And the moisture was in their gut.

Allan: That's where the moisture was. When the soil and the atmosphere went dry,

Allan: these large animals in their moist gut digested and broke down most of the vegetation.

Allan: So that we discovered here. So there are two glitches I said in the software.

Allan: One is we didn't have the tools in the tool bag to be able to stop what happened

Allan: to all those biblical civilizations.

Allan: When they killed off the wild animals and domesticated a few,

Allan: and they were doomed from then on.

Allan: The only thing that could have saved them was the livestock if they'd known

Allan: how to manage them. So we discovered that here.

Allan: Now, we thought we'd got success. We were getting some amazing results.

Allan: But when I was forced into exile, just that time, some were beginning to go

Allan: wrong. There was something we were missing.

Allan: We didn't know what it was. When I was given this opportunity and commissioned

Allan: to train 2,000 scientists,

Allan: with them challenging everything, and I had an hour every day,

Allan: which I devoted to nothing, but we cannot afford to be wrong.

Allan: We have to find if we're wrong. So we'd spend one hour every day doing nothing

Allan: but criticize our own work, the logic and the science, until we could not find flaws any longer.

Allan: At that point was when we broke through and had discovered the second glitch.

Allan: The weak glitch. Yeah, the glitch in the software.

Allan: And that is simply that every human has always believed that we manage in different ways.

Allan: We've got lots of ways of managing, lots of ways that governments develop policy.

Allan: You can manage scientifically, dictatorially, democratically, et cetera, et cetera.

Allan: And what we discovered is, oh, my God, no.

Allan: All tool-using animals, baboon, otter, vulture, human, manage exactly the same way.

Allan: It's genetically embedded in us. There's a simple framework,

Allan: and that's how we manage. And there's a problem with it.

Allan: There was no problem with it until we got use of fire.

Allan: So the way humans managed for a million years, we could not adversely affect

Allan: our environment any more than any other tool using animal.

Allan: And so we had technology, which was primitive stones, sticks.

Allan: We could sharpen the sticks. We could chip the stones. stones,

Allan: we couldn't change our environment.

Allan: When we acquired fire, we could melt the stones, go into the bronze,

Allan: the copper, copper, the bronze, the iron age, and every bit of technology that

Allan: you're photographing me, the clothes we have made possible by fire.

Allan: Now, once we had that, that decision-making management framework became damaging,

Allan: and we didn't know why or how.

Allan: So we discovered that, and the fact that we only manage in one way,

Allan: at all levels, and we could change that slightly.

Allan: So let me show you how that works.

Allan: You correct me if I'm wrong, please.

Allan: I don't know you, I'm only meeting you now. But tell me if I'm wrong.

Allan: If I predicted to you, haven't you made every conscious decision in your life?

Allan: Conscious decision. Not if your hand touches a hot stove.

Allan: You don't make a decision, you just pull it away. I'm talking about a conscious decision.

Allan: Haven't you made, and every listener, made every conscious decision in your

Allan: life to meet a need you had, a desire you had, or to solve a problem you had?

Willy: The answer would be yes, but there are more conscious and less conscious decisions.

Allan: It doesn't matter, they are still conscious decisions and they are always to

Allan: meet a need, a desire or solve a problem.

Allan: It's very difficult for any human

Allan: to think of a conscious decision that doesn't fit one of those three.

Allan: There's the problem. The world is holistic and complex, and that we will never

Allan: change that way of making decisions. Never.

Allan: That's a mistake I made. I thought we could change decision-making.

Allan: No, we will never change it. What we have to do is change management.

Allan: So when you and I, and all humans have that as the reason for our decisions,

Allan: that is correct, and it will always be.

Allan: It is for me, it is for this place, but now,

Allan: instead of that being both the reason and the context for the decision,

Allan: we now develop a holistic context where

Allan: humans decide how they want their lives to be

Allan: tied to our life-supporting environment and

Allan: our behavior and that becomes the

Allan: context while we meet our needs desires and you get this totally different result

Allan: we're getting here no matter how badly you do it we have not managed perfectly

Allan: we've made many mistakes but this place just gets better and better and better you.

Willy: Said it when you went to to texas you saw that the scientific way or the way

Willy: we did agriculture or we did management systems was actually wrong. But it was a narrative.

Willy: It was a narrative that we are living in, that we are working alongside.

Willy: What you're proposing now is a change of the narrative that we were in common

Willy: over many, many years or many, many centuries, perhaps,

Willy: how can you change a narrative that is so strong and holds us together into

Willy: a new, like a paradigm shift, as you said.

Allan: Well, this, I wouldn't have expressed it as a narrative. To me, that's a story. What,

Allan: The problem we have is that we're adults. And I'm deadly serious there.

Allan: I've trained thousands of people, from illiterate people to professors at prestigious universities.

Allan: I have never, ever found ignorance block learning. Never.

Allan: The only two things I've found block learning are what we already know, as adults, and our egos.

Allan: And our egos, and particularly professional egos, are the biggest vested interest

Allan: in the world, bigger even than financial vested interests.

Allan: Whole nations have gone to war over one man's ego.

Allan: And our egos in our universities, our institutions, our professional people

Allan: block learning, and what we know blocks learning.

Allan: So the ideal, and I don't have the answer to this, but the ideal would be to work with young people.

Allan: I'm not being facetious or anything, but some of the most intelligent people

Allan: I've met have been illiterate.

Allan: Some of the least intelligent, you can complete the sentence.

Allan: I don't want to say the wrong thing.

Willy: Yeah yeah yeah so so how

Willy: to put it uh how can one overcome

Willy: you said your hope is for the future or for the youth for the young people um

Willy: but there are still people in institutions there are still people managing this

Willy: world like i am like others are uh we can't wait for the for the youth to to

Willy: to grow up and to apply a new,

Willy: how do you say, managing holistically.

Willy: How can we change a running system in order to do the right things?

Allan: How would you do that?

Allan: I tried to explain this at COP26. Let me try again.

Willy: I will link the video in the show notes.

Allan: Yeah. Now, let's first just back off a little bit.

Allan: The whole world now is not in denial.

Allan: Every sane scientist is now acknowledging that humans are causing climate change.

Allan: So global biodiversity loss, desertification, fueling climate change,

Allan: feeding on each other, humans are causing it.

Allan: Now, science is logical.

Allan: If humans are causing it, then it is impossible for fossil fuels to be causing it or livestock.

Allan: And yet every global conference on climate or biodiversity, these are the things most blamed.

Allan: You cannot blame your resources. You can have many things influence a problem,

Allan: but only one root cause. So if humans are causing climate change,

Allan: then it means management is.

Allan: It's how we manage fossil fuels, how we manage livestock, how we manage our resources.

Allan: That is what's causing climate change.

Allan: So now that to me is very plain.

Allan: Why has nobody in the media, no Nobel Prize laureate, No National Academy, U.S.

Allan: National Academy of Sciences, Royal Society. Why haven't they acknowledged that?

Allan: We're still going on with conferences where everybody is blaming the resources.

Allan: So we seem to lack common sense today at a higher level.

Allan: Now, when we look at management, as I tried to explain in that very short talk,

Allan: all right if if you say to world leaders you need to address management now that's,

Allan: daunting that's overwhelming if i was

Allan: a political leader again i would say i don't know what the hell to do yeah that's

Allan: too big so let's break that down what do we manage and what do we produce so

Allan: i did that in that 12 minute talk and we produce millions of things we produce

Allan: beef wine, cheese, smartphones,

Allan: bombs, computers, music, art, literature,

Allan: buildings, trains, you name it.

Allan: We produce millions of things, including our food.

Allan: That's not where the problem lies, because that's not management.

Allan: You don't manage food. You don't manage cell phones. You produce them.

Allan: You don't manage bombs. You produce them.

Allan: And everything we produce is complicated. It's not complex.

Allan: Nothing we produce is complex and self-renewing, etc.

Allan: All right, so that's not where the problem lies, but that's where 100% of the

Allan: discussion, argument, and conflict lies.

Allan: But it's not where the problem is. So then what do we manage?

Allan: And really, we only manage three things. We manage ourselves,

Allan: our families, our communities, and at scale we manage organizations, institutions.

Allan: Most humans can't even make a toothbrush today because it's made by a corporation.

Allan: All right? So we manage at the human scale or the institutional scale.

Allan: Now, the first thing the family has to do, or the institution has to do,

Allan: is to manage the economy, because if it can't finance itself, it fails.

Allan: If a farmer can't finance the farm, they end up committing suicide because they

Allan: can't sustain their family.

Allan: If a political party can't finance itself, it's out.

Allan: It's the same for all of us at that level. So we manage humans and our institutions,

Allan: we manage our economy, and through them we manage our life-supporting environment

Allan: or nature to produce music, art, literature, wine, beef, food,

Allan: cell phones, bombs, everything.

Allan: So we've only got to focus on three things.

Allan: Now, I wish some scientists in the world would tell me where I'm wrong.

Allan: I cannot get a single scientist in the world to say, Alan, you're wrong, and this is why.

Allan: Because the whole of human survival hangs on this. I believe that.

Allan: Now, when we.

Allan: Look at that problem, all right, and then let's look at something else.

Allan: When we manage at scale, government policies etc

Allan: they're all formed by experts

Allan: uh you've got the political persuasion of the party and then you've got the

Allan: institutions and their experts universities farming organizations whatever they

Allan: nominate their experts to come together and let's say form policy now experts in what?

Allan: They're experts in production. I don't know, you know, they talk of peer review.

Allan: I don't know who my peers are.

Allan: Because for 70 years, I've been working on trying to understand managing complexity,

Allan: and I don't know who to talk to.

Allan: But I'm constantly told my work's not peer-reviewed. Well, who the hell are they?

Allan: Because the experts I talk to have all got PhDs or whatever in physics or chemistry

Allan: or science or medicine or something, but not in the management of humans,

Allan: economy, and nature indivisibly.

Allan: We can choose to produce bombs or cell phones, beef or wine, anything we produce.

Allan: We can choose what to produce, independent of other things.

Allan: When it comes to managing your family, your economy, and the nature to produce

Allan: everything that you produce.

Allan: What can you choose? You can't choose to manage your family without the economy, without food.

Allan: You can't choose to manage the economy without nature.

Allan: The only economy that will sustain any nation is dependent on the photosynthetic process.

Allan: And nothing I'm saying to you is complicated.

Allan: It's just common sense.

Allan: Is it not?

Allan: Well, now let's go, just let me say a bit more on the experts.

Allan: John Ralston Saul wrote a big book, 500 page, Voltaire's Bastards.

Allan: What he did was he said, look, there were major blunders occurring in the world

Allan: in those days of Voltaire.

Allan: And the best minds in the world at the time said, we've got to stop this.

Allan: Why are these blunders occurring? And they decided it was amateurism.

Allan: You could buy or inherit your position in the army, the business,

Allan: the church, whatever, parliament, you could buy or inherit your position.

Allan: That had to end, and every institution was going to be led by highly trained professional people.

Allan: And Napoleon spread that through Europe more than any other leader.

Allan: So what Saul said was, let me now study that and see what happened,

Allan: because we've had a couple of centuries go.

Allan: Let's see what happened. Did the blundering decrease or increase? What do you think?

Willy: It increased.

Allan: And he illustrates that right across the board, all fields.

Allan: In all fields, the blundering increased to where we're facing what we are today.

Allan: The catastrophes just increasing around the world.

Allan: That's because of professionalism, because they were all trained in narrow.

Willy: They all grew up,

Allan: Became adults with an ego and

Allan: knowledge. They didn't learn in managing complexity to produce everything.

Allan: So, experts are needed. I'm not deriding that.

Allan: I'm just trying to explain we need experts in management, not in production.

Allan: Now, I don't deride it at all. People often accuse me of that.

Allan: They say I'm anti-science or anti-that. I'm not. They need to listen to me carefully.

Allan: I wouldn't even be alive if it wasn't for specialization, narrow training.

Allan: I've been shot twice. I've had God knows how many African diseases, bohazi, et cetera.

Allan: I've got a defibrillator, pacemaker. Oh, you do? Yes, I've had cancer.

Allan: I wouldn't be alive if it wasn't for specialist knowledge. But we don't need

Allan: specialist knowledge in production to develop an agricultural policy. It becomes chaos.

Allan: That's why agriculture today, everything is dependent on it. You can't have a choir.

Allan: You can't have a church. You can't have a university.

Allan: You can't have a government. You can't have any business in the world without

Allan: agriculture. And yet, agriculture today is the most destructive industry ever

Allan: in history because of experts.

Willy: I'm really trying to, it's a very powerful, yet very simple approach.

Willy: But if you look at the detail, it gets very complicated or less,

Willy: let's say complex again. How can people understand?

Willy: Because I really somehow understood the system or the perspective of complexity

Willy: versus being something being complicated.

Willy: Because you can reproduce something being complicated, no matter how complicated

Willy: it is. There are smart people and less smart people.

Willy: I'm less smart, but there are people building turbines for airplanes.

Willy: Shouldn't be a complex system, right?

Allan: Well, it isn't. A plane isn't a complex system, but it's complicated.

Allan: And that's well defined by people in system science, that everything we make

Allan: or produce, everything is defined as a complicated, hard system.

Allan: And complicated means it is not self-renewing. If you stop producing, it stops.

Allan: If a battery dies, fuel runs out, whatever, it stops.

Allan: It cannot reorganize itself.

Willy: Autopoetic.

Allan: Yeah. Okay. So those are complicated, hard systems, and they're beyond me.

Allan: The technology you're using,

Allan: that's beyond my simple mind yeah right and when problems occur they are described as kind problems,

Allan: meaning they're easy to solve so a rocket explodes we're exploring space give

Allan: us a few million dollars give us six months we're back on track people can solve

Allan: them those problems now when you look at the three things we manage,

Allan: they don't stop.

Allan: If you lose thousands of species, nature doesn't stop.

Allan: It carries on in changed form.

Allan: So even if we lose thousands of species, nature carries on.

Allan: Now, look at the economies. We know it in this country, when our entire economy

Allan: collapsed, our currency collapsed.

Allan: We had the highest inflation in the history of the world.

Willy: A hundred billion dollar notes.

Allan: A hundred trillion. Trillion. Even trillion. With three zeros taken off already.

Allan: All right. When that happened, the country ran on the black market.

Allan: It was more honest, more integrity, and the whole country ran on barter and

Allan: trade and honest dealing between people.

Allan: There's far more dishonesty in the banking, the legal, the conventional system

Allan: than there is in the black market.

Allan: In the black market, if you're dishonest, you're out. Nobody trades with you.

Allan: So we suddenly found things much more honest, and the country kept going.

Allan: So that happens now. Same with a family or a company.

Allan: If the whole board of a company dies in a plane crash, the company doesn't stop.

Allan: You just change the board and carry on.

Allan: So economy, nature, and humans, these are indivisible. They're complex.

Allan: They do not stop. No matter how many people you kill, no matter how many species

Allan: you lose, no matter how much economic damage you do, it carries on in changed form.

Allan: So that's where we need the expertise. Now, when you divide them and understand

Allan: like this, what happens is people think the solution to that's got to be complicated.

Allan: No, it isn't. That's where we come up against the difficulty that I'm working with adults.

Allan: It's like the solution to it is not theoretical.

Allan: It's 100% practical. So it's like a bicycle.

Allan: If you and everybody listening had never known about a bicycle,

Allan: and I have developed a bicycle, and I'm explaining to you This practical thing

Allan: of riding a bicycle, the more I explain, the more you'd say, I'm crazy.

Allan: And you'd get confused. It's on two wheels, it barrows, it's narrow,

Allan: it's got a steering board.

Allan: You've got to pedal it. The faster you move, the more stable it is, etc.

Allan: You would just say, I'm crazy. But if I had a bicycle and you were with me,

Allan: probably in 30 minutes you'd be riding it.

Allan: It's exactly the same with what we're talking about now.

Allan: Adults, and the more I explain it, the more confusing it gets.

Allan: What I would like to do is what I suggested at COP26, is just get one sovereign state,

Allan: one government in the world of a state or a nation or whatever,

Allan: and just get the leader of that to say, I'm carrying on governing as usual.

Allan: Don't take any risk as a political leader, but say, I am on the side side.

Allan: As a concurrent activity, going to have the citizens of my country develop an

Allan: agricultural policy, say, because that's central to everything,

Allan: an agricultural policy holistically.

Allan: Now, they could get help from me and Savory Institute, because we've been working on this for decades.

Allan: We would not develop the policy. Their experts would.

Allan: The knowledge is there. It was the expertise and the division and the way they

Allan: developed policy that was causing the problem.

Allan: And so they would develop policy, take no risk at all, in the citizens' interest,

Allan: not the institutions' interest.

Allan: Every policy today is developed in the interests of institutions.

Allan: None are developed in the interests of citizens. So

Allan: we would just flip that do that and see what comes out of it now if people like

Allan: what comes out of it adopt it and every country could begin to adopt it if they

Allan: don't like drop it and you've wasted time i was wrong i promise you it will not prove wrong how do.

Willy: You know if if one likes it or dislikes it how would you decide

Allan: Simply because i've done it yeah let me try and explain it this way In armies

Allan: and army training, we had something we called toots.

Allan: What were toots? You couldn't stage a battle and manage a whole battle to see

Allan: if your strategy was going to work.

Allan: You couldn't do that. So what did armies do?

Allan: Toots, tactical exercise without troops.

Willy: All right? On paper.

Allan: On paper, on models, on cloth models, whatever. We've done toots with this for 40 years.

Allan: Every single time the result comes out the same. Wonderful.

Allan: Why didn't we think of this before? So simple. It comes out every time.

Allan: So I know what's going to come out of it.

Allan: Yeah, the moment you develop policy in the interests of citizens,

Allan: what do the citizens of that country want?

Allan: How do they want their lives to be based on their culture, their beliefs,

Allan: their spiritual beliefs?

Allan: And then how must the environment of Austria or wherever it be,

Allan: how must that environment be 500 years from now for your descendants to live similar lives?

Allan: Now tie that to your behavior.

Allan: Because you've got to trade with other nations, etc.

Allan: And there's certain guidelines in developing that.

Allan: It's a new concept. It's not in any religion, not in any philosophy,

Allan: not in any branch of science.

Allan: We discovered that in 1993, approximately.

Allan: So once you develop that, and your same experts, your same people,

Allan: develop policy to meet needs, desires, solve problems, Those are the reason for the policy.

Allan: But now in the interests of the citizens, you get a completely different result.

Allan: And everybody says, oh, my God, this was so simple.

Willy: Well, as you said, we have boxes in our brains.

Willy: The older we get, we try to understand the world, and thereby we are forming boxes.

Allan: Including me. And that's the biggest mistakes I've made.

Allan: As I've said in memoir and everything, the big blunders I made were because

Allan: I was an adult and I'd been trained.

Allan: And that led me to some big blunders.

Willy: But how can we apply this...

Willy: New, let's see, paradigm, I call it paradigm, without running into things like,

Willy: oh, all facts that we had before are wrong.

Willy: So you get into this alternate effect discussion. So we ignore everything we

Willy: knew, because everything has to be different now.

Willy: So, you know, that's a new ideology actually where you ran into.

Allan: That argument comes up.

Allan: When I was training 2,000 people, we had them fill in a form at the end.

Allan: What did you like? What didn't you like?

Allan: What was your main learning out of this?

Allan: And the things that came out were, oh my goodness, this is just common sense.

Allan: That was the commonest comment from professional people coming through a week

Allan: of training after they'd been able to acknowledge,

Allan: after analyzing hundreds of their own policies and concluding all of their policies

Allan: would lead to damage economically, environmentally, et cetera.

Allan: So common sense was a thing that came out of it.

Allan: Another thing that came out of it commonly was professional people who may have

Allan: a PhD in some field or whatever saying,

Allan: oh my goodness, it was like doing four degrees in a week, because we were non-disciplinary.

Allan: Remember the isolated disciplines is part of the problem, not in medicine and

Allan: manufacturing rockets or anything we make, but in management, it's a problem.

Allan: So when we took them right away from disciplines, across disciplines,

Allan: that staggered them, that, oh my goodness, is like doing four degrees in a week.

Allan: Now, the other thing that came out.

Allan: Commonly, not from everybody, but came from people who were high in their careers,

Allan: late in their careers, very respected, they'd published hundreds of papers,

Allan: etc., and they'd pinned their self-esteem to their position or status.

Allan: From those people, we would get the reaction of, oh, everything we've ever done

Allan: is wrong, wrong, wrong. And we weren't saying that.

Allan: But that's how it came over. They were hurt. They were angry.

Allan: They felt their whole life had been wasted, et cetera, which was purely low

Allan: self-esteem, ego stuff.

Allan: It wasn't true. But one fellow did express it well. Ridiculous. We had a coffee break.

Allan: We'd been training, I was training about 30 professional people.

Allan: And a chap called Knight, he was in the Forest Service, I think.

Allan: Came to me after a coffee break.

Allan: And he said, Alan, I've just had a prudent thought.

Allan: And he said, do you mind if I talk to everybody? And I said, no, take my place.

Allan: So he spoke to everybody. They sat down. He said, during the coffee break,

Allan: I suddenly realized what's going on.

Allan: And he said, let me describe it to you. and to the rest of them he's described it like a race.

Allan: We're all going this way and some of us are way out in front with two PhDs, then one PhD,

Allan: then there are people with just a master's, then people just with an undergraduate

Allan: degree, then there are school leavers and then there are illiterate people trailing behind in this race.

Allan: And you have come along and blown a whistle loudly and said,

Allan: stop you guys, the race isn't that way, it's this way. Now who's in front?

Allan: It was a very good description, because when we develop policy holistically,

Allan: you literally are all equals,

Allan: and people with a good liberal arts education have as much or more knowledge

Allan: and ease of accepting managing complexity as people with a very high degree

Allan: of training in a narrow field. You become equals.

Allan: And it's lovely to see.

Willy: I would say, because when you said, especially old scientists, you said,

Willy: with their egos attached to their work, their lifelong work, to their beliefs.

Willy: When I went to the university, I heard of Richard Kuhn On this structure of

Willy: scientific shift of paradigms.

Allan: You've probably heard of him. Kuhn.

Willy: Oh yeah.

Allan: Structure of scientific revolutions.

Willy: Yeah, that's it. And so we actually know.

Willy: So what Kuhn was describing was exactly those reluctant ancient old scientists

Willy: that couldn't let go of their lifelong work because their whole existence,

Willy: their life, was attached to if this is read or wrong or right.

Willy: They wanted it to be right, so they kept holding on it and neglected everything that was coming.

Willy: So I think we're aware of the dynamics of what keeps...

Willy: Complex systems changing, but we can't apply it because there is interdisciplinarity

Willy: in science ever since I can think of it.

Willy: There is the cradle approach by Michael Braungard or there's the blue economy thinking.

Willy: There are so many approaches, holacracy in terms of organized organizations.

Willy: You know, there's so much going on that tries to cover in one way or the other

Willy: what you're thinking of.

Willy: But we can't apply it to the whole system.

Willy: This is somehow the problem. Why? We know it, but we don't do it.

Willy: In every podcast where I'm talking about sustainability, the inevitable question

Willy: is, we know it, why don't we apply it?

Allan: Well, for that you come down, I believe, in the end to policy and institutions.

Allan: Now, when we talked of the three things that are complex, you'll notice one was institutions.

Allan: We manage our families, our communities, and at scale, we manage institutions.

Allan: Now, institutions are complex. The moment we have to have them, they're not bad.

Allan: They're our most efficient way of doing things. But the moment we form an institution,

Allan: it takes on a life of its own, and it is not a human.

Allan: The first institution will be human when we hang a corporation for killing people

Allan: with poisons in the water.

Allan: We can't hang a corporation.

Allan: It's not a human. Now, if you look at system science...

Allan: In complicated systems, we have kind problems. We can solve them. We do.

Allan: Now, when you look at the three things that are complex, they do have problems we can solve, and we do.

Allan: But they also have another kind of problem, which is called a wicked problem.

Allan: And it doesn't mean it's sinful, wicked.

Allan: It means it's almost impossible to solve.

Allan: So take the solving in the 1960s, the desertification problem,

Allan: as I was able to do here in this country, that had taken us probably 15,000

Allan: years, and then we discovered the cause of it in this country, oxidation,

Allan: animals, as we talked about.

Allan: So that was a wicked problem. It took 15,000 years roughly to solve it.

Allan: Finally, we've done so. Now, the other wicked problems we have not solved yet,

Allan: and one of those is that institutions take on a life of their own.

Allan: Now, to give you an example of that, institutions defend the thinking of the

Allan: day, the thinking of society in which they were formed.

Willy: They were conservative.

Allan: Yes, and so you get two types of discovery, and this took me a long time to understand,

Allan: because from the day I got the first breakthrough and realized the importance

Allan: of the work, I tried to get government to take it over,

Allan: other people, because I had become an independent scientist with no resources.

Allan: But I found I couldn't do honest science in an institution.

Allan: So I had resigned and become independent to try to keep pursuing this problem.

Allan: Now, when I realized I had solved part of it, I went immediately to Dr.

Allan: Oliver West, who was our chief scientist in this field in this country,

Allan: trying to get government to take it over.

Allan: And they wouldn't because they had to do experiments and, you know, all sorts of stuff.

Willy: You had to prove it first,

Allan: You know. Yeah. Period. And I said, you can't experiment. It's practical management.

Allan: That's like experimenting on World War II before we engage in it. You can't do it.

Allan: So anyway, when looking at this problem, there are two types of discovery,

Allan: and I say it took me a long time to understand that.

Allan: There are discoveries that are new. They're taking place all the time and have throughout history.

Allan: And when these discoveries are made, everybody knows they're new.

Allan: Institutions know they're new. The people know they're new. And there's argument.

Allan: There's discussion. There are people who agree, disagree.

Allan: We apply the scientific method, developing a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis.

Allan: And there may be a decade of argument. The idea of the discovery is accepted

Allan: or it's found to be flawed and it's rejected.

Allan: And we move on. And we give Nobel Prizes and all these awards and society moves.

Allan: Now, throughout history, there's been another type of discovery.

Allan: Very rare. It's only occurred a few times.

Allan: And that is where something is discovered that ordinary people can say,

Allan: yes, that makes sense. That seems new.

Allan: But institutions know it's not new. They know it's wrong.

Willy: It doesn't apply to your system, yeah.

Allan: So Galileo, Copernicus, they're in that category. There are some that are close to it.

Allan: The fellow discovering longitude, discovering scurvy, could be stopped with lime juice.

Allan: That took 200 years for the Royal Navy to accept.

Allan: So unfortunately for us with the ability to manage holistically, two things occurred.

Allan: One is it was discovered.

Allan: And developed by an obscure non-entity of a scientist with a basic undergraduate

Allan: degree from a piddling little university in Africa.

Allan: If it had been discovered by Texas A&M or Harvard or Oxford,

Allan: the whole world would be practicing it.

Allan: Because of academic egos, it's been fought and resisted tooth and nail.

Allan: Now, there's another unfortunate thing. whereas past discoveries that institutions

Allan: knew were wrong have taken us a hundred years or more for institutions to accept them.

Allan: No matter how many lives are lost, it doesn't matter.

Allan: No matter how much evidence is produced, it does not change institutions as

Allan: Lord Ashby's research showed.

Allan: Right now, unfortunately, in the case of managing holistically,

Allan: there were two discoveries, not new scientific discoveries, really,

Allan: as much as management discoveries.

Allan: And both of them are heresy. Both of them go totally against the beliefs of every institution.

Allan: That's why we're having such a difficulty.

Allan: And it came to the fore for me here about a year or so ago.

Allan: I was having coffee in town with two young men, both well-educated.

Allan: I don't know what, but they'd been to university and well-educated.

Allan: And they were saying to me, Alan, we've been watching you all our lives because they were young men.

Allan: And the difficulties you've had, what you say is such common sense,

Allan: but we've seen governments opposing you, universities opposing you, etc.

Allan: You have to be doing something wrong.

Allan: So I said, yes, you guys, I've had hundreds of people tell me how wrongly I'm

Allan: doing things, but nobody tell me how to do it right. Can you?

Allan: And I said, what about you guys? How are you doing? And they said,

Allan: what do you mean? And I said, well, how are you doing?

Allan: And they said, we don't understand you. And I said, well, by the look of you,

Allan: you're Christians, are you? And they said, yes.

Allan: And I said, well, how are you doing? I said, what did your founder have to say?

Allan: Didn't he just preach love and caring, basically?

Allan: I said, millions of people have been capable of doing that.

Allan: Millions and millions for 2,000 years. What happened to you when you took it

Allan: to scale and when you started to run religion through organizations.

Allan: You've been going to war with each other, killing each other.

Allan: The Christians carried out the Holocaust.

Allan: Was that what love and caring is about? I said, you guys are doing no better than I am.

Allan: Pedophile priests protected by churches?

Allan: Churches' wealth and ostentatious? Is that what Jesus would want to see if he came back?

Allan: I said, don't you guys tell me how wrong I'm doing, because I've got a simple common sense message.

Allan: This is an institutional problem.

Allan: So now, I never like to criticize anything unless there's a simple solution.

Allan: And this institutional problem, we have to have them. I wouldn't be alive without them. accept it.

Allan: So when we develop policy to manage at scale, which is the only way we're going

Allan: to solve these problems, is at scale, because policy leads to laws, regulations,

Allan: taxation, everything.

Allan: That's how we manage. Now, when we develop policy holistically,

Allan: thankfully, nobody gets hurt.

Allan: Institutions don't get hurt, everything. It becomes very, very collaborative

Allan: if we just ride the bicycle.

Willy: So what you're describing is actually, I've written it down like three times already,

Willy: the science we're, let's talk about science, the science we're living in is

Willy: like a knowledge-based science.

Willy: We have, you have to prove everything, peer review everything in order to,

Willy: well, verify it, or like Popper said it, try to falsify it, you know.

Willy: What you are trying to add, I wouldn't say a pose or change is to add an intuitive science, right?

Willy: But you say riding a bicycle is much more an intuitive thing.

Allan: No, that's practical. What I'm trying to say, you mentioned it there, peer review.

Allan: Two things. I had a group of about 10 people here a little while ago.

Allan: I think one or two had PhDs. They all had good education, all of them.

Allan: And I asked them three questions.

Allan: I asked them, what is the scientific method?

Allan: And they could all answer it. You develop a hypothesis, you test the hypothesis,

Allan: and you prove or disprove it, etc.

Allan: They knew that, because they'd been trained in universities.

Allan: Then I said, what is the peer review process?

Allan: That's a publishing process. It's not a scientific process at all.

Allan: And they could all define it clearly.

Allan: Then I asked them, what is science? And there was just silence. They couldn't answer.

Allan: That is serious. All I'm talking about is science, not the scientific method. That is not science.

Allan: It's how you check knowledge.

Allan: And peer review process is holding back science.

Allan: It's not science. I'm just talking about common sense and science.

Allan: But we're training millions of people in our universities to think that science

Allan: is the peer-review process and the experimental process.

Allan: Well, where did science originate? A fellow called Liebenberg wrote a paper

Allan: tracking the origin of science.

Allan: Where did all the domestic plants, animals, everything come from?

Allan: The development of, I think it's six vegetables from one weed on the coast of the sea in Europe.

Allan: Where did all this come from? There were no universities. There were no scientists.

Allan: This was illiterate people talking around kitchen tables and fires. That is science.

Willy: And trial and error.

Allan: And just developing knowledge, developing knowledge.

Allan: Now, I've been ridiculed in some universities in America where professors have

Allan: told the students not to listen to me at all because I rely so much on observation. You're dangerous.

Allan: Observation. Well, Newton, seeing that the apple didn't fall 45 degrees, it fell straight.

Allan: Observation led to discovery. All I've done is spent years tracking,

Allan: developing logic, observing, and following up. Yeah.

Willy: But if you observe an apple falling down and you derive some knowledge out of it,

Willy: It's a trial and error, so you make complicated observations,

Willy: you describe complicated observations.

Willy: But you were talking about family, you were talking about the environment.

Willy: There are still things that we can describe, like in writing it down,

Willy: but we somehow feel if it's right or if it's wrong.

Willy: So you mentioned it also, I guess, during this talk.

Willy: Is there a part of science that has to be not practical to use it?

Willy: Because you're saying, get into practice, but is there a room for intuitivity?

Willy: Something that can be described in terms of trial and error, but you can just feel it?

Allan: Well, I think I get what you mean.

Allan: Let's divide management from science. because they're not the same.

Allan: Now, in science, to me, science is just gathering knowledge from all sources,

Allan: making observations, and then experimental process if that suits.

Allan: Otherwise, it's just deduction and thought experiments.

Allan: And you just do everything you can to confirm why what you're observing is happening,

Allan: and what you learn from it, and you're opening your mind to all sources of knowledge

Allan: and ways of checking it, not just the experimental process, all right?

Allan: So having said that, intuition may lead you to saying, okay,

Allan: I make that observation, and my intuition says this, let me study that to see if I can confirm.

Allan: It could happen, and it does happen, I'm sure.

Allan: Now, when we take management, intuition plays a big part, because you're dealing

Allan: with complexity of humans, complexity of institutions, complexity of the economy,

Allan: and complexity of nature.

Allan: Each one of these beyond human understanding, and you're dealing with them simultaneously.

Allan: So in the holistic management framework, we have dealt with that in a particular way.

Allan: And basically, you develop what we call the holistic context,

Allan: which unites all these in a way that this is what humans want and have to have

Allan: for civilization to survive.

Allan: Now you're using all knowledge, all science, opening your mind to past knowledge,

Allan: past people, everything, to try and achieve this. Now, when you're making decisions,

Allan: you'll never change the way we do it.

Allan: So you'll make all decisions to meet a need, desire, or solve a problem.

Allan: How do you make the decision? You make it on one or more of many factors,

Allan: past experience, research results.

Allan: Peer pressure, fear, cash flow, cost effectiveness, profitability,

Allan: laws, regulations, etc.

Allan: One or more of many factors, and you make the decision.

Allan: Now, in this case, when you're talking management, you're close to,

Allan: you've got that decision.

Allan: Now, we check to see if it's in this context.

Allan: Now, when we do that, intuitively, you'll know it is, or you'll know it isn't.

Allan: With most decisions, let's say 90%, I find most decisions,

Allan: you just make them quicker, better intuitively now

Allan: with some that are more complicated decisions particularly

Allan: where a team is involved in making them what we do is to have some filters to

Allan: check if it is in line with the context and basically we've got eight filters

Allan: that are with the framework and these you go through in a specific way,

Allan: and you can learn how to do this in a day or two,

Allan: and certain problems you go to certain filters first, etc.

Allan: But the last of these filters is intuition.

Allan: So you may have a decision, it's research-backed, everything tells you it's

Allan: right, you check to see if it's in line, it is in line in every way you can,

Allan: but it's a new action that's never been taken before affecting your environment.

Allan: And so at the end of it, you'll go with it and say, intuitively,

Allan: we feel good about this because supported by research, everything.

Allan: Economically, socially, et cetera.

Allan: But now assume we're wrong.

Allan: And we complete a feedback loop on the assumption we're wrong.

Allan: And we do this with policy.

Allan: When we develop policy holistically, when the policy is developed,

Allan: you automatically assume it's wrong, so you establish a feedback loop so that

Allan: you find if the policy is not achieving the desired objective for citizenship, not for institutions,

Allan: then you proactively change.

Allan: You work out what signs are going to indicate that as early as possible.

Allan: So the whole management, including policy, is proactive. It's no longer adaptive

Allan: or any of these things we talked about in the past.

Willy: So if I understand it right, you in applying the framework,

Willy: you look where you want to go, at the goal, at your goal, or at the outcome,

Willy: and then from then you design it backwards and see how to get there,

Allan: Right? Well, that's a way of it, but put it this way, and I'm just repeating

Allan: myself again. Yeah, sure, sure.

Allan: Right now, whether you're in the family or whether you're in government, all right?

Allan: Every single human, every day, is making decisions on one or more of many factors

Allan: to meet a need, a desire, or solve a problem. But the world is holistic and complex.

Allan: So that's where the problem lies. Now, with minimum change, change two bits

Allan: in the software, you can make that successful.

Allan: So while we're doing this today, and we might be in Europe, in,

Allan: say, around London, and we may say a practice is perfectly all right for us. Yes, and it is.

Allan: But if we're Oxford University and we're promoting this as a perfectly correct

Allan: practice for the world, we're doing damage.

Allan: Because that practice might be

Allan: completely wrong for here, but that's a prestigious university in Europe.

Allan: So we've got to be very careful that when we are checking things and talking

Allan: now, we are site-specific.

Allan: The rainfall of London, Paris, is about the same as the rainfall of, say, Johannesburg.

Allan: Now, around London or Paris, and I'm just using that as an example,

Allan: you can use all the technology in the world. You can poison all the plants.

Allan: You can bulldoze thousands of hectares.

Allan: You can create bare ground.

Allan: You can use fire as much as you like. And I promise you, nature will fill the vacuum very fast.

Allan: You cannot create desert, no matter how badly you manage.

Allan: So when you discover that a practice is right for there, don't tell us in Africa

Allan: it is and penalize our governments, penalize our national parks,

Allan: have environmental organizations with more power than whole states here wrecking Africa.

Allan: Because the environment around Johannesburg with the same rainfall is totally

Allan: different. Whereas London gets the rain all year round, here and Coburg,

Allan: we get the rain in roughly four months.

Willy: Yeah, the mistake you make when looking on averages.

Allan: And now, yeah, we get eight months of no rain.

Allan: The rain is finished now virtually, and we can't expect rain until mid-November.

Allan: It's a very different climate. So, we have to acknowledge that and not claim

Allan: that we found answers for the world, for Europe, and then impose them on us

Allan: here, which is what happens.

Willy: But didn't you find an answer here in Zimbabwe that applies for the whole world?

Allan: Yes, but look, let's just take one thing.

Allan: The biggest problem facing humanity is not atomic warfare, threats,

Allan: arms race, space travel. It's none of those things.

Allan: It's the destruction of human habitat.

Allan: You can live without food and water longer than you can without habitat.

Allan: Now, where does the habitat destruction start? With biodiversity loss.

Allan: Leading in these parts of the world to desertification. That's about two-thirds

Allan: of the world leading to megafires, climate change, feeding on each other.

Willy: Do you need some water?

Allan: Now, you're here now, and while you're here, we might get a chance to go to

Allan: the national park, or you might.

Allan: I took people there the other day, including people from World Wildlife Fund were here looking at it.

Allan: We're surrounded by over 30 national parks.

Allan: If I take them to you there today, I promise you, they are some of our worst

Allan: examples of biodiversity loss desertification.

Allan: Now, why is a national park like that?

Allan: You can't blame fossil fuels, can't blame livestock, they're not there,

Allan: can't blame corporate greed, can't blame corruption, can't blame colonialism, can't blame racism.

Allan: I'm just blaming all the things that I hear so I'm just blaming.

Allan: There's only one reason, management by the world's environmental organizations

Allan: and governments and universities.

Allan: There is no other possibility, and we cannot get that addressed.

Allan: I've been saying that for over 40 years.

Allan: And the other day, we had two people from Europe who are high in World Wildlife

Allan: Fund, and when they came and visited with me for the first time,

Allan: because they've always avoided me,

Allan: when they came here, I don't think it's unfair to say they got a shock to learn

Allan: how bad the situation is in our national parks.

Allan: Now, we cannot solve that in this country. Why?

Allan: Because if this country tried to develop policy that would heal that and lead

Allan: to these national parks being the perfection of management that they should,

Allan: It would be vetoed by the world's big environmental organizations,

Allan: IUCN, Nature Conservancy,

Allan: World Wildlife Fund, Africa Parks.

Allan: All of these big environmental organizations are part of the problem,

Allan: not the solution. Now...

Allan: What they're trying to do, we can turn constructive, because we can't solve

Allan: this problem without them. They have to be with us.

Allan: But when we develop policy holistically, they have to meet as equals with poachers.

Willy: So the problem is...

Allan: They're trying to sustain their families. Yeah, yeah.

Willy: Yeah.

Willy: While you were talking, I developed the idea of planning a party,

Willy: like, say, a wedding party.

Willy: And I guess a wedding party, if you have ever been to one, is a really,

Willy: it's a complex issue, and it's not a complicated issue. It seems to be complicated.

Allan: I made mine simple.

Willy: But if you try and i try to to to

Willy: put uh much of your

Willy: thoughts into this wedding party uh you cannot

Willy: predict the outcome of the wedding party well they

Willy: they will they will eventually get married but you

Willy: can if it's whether it's a good party or it's a bad party

Willy: if everyone is happy or not so the only thing

Willy: you can do is manage i hope hopefully

Willy: i apply it right now manage all the parts of

Willy: this complex system which is a wedding party which is food which is music which

Willy: is the location everything you know and it's a wicked problem you know because

Willy: you can't really predict but there are certain people that know how to plan

Willy: wedding parties that have a great outcome right yeah

Willy: And this is uh and and and i

Willy: i worked in catering for a while so i came up with this

Willy: and and we always try to approach this in

Willy: a in a a causal causal way

Willy: you plant this you do this you do this and you do this and eventually

Willy: the party somehow failed yeah you have

Willy: to think of a party as a system to manage it because you

Willy: can and i think that's the term of management you know you can't

Willy: predict and you can't make things

Willy: for sure you can only manage it right so

Willy: it's probabilities that have to be addressed in a

Willy: very specific way and that's why I'm coming up with this now if you're doing

Willy: a wedding party here in Zimbabwe it would be a different party as a wedding

Willy: party in Austria yeah so that's the size specific element of it right all

Allan: Right now now let's take that yeah all right

Allan: let's take that and play with it yeah now in

Allan: your wedding party yes you're dealing with the complexity

Allan: of it all and you're trying to bring people together and

Allan: yes the couple will get married but you

Allan: don't know whether it's going to be a happy party or whatever all right now

Allan: when you come to managing holistically it's much simpler why because with your

Allan: wedding party you only knew that the couple's going to get married.

Allan: Everything else was unknown and you had conflicting views and we should do this,

Allan: we should do that, we should do this, etc.

Allan: Now, when you're managing holistically, you would get all the parties involved

Allan: or their representatives and you'd say, what is our desired outcome?

Allan: No compromise. If there's a compromise, then somebody's not happy.

Allan: You're not allowed to compromise.

Allan: How do we want our lives to be better?

Allan: Should mean more to you than anything in life. If you say my religion means

Allan: more, it should be in there.

Allan: If you say my children mean more, it should be in there. You cannot escape it.

Allan: Now, how must the environment be surrounding you, whether you're an employed person in town?

Allan: Everything comes from nature. Everything goes back to nature.

Allan: How must that be functioning centuries from now to sustain this.

Allan: And now, how must we behave? At the end of the day, you're not judged by logos, marketing, branding.

Allan: You're judged by your behavior.

Allan: How must you behave, be?

Allan: Now, when you've developed that, no prejudices allowed, no action already taken

Allan: allowed, no decision already made allowed,

Allan: all right you've got that you see at that point you find total agreement but

Allan: total agreement now you say now how do we attain this party yeah and to achieve

Allan: that it's a it's so much simpler.

Willy: But let's take the wedding party example and let's say you said you have to

Willy: integrate all problem no compromises so we have all groups i'm thinking of holacracy

Willy: as this is the system how you do it with these holes in the holes and stuff like that.

Willy: And you have conflicting goals.

Willy: One party says, I want to do it in a castle. The other party says,

Willy: I want to do it in a garden.

Willy: You can make a compromise on that. How do you solve that problem?

Willy: Well, those kind of problems.

Allan: I can't. I can't. Because, you see, all you're doing is you're managing a party.

Allan: You're not managing humans, institutions, complexity. city.

Allan: You're managing a complicated party and all these conflicting views.

Allan: Now, theoretically, if you're managing, let's say a family was doing it.

Allan: Now, I'm just trying to see if that family could decide how we want our wedding to be.

Allan: Like the one I attended in Hungary recently, The couple decided where they wanted

Allan: to be married, how they wanted to be married, so traditional,

Allan: etc., etc., and the whole thing was wonderfully happy.

Allan: You see, the couple decided that, not the other people.

Allan: So that's a little bit like I'm trying to say.

Allan: I can only say to you that when I talked about toots at Tactical Exercise Without

Allan: Troops, I've had a couple of situations that are really telling.

Allan: One in this country where because of my past political connections and efforts

Allan: in the war, I was able to go to

Allan: the Capitol and run a short workshop for lawmakers, members of parliament.

Allan: Now, they came from two political parties that I'm not exaggerating were killing

Allan: each other. There was a lot of violence.

Allan: So you've got these two parties that would make Republicans and Democrats in

Allan: America look like children playing in the sandpit.

Allan: Now, when I went over, our staff said, whatever you do, please don't deal with

Allan: land or agriculture, it'll get violent.

Allan: Then I said, never mind what I'm going to do.

Allan: Now, when I got to the capital, I was met by 35 members of parliament,

Allan: posing views, setting different sides of the room.

Allan: I couldn't talk about land, any of these problems, it would get violent.

Allan: All I did was I said to them do you

Allan: guys you are lawmakers in parliament do you

Allan: know how governments develop policy well not

Allan: really well let me explain now I didn't know that till I was president of a

Allan: political party that's when I learned that so I explained how all governments

Allan: do dictatorship democracy they develop the same way and I said now there's a

Allan: different way of doing it that I want to explore with you.

Allan: Now, I said, and I don't want to repeat what we've said before about,

Allan: you know, policy is developed to needs, blah, blah, blah.

Allan: I said, what we need is what is called a holistic context.

Allan: We need to know what the citizens of our country want, right?

Allan: Now, because it's a short workshop and I haven't got time to get the relevant

Allan: people in to develop a real holistic context.

Allan: I am a Zimbabwean, white male, and I know how everybody in our country wants

Allan: to live because I'm a part of this culture.

Allan: And so what I've done is written it down. Let me read it out and you change anything you want.

Allan: So here we've got these two to very divided political groups.

Allan: I read out how every Zimbabwean wanted prosperity, stable lives,

Allan: peaceful lives, freedom to pursue their own spiritual values,

Allan: it's a clean water, blah, blah, blah.

Allan: I read the whole thing out and I said, do you want to change anything?

Allan: One woman asked me to change one word.

Allan: They all said, oh my God, every Zimbabwean wants that.

Allan: And suddenly, I was no longer dealing with two political parties.

Allan: I was dealing with 35 Zimbabweans willing to solve a problem.

Allan: And now I said, let's tackle land and agriculture. No conflict at all.

Willy: So you got rid of the ego?

Allan: You get rid of it all by starting with what citizens want.

Willy: And you would imagine going back to the wedding party, if I get people together,

Willy: planning this wedding, including guests, including, of course,

Willy: the bride and the husband, at the end they want to have a nice party.

Willy: You know that's what they whatever and then we can find if we have a common

Willy: goal then we can agree well let's say compromise even compromise on getting there right

Allan: Yeah when you develop the holistic context you do not compromise,

Allan: that's one of the rules yeah and the reason you don't compromise is if you and

Allan: I are talking about how we want our lives to be and we have to compromise eyes,

Allan: you're not happy and I'm not happy. We're going to have conflict.

Allan: So now we would just talk about it. What do you mean in what you're saying?

Allan: What do I mean in what I'm saying?

Allan: And you just talk about it and you find at the end of the day you come to agreement.

Willy: So let's take my example.

Allan: Because you're only talking about a holistic context. You're not talking about the actions,

Allan: the management actions you stop all

Allan: discussion about actions you stop all

Allan: discussion about the problem until you have

Allan: a holistic context now if you

Allan: think you can't get people to agree like that let me give you the second example

Allan: first before i leave the other one i should say to you by the end of the workshop

Allan: once they were working together they had the policy the world dreams of there'd be no organic,

Allan: no third party endorsement,

Allan: no regenerative agriculture. Why?

Allan: All food would be clean, nutritious, growing on regenerating soil,

Allan: rivers would be flowing clean again, and every bit of knowledge was in the room.

Allan: We didn't have to ask a single expert.

Allan: It is that easy. But now, leaving that one and going to why no compromise.

Allan: In America, I was asked by the Fish and Wildlife Service to help them at a place

Allan: called La Creek, a refuge, with developing the management holistically.

Allan: And I said, okay, there's a lot of conflict. There'd been the Oklahoma bombing,

Allan: biggest domestic terrorism ever.

Allan: In America, there was lots of conflict.

Allan: And I said to them, just get the people together from the town,

Allan: the business people, the farmers, the ranchers, the bureaucrats.

Allan: Get them together too, and I'll come and meet with them. And it was before cell

Allan: phones and computers and so on.

Allan: And they asked me to send an agenda, and I sent a blank piece of paper in an envelope.

Allan: They phoned me and said, there's nothing on this. I said, yeah.

Allan: The agenda can't come from outside. It's got to come from you.

Allan: Just get the people together. That's all I ask. So I went up there.

Allan: The officials took me to the meeting place, a farmer's hall,

Allan: and there were clusters of men outside, and there were no women and no children. I said, why?

Allan: I said, I just asked to meet with your community. Don't you have any women in this community?

Allan: No children? they said yeah but they haven't come because this could get violent,

Allan: Okay, so we went into the room, and I'm dealing with all these American men, macho image stuff, etc.

Allan: And I talked to them about the need to have common agreement,

Allan: because there's so much conflict in the area.

Allan: And they shouted me, they told me to push off back to Africa,

Allan: I don't know what I'm talking about.

Allan: And they, literally being vulgar and cursing, they tell me it's impossible to

Allan: have agreement in that community.

Allan: So I said, gentlemen, you're right. Let's stop this meeting.

Allan: They applauded. Yeah, yeah.

Allan: We canceled the meeting. And then I said to them, one more thing.

Allan: Before you go, will you agree to one hour and prove me wrong?

Allan: And then I leave. Don't tell me I'm wrong.

Willy: Prove me.

Allan: And so they agreed to one hour to prove to me that it was impossible to have agreement.

Allan: Now, I didn't use any conflict resolution, nothing. I only used the holistic framework.

Allan: All I needed from them was some idea of what they valued in life.

Allan: Now, I couldn't talk about love or caring. They would have ridiculed.

Allan: So I just gave each person a piece of paper, and I said, be totally selfish,

Allan: think only of yourself, to hell with anybody else, just you.

Allan: I want you to write on this bit of paper what you'd like to see if you could

Allan: come back into this community 100 years from now.

Allan: By the look of you, you're all going to be dead within 20 years.

Allan: So take this beyond you be totally selfish write down what you'd like to see i give you 10 minutes,

Allan: they had 10 minutes to do that we collected the bits of paper we wrote them

Allan: up on the board you could not distinguish who was a bureaucrat who was a farmer

Allan: who was a businessman identical,

Allan: immediately the whole atmosphere changed within the hour we had a holistic context

Allan: When they left, some men were putting an arm on other guys' shoulders.

Allan: I have worked with people in India, Pakistan, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, America.

Allan: Everywhere I get the same result.

Willy: Mm-hmm.

Willy: Do you are you familiar with the concept of the citizen consumer gap? No, I'm not.

Willy: Well, actually, if you make polls for people on shopping, shopping for,

Willy: let's say, organic products,

Willy: if you ask people in polls, they will say like 80, 90 percent,

Willy: they will say, yeah, of course, I'm shopping for organic products or for products

Willy: that treat animal welfare products.

Willy: If you look at the data at

Willy: the sales data you see like 90 percent said yes

Willy: it's important to me and then you look at the sales day then you have 10 percent

Willy: of people actually buying it yeah so when you just said vote yeah how is it

Willy: like a secret vote secret would yeah and when you said you ask them even uh

Willy: in hundreds of years because you could tell by the view that they're gone but in 20 years.

Willy: You are asking citizens. Citizens do know, and we know it from this polls too,

Willy: you know, this is evidence too, that people know what's right for them.

Willy: But if they act, and I'm people too, they act opposing their beliefs.

Willy: So we know, but we act differently. so how do you get them to action

Allan: That happens commonly um

Allan: we get people who come to

Allan: a workshop they develop a holistic context or

Allan: they take the teaching one from the workshop and they go home and i can promise

Allan: you it's going to fail yeah it's going to fail because they have no ownership

Allan: in it that's why the real holistic context there's a way we facilitate it where you have to own it.

Allan: Now, if you don't, it's not going to work, and I can tell you that now.

Allan: But when you do, like for me, I manage my life holistically.

Allan: I have a holistic context, and I live it. I own it.

Allan: I would rather die than not live like that. Mm-hmm.

Allan: So when I'm working with people, I say to them, now, do you really want your life to be like this?

Allan: If they do, they will begin to live

Allan: it. If they don't, they'll fall by the wayside. That's going to happen.

Allan: Now, that happens with individuals.

Allan: When I was training the 2,000 people, I said we tried to find where we were

Allan: wrong, spend an hour every day on that.

Allan: Now, towards the end, I took two issues, holistic management and the planning process for livestock.

Allan: Both of you have the same result. And I said, look, what is the scientific method?

Allan: Everybody knew it. And I said, all right, now this is 100% practical. It's not a hypothesis.

Allan: But what I want you to do is to treat it as though managing holistically was a hypothesis.

Allan: You all understand it's developing a holistic context, opening your minds to

Allan: all science, and managing in that context.

Allan: Yes, they all understand it. Assuming you're wrong, completing your feedback, all understand it.

Allan: I said, right, now I want to divide you into teams. And I usually put about

Allan: eight people in a team, five to eight.

Allan: And I said, you have unlimited time. I want you to work out in theory how to make that fail.

Allan: You have unlimited time. So I've done that with hundreds of people,

Allan: scientists, and I can tell you the result.

Allan: On average, four hours, they give up.

Allan: And they say, damn it, you cannot make this fail except by not doing it.

Allan: That's my point. Yes, you'll get some people who will learn and then not do it. We can't help that.

Allan: Now, what you can do is get, as I said just now, like the Zimbabweans developing

Allan: policy, and then it comes about. Why?

Allan: Because you start to use laws, taxation, regulation to reward everything that

Allan: is in a national holistic context,

Allan: and to make difficult or costly everything that's not.

Allan: Now, everybody begins automatically to take the actions that are in line with

Allan: what the whole nation wants.

Willy: But before that, you have to decide what do we want and what don't we want, right?

Allan: Well, and it's not what you want, it's how do you want your life to be,

Allan: and then your behavior. So yes, it's a big mistake, what you want.

Allan: If you ask them what they want, they'll give you a string of values. It's meaningless.

Willy: You said it's the language, right?

Allan: Yeah, as I said to you, the holistic context is a new concept.

Allan: If it was what you want, if it was a mission, if it was a goal,

Allan: people would have thought of it thousands of years ago.

Willy: Because we know what a goal is.

Allan: Yeah, this was a new concept. It was the hardest thing for us to discover.

Allan: And as I said to you, it's not in any branch of science, not in any religion

Allan: in the world, not in any philosophy in the world.

Allan: It is a new concept, and there is a way of facilitating it.

Allan: And it's not difficult. We can train people to do that very quickly.

Willy: Do you get frustrated a lot when people are not getting it?

Willy: Because I can tell you saw that I wasn't getting it from the beginning. Does it frustrate you?

Allan: Yes, but I've got used to it because I know how long it took me to learn.

Allan: I mean, I'm talking to you as though I'm a wise guy.

Allan: No, I'm not. I'm a very simple guy, but I saw this as a problem 70 years ago.

Allan: I'll be 90 in a couple of months. I saw this in my early 20s.

Allan: And what the world is acknowledging today, that management is the problem, I saw when I was 21.

Allan: So I began studying it then, and I've made major blunders.

Allan: I've struggled, I've struggled, I've struggled. So today, in hindsight,

Allan: I can explain it so simply.

Allan: And if you were a child, you would be just saying, oh, that makes sense, I get that.

Allan: But you're an adult, that's the difficulty.

Willy: Yeah, become an adult in the meantime, yeah, I know, I know.

Willy: Back to the, well, now, before I had the example with the wedding,

Willy: we can't decide whether it's a castle or in the garden.

Willy: Applying holistic management would solve the potential conflict between castle and garden.

Allan: Can I correct you again?

Willy: Yeah.

Allan: You cannot apply holistic management. You see my problem. You're an adult.

Allan: Yeah. Managing holistically. Yes.

Allan: Carry on. Managing holistically.

Willy: Okay. Managing holistically.

Allan: What would happen?

Willy: Managing holistically. the castle garden

Willy: problem would go beyond the fact whether it's a castle or a garden but would

Willy: ask the people what they really no no no what they

Allan: Well it's an awkward analogy but let's try keeping on it would be asking the

Allan: couple yeah maybe because they're it's their wedding yeah so at first it's deciding

Allan: who are the decision makers do the guests make decisions No.

Allan: Their only decision is to come or not to come. Who makes the decisions?

Allan: It's the wedding couple, and they may have an advisor.

Allan: So it's up to them. So using the holistic context as a guide here,

Allan: they would decide how do we want our wedding to be, and oh, the weather's unreliable.

Allan: So let's make it indoors.

Allan: Now we're safe, whatever the weather. together, let's make it blah blah blah, whatever.

Allan: Okay, so they decide, and now they invite you to the wedding.

Allan: It's not up to the guests to decide whether it's indoors or out, it's them.

Allan: So whoever are the decision makers, they develop the holistic context.

Willy: Sorry if I'm asking again, but if you make a policy framework that you have

Willy: to ask everyone, you know, get everyone.

Willy: So he's the decision maker in the country.

Allan: I get what you're getting at. Okay, so how do we do it?

Allan: So if you were the president of the country, I would just say to you,

Allan: look, there's a new way of developing policy.

Allan: You're a politician, don't risk. Keep doing what you're doing.

Allan: Because politicians cannot take risk, etc. Now, be a statesman,

Allan: and on the side, concurrently, we'll work with you, and let's see what your

Allan: citizens can come up with.

Allan: Now, how do you develop policy at the moment? As a leader of a political party,

Allan: you've got a problem, and you develop a policy.

Allan: So you've got your party viewpoint coming into it, and then you invite experts.

Allan: The experts, do you invite independent experts on management of complexity?

Allan: There are almost none in the world. Or do you divide highly trained experts in institutions?

Allan: Which do you? Institutions. All right.

Allan: So everybody who's coming to develop the policy, what is their first priority?

Allan: The political party. Its first priority is to finance itself.

Allan: If a political party doesn't have money, it's out.

Allan: Its second priority is to grow.

Allan: It's got to grow in support. Its third priority is to stay in power.

Allan: If you don't stay in power, you can't do anything.

Allan: Your fourth priority is the interests of the citizens.

Allan: So you're convening it, and your fourth priority is the citizen interest.

Allan: Now, let's say you bring 10 institutions.

Allan: Representing all the facets of this agriculture

Allan: or whatever you're going to deal with what's the first priority

Allan: of every institution none of

Allan: them is human no be holding

Allan: itself it's got to finance itself it's first priority if the institution isn't

Allan: funded it goes broke yeah so its first priority is that what's its second priority

Allan: do what it's getting support clients customers,

Allan: etc what's its third priority citizen interest if you're lucky yeah some it'll

Allan: be staying in power or monopoly in the corporate world or whatever it's dealing

Allan: with so now you're going to get policy developed where everybody at the table,

Allan: it is their third or fourth priority is the interest of the citizens.

Allan: That's why it doesn't work.

Allan: So what I would say to you is let us develop this with your citizens.

Allan: So let's help you and let's take like a jury.

Allan: The present model is you're the judge. You bring these institutional experts

Allan: together who are all experts in production,

Allan: not management of complexity, and they develop the policy and you are the judge and you accept it.

Allan: Now let's do a jury approach.

Allan: So with you, and we'll help you, let's pick six to eight citizens.

Allan: Let's say we're looking at agriculture we don't want a single one who's an expert in agriculture,

Allan: for the jury so we pick six people right across the board men,

Allan: women, whatever a cross section of your society that are just well educated

Allan: citizens alright now with them,

Allan: they need your convening power if they invite institutions they're not going

Allan: to come we need your convening power now our institute will just provide them.

Allan: Facilitation skills with them we would sit and say now this is agriculture who's

Allan: influenced by it who does this affect in the country and you'll find it's everybody

Allan: you can't have a church you can't have a women's organization can't have a corporation

Allan: can't have anything Tourism.

Allan: All right, so who do we get to bring to develop the policy?

Allan: And you start naming, and maybe it's 20 institutions.

Allan: The captains of industry, who could represent them and come to this?

Allan: The universities, who could represent them and come to it, etc.

Allan: You decide where the expertise is in production.

Allan: Because there's no expertise in management of complexity.

Allan: Now, we six citizens in this jury, we don't have the power to make them come.

Allan: We've got to have them at the table. They must not refuse.

Allan: That's where we need your convening power. We say to you, here's the list to invite.

Allan: You invite them, we get them there.

Allan: Now, when we've got them there, with the six jurors, we now say,

Allan: describe it, how governments develop policy, etc., etc., you do it peacefully.

Allan: You've come here, all of you representing institutions, including the political party.

Allan: And we've also invited the leaders of the opposition parties,

Allan: because agriculture should be above politics.

Allan: It's totally above politics. If it isn't, God help you.

Allan: All right, so now with them we'll explain. You all represent institutions,

Allan: but leave your institutional hat at the door.

Allan: We're going to treat you as citizens. You've all got families.

Allan: And now we would develop a holistic context.

Allan: How do you want your lives to be? I promise you it's going to be the same.

Allan: And we keep developing with no compromise. When we've got it developed,

Allan: we'd say, all right, you all agreed on that.

Allan: That's how we as citizens want our lives to be in this nation.

Allan: We haven't talked about agriculture at all.

Allan: Now we would say, you've got a period off of two weeks.

Allan: Go back to your institutions and check with all the people you like in your

Allan: institution and see if any human being in that institution doesn't want a life

Allan: like that. And then come back and report.

Allan: Now, were any changes, did anybody produce any change? There might be one or two.

Allan: Now, you see, we've got you reporting as human beings in your institutions.

Allan: At this point, we have to start introducing some new ecological knowledge because

Allan: agriculture is based on the biological sciences and ecology and there is such

Allan: illiteracy throughout our universities about ecology.

Allan: So we have to introduce some new principles, etc., that people know.

Allan: And then we start saying, now...

Allan: Let's talk about agriculture yeah now how tools yeah.

Willy: Now let's talk about

Allan: Tools develop a policy in this context when you're doing this what you do as

Allan: part of the facilitation is to isolate,

Allan: all the experts on agriculture so you've had the experts from the women's organizations

Allan: the captains of industry but the experts from the universities from the farming

Allan: organizations on agriculture, you isolate them.

Allan: Because when you start talking about how could we do things,

Allan: they dominate the conversation, and they have no expertise in managing complexity. With the tool thinking.

Willy: Right? Yeah. So you get all those experts, but when you decide on tools...

Allan: You isolate them, and they work amongst themselves. Yeah. Because if you put

Allan: them with the ordinary citizens, they intimidate.

Allan: Yeah. Because they know about agriculture.

Allan: Yeah. So you isolate them and have them come up with the ideas of how they would

Allan: develop policy, and you've got the others doing it.

Allan: Now, and I'm rushing through it. This is a Reader's Digest version.

Allan: At that point, you have a second break where you've got some skeleton structure

Allan: ideas, and you send them back to their organizations.

Allan: And you say, now you've got one month, and we want you to come up from your

Allan: organization with every possible

Allan: way you can think of of developing an agricultural policy in this context.

Allan: Now, when you feed those ideas in, we as facilitators will be working with the

Allan: jury who are doing the same thing themselves, and we'll be filtering those ideas

Allan: to see if they're in context.

Allan: Now, if one of your institutions' ideas is not in context, we would not tell them they're wrong.

Allan: If we tell them they're wrong, they oppose. They're human.

Allan: Humans in it. They've got egos. They've got institutional egos.

Allan: We wouldn't say they're wrong. We'd say, please, can you come in and talk with us?

Allan: And we'd take them through the context checking.

Allan: So they discover, wow, it was a great idea, but it's not in context.

Allan: You never tell them they're wrong. You let them discover if they're wrong.

Allan: Because the whole process of managing holistically produces harmony.

Allan: If I see people who say they're managing holistically and there's conflict, I know they're not.

Allan: Because every time I've ever worked with people, it results in harmony.

Willy: So, your presumption is that there are general values or, yeah, let's say values,

Willy: general values that we at the end can all agree on from where we can then back

Willy: engineer to the goals to how we apply it at the end.

Allan: Well, yes. So that's the solution.

Willy: Abstract it and re…

Allan: Yeah, in answer to your question, yes. I have what I call a generic holistic context.

Allan: I wrote it. It's what I think how

Allan: every citizen of every culture in every country wants their life to be.

Allan: Now, I use that when I go to India or Pakistan or wherever.

Allan: As I'm reading research, I'm reading the newspapers, I'm using that holistic

Allan: context to evaluate what I'm reading and learning.

Allan: Now, wherever I've been, wherever I've been, when I show that to people,

Allan: whatever culture, they say, yes, that's how we want our lives to be.

Allan: But if we use that, nobody has ownership in it.

Allan: So yes, I know that when you sit But like, for example, I would love to deal

Allan: with the Palestinian-Israeli problem.

Allan: I'll bet you if you got every Israeli, every Palestinian in two different groups,

Allan: and with the Israelis you developed a holistic context of how they want their

Allan: lives to be, and with the Palestinians you developed a holistic context of how

Allan: they want their lives to be,

Allan: you could then change them and they wouldn't see the difference.

Willy: No, but it's beyond religion then, right? Of course it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Allan: Yes, as long as the only place I've had it break down,

Allan: and I should have remembered this, is in America where in one group that I was

Allan: working with, we could not get agreement because of a born-again Christian.

Allan: And he absolutely insisted everybody had to be his religion,

Allan: his narrow version of Christianity and finally I had to say we just have to

Allan: disagree if people are that rigid that everybody has to follow your religion

Allan: then war is the only answer yeah,

Allan: But if you're tolerant that you pursue your own religion and others can pursue

Allan: their religion, it's amazing what can be done with the mixing of the cultures.

Willy: But how long would you try until you give up?

Willy: Because it's easy to say, he's a total ideologist, don't deal with him.

Willy: How long would you try to...

Allan: I don't know the answer to that. Because if people cannot develop a holistic

Allan: context, like the example I gave you, I would give up at that point and say,

Allan: just carry on, carry on the fight. I can't help you.

Allan: Nobody can help you. You have to destroy your opponents and make everybody one

Allan: religion, or you have to be destroyed.

Allan: Because that intolerance, there's no place for it in any holistic context.

Allan: So, yes, if there's total intolerance, and it always comes out about religion,

Allan: if there's tolerance, then we can solve it.

Allan: And one thing I found when I was working in India once, you know,

Allan: they're more class conscious than even the British, which is amazing.

Allan: And when I was working with them in a village in India, it was interesting,

Allan: I was having lunch with one of the upper-class Indians.

Willy: Brahmins, right?

Allan: And he was saying to me, Alan, this is amazing working with you this week.

Allan: He said, I've lived all my life in this village and I never knew until now that

Allan: the tribals, or they used to call them untouchables, have the same pride in the village that I have.

Allan: He spent his whole life there and never knew that.

Willy: I just got the idea of, do you know the golden circle of Simon Sinek?

Willy: The golden circle of Simon Sinek where it describes the why,

Willy: the how and the what to do.

Allan: I do, but vaguely.

Willy: Yeah, but it somehow reminded me that you have global values and then you work

Willy: yourself way back into the site-specific community-based solution.

Willy: So I'm still making the problem try to fit your...

Allan: Don't.

Willy: Known to into uh patterns but at least i see some similarities to other uh the

Willy: way other people think about the world and try to approach uh development it's kind of

Allan: Now yeah let me try yeah i said you don't yeah don't all right because that's

Allan: why adults find it so difficult to,

Allan: to learn yeah because they try to take something and relate it to what they

Allan: know yeah yeah don't do that.

Allan: Now, I'm not putting down that work.

Allan: Listen to me carefully.

Allan: When you manage holistically and people determine how they want their lives

Allan: to be, etc., all the good ideas, there are many people.

Allan: There are thousands of people. Most people are good. Most people mean well.

Allan: It's going wrong because of our decision

Allan: management framework so when

Allan: you do what i'm talking about and manage realistically those good ideas from

Allan: those many people float to the top if they're not good ideas never tell them

Allan: they're not let them discover it if they are good ideas i promise you they'll float to the top.

Willy: It's a trickle down, or trickle up.

Willy: I was thinking about the song of Leonard Cohen, I guess.

Willy: I guess there's a crack in everything, that's where the light comes in.

Willy: That was one guest referred to him.

Willy: It's like with your approach, you know, you have to crack now,

Willy: the surface, and it somehow will take, well, it will take, still will take time.

Willy: Is it frustrating for you that you developed it like 50 years ago?

Willy: You start thinking of it and you're still fighting against windmills.

Allan: Well, I'm only fighting because it's of wicked problems.

Allan: And the two concepts that we've mentioned, that you've got no option but to use livestock.

Allan: If you want to stop global desertification.

Allan: Now you have no option that has

Allan: been fought tooth and nail for over

Allan: 50 years now by the universities of the world

Allan: and the ranchers not a single cattleman's

Allan: organization has supported me all institutions have opposed that the first to

Allan: have supported it should have been environmental organizations cattlemen's ranchers

Allan: organizations it hasn't happened because it's heresy and institutions,

Allan: even raunches, knew it was wrong.

Allan: Okay, so that, and then you've got the second one, that we all make decisions

Allan: one way, and that, not evil, not ill will, was what was causing the problem.

Allan: You have to ask yourself, why over so many thousands of years,

Allan: with so many brilliant minds, far brighter than mine, I'm not a bright person,

Allan: so many Nobel Prizes, et cetera, why are we facing global destruction of civilization

Allan: when so many people are good?

Allan: There was a simple reason.

Allan: That's it. Don't complicate it.

Willy: I had an interview with Joel Salatin a year ago,

Willy: and he and many others actually referred to you as a pioneer for the ways how

Willy: they applied their approaches into agriculture and stuff.

Willy: All their books have been translated into German, into other languages.

Willy: They're sold many, many times.

Willy: But you, as their source of inspiration, your book is only available in English at the moment.

Willy: Why haven't you been translated or even more widely spread as your...

Allan: Because of the heresy. You see, if you take what Joel's saying,

Allan: or any of the people, I mean, regenerative agriculture came from me and Bob Rodale, from two men.

Allan: There are over 600 regenerative agriculture organizations now.

Allan: They're all good people.

Allan: But look at them. They're all promoting practices.

Allan: Organic growth of vegetables or whatever, meat, grass-fed, blah, blah, blah.

Willy: At the tool level.

Allan: Production level production level yeah and they're all

Allan: doing that only one organization in the world is saying let's address the cause

Allan: of the problem that's savory institute of which this is part yeah so those over

Allan: 600 organizations are good people.

Allan: They're friends of mine. So what I'm saying is not malicious or anything else.

Allan: It's just I face realities as a scientist.

Allan: I promise you they're going to fail.

Allan: Why? Because they're not addressing the cause of the problem.

Allan: As you say, all sorts of books and derivatives of my work or Bob Rodell's get published.

Allan: But people don't go to the original because of egos, diffusion of innovations.

Allan: Everett Rogers wrote the textbook. When new idea comes out, because of our egos,

Allan: we have to take it, give it a twist, a name of our own, search for novelty corrupts.

Allan: These are good people, so it's going to fail.

Allan: Now, if you doubt that for a moment, and you're part of that movement and looking

Allan: at people, just tell me one practice that they've got, apart from holistic plan grazing,

Allan: if any of them are doing that,

Allan: just name one practice that wasn't being done 2,000 years ago.

Allan: They're none. We're just repeating history. So you've got people praising planting trees.

Allan: You've got people praising earthworks, whole institutions, building sculptures

Allan: to harvest the runoff of water, etc.

Allan: Great practices. You've got people spending trillions of dollars on these things.

Allan: What the hell were the Nabataeans doing 2,000 years ago? They were masters of water harvesting.

Allan: They failed. we're going to fail again,

Allan: Now, if all of those people just addressed the cause of the problem,

Allan: every one of the practices that is right would float to the top.

Allan: And those that aren't would fall aside.

Willy: I have to ask this question because many of my Austrian colleagues,

Willy: or not colleagues, I'm not a farmer, many Austrian farmers ask me a question.

Willy: Uh it's on uh the the

Willy: the grazing uh the holistic uh no

Willy: them help me losing words the holistic plant grazing uh can is this a uh only

Willy: possible here in Zimbabwe as as you describe it or can Can this be done in Austria too?

Willy: But actually, since we're talking, I can imagine the answer,

Allan: But what would you say? You've got the humid environments, more humid,

Allan: and then these environments like this that have long periods, etc.

Allan: Now, it doesn't matter where you are.

Allan: If livestock are needed, okay, needed or essential, you can do two things.

Allan: One is Andre Moisan, the Frenchman, developed rational grazing,

Allan: which means planned, not rotational, rational. Rational.

Allan: Okay, rational, thought out. And I adopted his work. I thought he'd solved the problem.

Allan: And while he had solved the problem for the land, and to some extent the economics,

Allan: in Europe, when I applied that thinking here and used his method of planning,

Allan: we came unstuck. And I described that in a memoir.

Allan: And I realized that Wazan is right.

Allan: We have to have some planning process to deal with the complexity.

Allan: So we need something more sophisticated to deal with all the wildlife,

Allan: the long dry months, etc.

Allan: And at that point, all I did was to look at all professions,

Allan: because I had so few resources as a single independent scientist,

Allan: and I looked at the armies of Europe and how they had learned to plan over the

Allan: last 1,000 years in immediate battlefield conditions.

Allan: They used no system, no rotation, no, they used a planning process.

Allan: And so I'd simply took 1,000 years of military experience, which is highly successful,

Allan: and I adapted that to a farming situation.

Allan: So coming to your question now, if I was a farmer anywhere in the world,

Allan: if it was in a humid area, I might just use Fosanz, Rational Grazing.

Allan: His book's been published in five languages in Europe.

Allan: My wife and I got his book republished in America because people were plagiarizing his work, etc.

Allan: So I would use that.

Willy: So it's site-specific?

Allan: Yeah, that's right. Now, if I wanted something more sophisticated,

Allan: like instead of running in a Cadillac, I'm now going to run in a Rolls-Royce,

Allan: then I would use holistic plan grazing.

Allan: And that will work everywhere, any size farm, anywhere, right up to vast millions

Allan: of acres with pasture lists. It's absolutely universal.

Willy: Yeah.

Allan: So you can use either one. But you couldn't use rational grazing on vast areas here and there.

Willy: If you take the three areas of management, family, economics and environment,

Willy: is there any... I know it's a stupid question, but I want...

Allan: I'll give you a stupid reply.

Willy: Thank you. Is there any of these management areas more important than the other? No. Are they equal?

Allan: But when I say they're equal, when you're managing, you do take them in a different order.

Allan: So, for example, you start with a holistic context. That means you're starting

Allan: with the human part of it.

Allan: Deciding the context, holistic context.

Allan: Now, having done that, if you're a farmer in agriculture,

Allan: or even in a citizen in town in a job,

Allan: the very first thing you've got to do is finance your

Allan: family because if you go broke you're out so here

Allan: or if i was dealing with a farmer in austria

Allan: or anywhere i would get them to develop the

Allan: holistic context and then the next thing i'd

Allan: say is now look at the specific way

Allan: of planning finances that is

Allan: in the holistic framework because it's specific

Allan: to managing holistically and plan

Allan: the finances of your family before you do

Allan: anything with your crops or your livestock and

Allan: plan that and now nature etc now why that's so important we talked about derivatives

Allan: just now there are any man adaptive multipathic mob grazing cell grazing short

Allan: duration high intensity diversity grazing,

Allan: I think there's 20 or more derivatives of my work that only developed after

Allan: I began training thousands of people.

Allan: Now, you can take all of those and.

Allan: I promise you, none of them will produce the economic result of holistic plant grazing.

Allan: Now, why do I say that? Because Deb Steiner and her associates at Ohio State

Allan: University, she did a study, it's published, of early adopters across the United States.

Allan: So these were farmers that came to me for some training.

Allan: The commonest reason they came to me was because they were going broke.

Allan: That's what brought them to me.

Willy: A need.

Allan: A need. Because she studied those early adopters from California to Florida,

Allan: she and her co-workers, and what they discovered or established was all but

Allan: one increased in biodiversity,

Allan: and the average of all of them was a 300% increase in profit.

Allan: It's about managing the family of family finance and then nature to produce.

Willy: Um some uh of

Willy: your critics um um say that you are proposing uh uh let's say uh more livestock

Willy: because the the whole argument is livestock is causing uh climate change and

Willy: you're proposing even more livestock to be a

Willy: on our fields.

Willy: First of all, is that wrong? Because as I understood it, in this area for the

Willy: holistic grazing management here in Zimbabwe, it makes sense to concentrate livestock on certain

Willy: fields and rotate them.

Allan: Never rotate.

Willy: How do you say it?

Allan: Move them.

Willy: Move them. Okay. Move them. But does it mean more livestock or does it mean managed livestock?

Allan: It means management, obviously, first. So take that.

Allan: If you're looking at commercially operated ranches over the world,

Allan: right, as opposed to pastoral areas, if you're looking at commercially managed

Allan: ranches, as I was dealing with in the Americas and here,

Allan: the biggest economic problem is overcapitalization.

Allan: So if you were a commercial rancher in this country or Texas or Arizona or wherever,

Allan: the first thing we would do is get you to develop the holistic context and then

Allan: do your holistic financial planning.

Allan: And that's a specific process. And when you do that, you would look at the possibility

Allan: of water points, of fencing, more cattle, etc.

Allan: Because you'd be overgrazing plants, overbrowsing plants if you're under conventional

Allan: management, and you'd have all these problems.

Allan: Now, the first step, because you're overcapitalized, you've got too much capital

Allan: tied up in land, vehicles, salaries,

Allan: earnings, you know, your earnings as an owner, etc., for livestock run from

Allan: which you're producing money, the first step you do is buy more cattle.

Allan: And if you had no money, you would lease grazing to somebody else to bring in income.

Allan: That's your first requirement, because I haven't seen a single ranch in the

Allan: world that was ever overstocked.

Allan: Now, John Aycox was the first to spot that when he wrote an article.

Allan: He was a botanist studying the advance of the Karoo Desert, and he wrote an

Allan: article saying South Africa is overgrazed and understocked, and that caused

Allan: a furore in academic circles.

Allan: I phoned him and went down and visited him, said, this is new thinking, explain to me.

Allan: And he was right for the wrong reasons, but he was right.

Allan: South Africa's got pathetically few cattle.

Allan: Take Texas in New Mexico, in the United States.

Allan: They regard themselves there as the world's experts on range, etc.

Allan: When I was training people there and living in San Angelo, So,

Allan: Professor Steger, who's one of the men training with me from the local university,

Allan: he showed me one day, he said, Alan, I want to show you how right you are.

Allan: He said, and he showed me the stocking rate figures for Central Texas a hundred years ago.

Allan: And they looked like science fiction. And that was the government official stocking rate.

Allan: They've just been falling, falling, falling, falling.

Allan: And wondering why it's not profitable. So the first step we do is just increase the cattle.

Allan: And here, the rancher that I bought this land from was going broke.

Allan: He readily accepted my cash offer to get out of the country at the time,

Allan: and he had 100 head of cattle.

Allan: Now, if he'd been a better rancher, he might have run 200.

Allan: Well, we're running about 600 now. Now we desperately need 1,000,

Allan: and it's obvious when you travel around this place, you're going to see that we need about 2,000.

Allan: Now, when we began, we had no elephants.

Allan: Some days now we can have 300 to 600 elephants.

Allan: When we began, we had no buffalo. Some days we can have 300 buffalo.

Allan: This productivity has gone up 20-fold.

Allan: Literally we will not be able to use the grass we have this year and this is

Allan: after 20 years of bad rainfall.

Willy: But would we in total, I was going to look up the total number of let's say

Willy: cattle in the world would we even need a higher that number absolutely

Allan: We need millions.

Willy: More millions more

Allan: Yes How else are you going to stop climate change?

Allan: Fire can't do it. Technology can't do it. Only more animals can do it.

Allan: For God's sake, stop fiddling and playing academic games.

Allan: Somebody needs to prove me wrong or explain where I'm wrong, or we need to get moving.

Allan: The whole future of civilization is at stake.

Willy: But would we have to get the cattle that is in stoils now, that is highly conventionally

Willy: producing meat and dairy?

Allan: Just get them out of the damn feedlots. They shouldn't be in feedlots.

Allan: They should be on the land, healing the land.

Willy: Would we even use every cattle that is out in the land or is it just the cattle

Willy: to be part of the land, part of the solution?

Willy: Is there a need to use every piece, every cattle that is out there or is it

Willy: just like a wild animal actually?

Allan: Well, no, we would use cattle and wildlife as we're doing here.

Allan: Now we cannot solve the problems with the wildlife here that we have,

Allan: we've increased species, we've increased vegetation enormously,

Allan: but we're losing some charismatic trees, and we cannot solve that problem at

Allan: the local level of managing our families, our communities, this land.

Allan: That can only be solved at the national institutional level,

Allan: because it's in the national parks, it's everywhere.

Allan: And so we cannot solve that, we cannot solve the wildlife-human conflict that

Allan: is getting bad and worse and worse,

Allan: these bigger problems, it's impossible to solve them until government policy

Allan: changes, the way they develop policy.

Allan: Now, with the rest, you get on with it. Now, if you just manage holistically

Allan: and use the holistic plan grazing, if we were a family in the Amazon in Brazil.

Allan: We would develop a holistic context, and the first decision we would make if

Allan: we were clearing forest to run cattle to produce beef, we would look at that decision,

Allan: that management, in the light of the holistic context that we develop for our

Allan: families, and we'd stop it.

Allan: Because we would realize if we do this, we're going to destroy our families, destroy the economy.

Allan: Yeah, sure, we're going to be wealthy short term, but we're going to destroy

Allan: it. So the first thing would be you would take the damn cattle out.

Allan: Now, if you were in Arizona, Southern California, parts of Hungary I've seen and Germany.

Allan: I haven't been to Austria yet. But

Allan: if you find you need or have to have livestock, then you would run them.

Allan: And you'll find the moment you stop the overgrazing, stop the overresting of

Allan: plants, stop the overbrowsing, you can immediately run two, three times the

Allan: stocking rate immediately.

Allan: Now, we did that in trials in this country. We did international trials.

Allan: We ran advanced projects.

Allan: Two advanced projects we ran in this country over 50 years ago.

Allan: In the one in the dry part of the country, the biggest launching company in

Allan: the history of the world were clients of mine for 15 years.

Allan: Now, when they asked me to help them, I said, look, everybody in the world says I'm wrong.

Allan: I don't want you to take any risk in me advising you. And they said, what do you propose?

Allan: I said, give me a bit of the worst land you have,

Allan: You're a big company. They had 60,000 guttel on the ranch, cars.

Allan: I said, give me the worst land you have. Let me show you what can be done,

Allan: and I'm going to take it to breaking point.

Allan: I'm going to try to cause failure.

Allan: If I can't, and you do that on a small bit of your land, then we proceed. So we did that.

Allan: They made 4,000 acres available.

Allan: We did it as a national thing. I called it an advanced project because if I'd

Allan: called it a trial and it failed, they'd have said, there you are, he's wrong.

Allan: So I called it an advanced project because I was trying to make it fail.

Allan: On that, we spent a total of $1.80 an acre, total capital outlay.

Allan: I got them to double the stock immediately. I was wrong, got them to treble

Allan: the livestock numbers immediately.

Allan: We ran that for the next eight years and went from bare ground and trees to perennial grassland.

Allan: We produced five times the meat per acre of the surrounding area of 200,000 acres control.

Allan: We ran all of that in this country. We could not make it fail.

Allan: The only thing that's held us up is academics plagiarizations confusion.

Willy: Yeah um a question that was uh given to me by one of i guess your biggest fans in austria

Willy: but this is a very specific question from agriculture we we do have you probably

Willy: heard of it, the foot and mouse disease in Hungary at the moment,

Willy: in Hungary and around Austria.

Willy: It's not in Austria yet, but the general question that they gave me is how would you

Willy: from your perspective, deal with handling the foot and mouth disease?

Willy: What's your perspective on that?

Allan: Do you mean foot and mouth disease or foot in mouth disease?

Willy: I can try the foot in mouth disease. That's what politicians have,

Allan: And I can't cure that one.

Willy: Thank you, Alan.

Allan: Thank you.

Allan: Well, some comments. It's common here.

Allan: Uh the story here

Allan: is that wildlife spread it uh albert

Allan: howard so albert howard worked in india

Allan: and if you read his work he found he could not infect cattle with foot and mouth

Allan: disease even drinking out of the same trough with infected animals he could

Allan: not spread the disease apparently as long as they were on high biodiversity, healthy land.

Allan: So bear that in mind. Now, coming to this country, it was said that buffalo

Allan: was spreading it, and wildlife, and particularly buffalo.

Allan: So when I was a researcher, wildlife researcher, I got my veterinary friends

Allan: in the veterinary department, and I said, will you provide your data for me to look at?

Allan: And they gave me every single outbreak of foot and mouth that had ever occurred

Allan: since records were kept in this country.

Allan: And for every outbreak, I put a pin in the map.

Allan: And the correlation was perfect with deteriorating land.

Allan: Where the land deterioration was worst all the

Allan: pins there was one pin out of place it

Allan: was in the middle of wankin national park at the

Allan: headquarters an outbreak so we

Allan: investigated that because they all said there you are buffalo one pin out of

Allan: hundreds and we investigated that and we found there was a vet in zambia where

Allan: there was foot mouth who was coming to visit his girlfriend on the weekends

Allan: at Wanky National Park. The vet had spread it.

Allan: Okay, bear that in mind. Now, if you asked me to design an experiment to prove

Allan: that it's humans spreading it and not wildlife,

Allan: I could not do better than the foot and mouth cordon.

Allan: That's been the standard practice all my life. Yeah, still is. Now, what is that?

Allan: Where there's an outbreak, they form a cordon around it.

Allan: That means every footpath that bicycles or people walk out, major one, every road,

Allan: every track, they put people on it to control the traffic,

Allan: make you dip your shoes, dip your tires, spray you whatever around the outbreak

Allan: and that's been the standard practice for over 50 years because it works.

Allan: I couldn't do a better experiment. The only thing you're controlling is humans.

Allan: Vultures, buffalo, kudu, impala, daika, warthogs, everything you can name,

Allan: bushbuck, are going all over across that barrier.

Allan: There's no barrier except at the human footpaths and roads.

Allan: And if that, after 50 years, is still the practice, surely that's an experiment.

Allan: Wouldn't you, in the scientific method, just do that?

Allan: And yet they still keep blaming humans. So here we've had foot and mouth around

Allan: us, we've had none on this place.

Allan: That doesn't mean we're not going to get it, but if we got it,

Allan: frankly, just let it run its course.

Allan: So you can build immunity. We wouldn't slaughter thousands of animals,

Allan: that's just sheer stupidity.

Allan: I don't know what more to say.

Willy: Let's keep it there let's see what they were talking what they were saying what

Willy: the reactions are from Austria

Willy: well I think we get a good idea well at least we can over and over hear this

Willy: interview again and again until Willy finally gets what Alan was talking today

Willy: but I do always have some final questions for the podcast.

Allan: And I would like to make a final point, if I may.

Allan: I've said a lot of things to you. I've made firm statements because of years of being sure, etc.

Allan: Because I value my self as a scientist.

Allan: I've had much vilification. I have one little plaque I really value and it's

Allan: for integrity and science.

Allan: And I value that little plaque. It's a non-entitive thing, but it's in my study.

Allan: If anybody listening to us, any Nobel laureate, anybody, can tell us where I'm wrong, please do.

Allan: I don't have a monopoly on being right.

Allan: I've been wrong many times.

Allan: So if somebody can say where I'm wrong, please do. If they can't,

Allan: for God's sake, let's get moving.

Willy: You should have said that directly to the Nobel laureates that are listening to us right now.

Allan: Well, talking of Nobel laureates, I think what you're seeing is an unintended

Allan: consequence of Nobel Prizes.

Allan: Let me explain that to you. When you look at Al Gore,

Allan: he got a Nobel Prize for his TED talk, and he showed this hockey stick curve

Allan: of atmospheric gases shooting up and linked it to the industrial age, etc.

Allan: But if you were to link Nobel Prizes to that, it's the same curve.

Allan: Now, which is, is it? Is it Nobel Prizes or is it industrial fields?

Allan: What went wrong with Nobel Prizes?

Allan: It was a wonderful idea that he had, Alfred Nobel, of let's have a very prestigious

Allan: prize because of people's egos.

Allan: Let's have this prestigious prize every year in the areas that matter most for humanity.

Allan: So physics, chemistry, they argued about arithmetic, peace, literature, etc.

Allan: Now, earlier we were saying without agriculture you cannot have a church,

Allan: a choir, an economy, any of these things.

Allan: Why wasn't there a Nobel Prize for agriculture or ecology on which agriculture is based?

Allan: There was none. So for roughly 102 years, I think we've had Nobel Prizes now,

Allan: that has attracted our best and brightest minds into the hard sciences.

Allan: And the people that went into ecology, the new science of ecology,

Allan: as it was when I went to university a long time ago, they were just people like

Allan: me with mediocre minds that loved wildlife.

Allan: But ecology, the whole survival of civilization is dependent on that branch

Allan: of science more than physics or anything.

Allan: And you see, we had no Nobel Prize for it, so all our best minds went into the

Allan: hard sciences, and we believe that the salvation is colonizing Mars.

Allan: It's not. It's stopping destroying our own habitat here.

Allan: And that depends on ecology more than anything.

Willy: Yeah, there's the, I guess it's the right livelihood award that was created

Willy: just because of the Nobel prize is lacking, have some likes. yeah yeah no

Allan: No amount of all these awards are going to work.

Willy: Yeah yeah yeah um well

Willy: the first question at the end is uh is there anything that i should have asked

Willy: you that is of true well there are so many questions that could be asked but

Willy: is there some thing that i haven't asked that is really really more important

Willy: to understand you and what you do not

Allan: I think we've covered a lot out of good ground, I can't think of anything else.

Allan: I like you, I would just go over and over these things and try to find the flaws.

Allan: I mean, if you can find any flaws, I have often said to our own people in Savory

Allan: Institute, I don't even defend the holistic framework.

Allan: If you or anybody came up with a better way,

Allan: simpler way of managing complexity tomorrow, tomorrow I drop everything I've

Allan: spent my life on and adopt it because I have no other desire than to be a good

Allan: scientist and leave a better world.

Allan: So I hope that you can spread this and we can find somebody who will tell me where it's wrong.

Willy: Well, I will if I don't. I haven't forgotten to push the record buttons and

Willy: I guess the audio should be fine.

Willy: So actually I'm trying to spread it as wide as I can. That's kind of my job.

Willy: But we were talking about agriculture too, but in an

Willy: ideal future, I guess asking you this is kind of a no-brainer,

Willy: how would our global food system, what would you change in our global food systems

Willy: in an ideal utopian future?

Allan: Oh absolutely nothing except one thing.

Willy: Okay, you prepared for a question you didn't even know.

Allan: How governments develop policy. That's it. That is the cause of the problem.

Allan: And if you tackle anything else, you're not going to solve the problem.

Allan: That is common sense 101.

Allan: If you've got a problem, address the cause of it. That's all.

Allan: We've got wonderful minds in agriculture. We've got wonderful minds in our universities.

Allan: We're not short of knowledge.

Allan: All the knowledge we need is there.

Allan: Just change the way that policy is developed and you will see the whole scene

Allan: change and if you don't do that I promise you failure promise you stake my life on it.

Willy: What's at the very top of your bucket list

Allan: That some government somewhere is headed by a statesman,

Allan: who will just develop policy holistically and let the world observe and i believe

Allan: like dominoes it'll fall because i think there's not a single world leader who knows what to do did.

Willy: Anyone come close

Allan: Sorry did anyone come close nobody comes close they're all relying on experts

Allan: to advise them and there are no experts in managing complexity now the,

Allan: former president of this country mugabe when he was prime minister at the end

Allan: of the war he made a statement that I often cite.

Allan: He said, we do not have a bigger problem in Zimbabwe other than our rising population

Allan: and our deteriorating environment.

Allan: And he said, we politicians do not know what to do.

Allan: We can only take the advice of our advisors, but when it goes wrong we get the

Allan: blame I believe that was totally true of every world leader today.

Willy: Well there will come a day somewhere in the future when you will say goodbye

Willy: and leave this world forever what should

Willy: what wish you to be reminded of be reminded for I guess is the right term

Allan: I'm often asked that question what

Allan: do i want my legacy to be and i can tell you i don't give a damn it's not about

Allan: ego worrying about your legacy is ego stuff i've tried to put that aside when

Allan: i was a school boy yeah okay that's an interest i don't give a damn what it is. I'll be forgotten.

Willy: Okay, let's put the question differently. Oftentimes, people are asked,

Willy: if you turn around with the age of 80, you're 89 already,

Willy: if you turn around with 100 and look back, what would you be proud of?

Allan: Well, I'm already proud of being one of the people centrally involved in finding

Allan: a way to address complexity.

Allan: I'm extremely proud of that. But I would drop it tomorrow if somebody had a better way.

Allan: I mean, we haven't known how to do that for thousands of years.

Allan: I mean, in terms of scientific achievement, I'm proud of that.

Allan: I'm happy with that, but against stress, if you find a better way, I'll adopt it.

Willy: I guess you have a refrigerator here. If you open your refrigerator, what will I find?

Allan: If you open it, you'll have to ask my Minister of Finance and Social Affairs,

Allan: my wife. I never look in there.

Willy: What would you wish to find in there?

Allan: I wouldn't even say beers, because I drink whiskey. You drink whiskey? Okay.

Willy: The ultimate final question, and it's an easy one.

Willy: Do you have a motto, a guideline, a joke, or a small story, well,

Willy: sentence or so, that is important to you and that you would like to end this talk with?

Allan: That's a difficult one. I immediately think of a morbid sense of humor here.

Allan: You know, when everything's going against us, we used to say,

Allan: you shouldn't have joined if you couldn't take a joke.

Allan: So humor has helped to keep me going through the years.

Allan: And there's one other thing that is such simple stuff.

Allan: And I know it's inspired other people, not just me. But are Are you aware of Kipling's poem, If...

Allan: Read it when i in my darkest days i would just read that poem if kipling was

Allan: such a student of human nature and that helped keep me sane and it's done that

Allan: for other people too i believe read that poem so.

Willy: It's a book recommendation poem recommendation yeah

Allan: And he's got words like in that, like, if all men count with you, but none too much.

Allan: I've got a couple of arrows, broken arrows.

Willy: Arrows too?

Allan: No, metaphorically, I've got a couple of arrows in my chest from my enemies.

Allan: My back looks like a porcupine from my friends.

Allan: So, you know, just take it good humorously. there are lines in there if you

Allan: can bear to hear the words you've spoken, twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Allan: I've had that happen to me so often that you in the end you just read the poem

Allan: and laugh about it Hans-Ever.

Willy: Thank you for your time and thank you for your patience for my stupid questions

Willy: but I hope it will help translate something

Allan: No No problem at all, I value what you're doing, trying to get the word out.

Allan: As I frequently say, it's not people who discover new things like me that are

Allan: leaders, it's people like you who get the word out to the public,

Allan: that are the leaders in society.

Allan: So I value what you're doing, more than you value what you're getting from me. Really?

Willy: Nothing to add more.

Music: Music