Nature is a whole system. But also an economy, a family, a company, a community, or many other things, can be looked at as whole systems. A whole system view would include all the factors involved and examine how they relate to each other and how they work as a whole. To deal with a whole system we can't leave anything out as irrelevant. Intuition is as important as rationality, we must address both scientific and artistic approaches, both material and spritual needs, the small as well as the big, what we feel as well as what we think, what we perceive as well as what we imagine.
Whole systems are dynamic, they change they move, they develop.
Frozen pictures of how things are supposed to be might do us no good, we need to deal with the live systems, whichever surprising directions that might take us in. There is no one authority in the field of whole systems. So, we all have the opportunity to discover together what whole systems are about. There is a Whole Systems mailing list for the exploration of whole systems principles, particularly in regards to economic, ecological, sociological and metaphysical transformation of our civilization. The Networking Institute.