Hola: a way of thinking

Nobody perceives the whole of an ecology. An ecology is what we live and work inside: a street, a workplace, a ministry, a city, with the people, things and agents of every kind that share it, human and synthetic. Each of us perceives it from somewhere, with a body and a history or, for a model, with whatever it has been given. What one agent perceives of an ecology is its hola. How that agent draws what it perceived, so that someone else can meet it, is its gram.

One ecology and three perceivers. Each hola is partial, and the faint marks are what no one perceives. A filled square is a person, an open square a team and a diamond a model.

Hola

A hola is lived. For a person it is lived experience: the street at six in the morning, the meeting that went quiet, the way a ministry feels from its corridors. It is partial by nature, and no less real for that. It holds many dimensions at once: the body and the place, the hour and the season, memory and mood, who is near and who is far, what it all means. A discipline looks along one or two of them. A hola holds them together as they were lived.

Between holas

No hola holds the whole, and none can be added to the others to make it. When the grams that carry them are laid side by side, the places where they agree, where they differ and where they pull against each other show something that none of them drew. Holagram looks for wholeness there, in the interplay, and not in a complete picture, which does not exist.

Each ecology one perceives is also part of a larger one and holds smaller ones: a room in a building, a building in a street, a person in a team. Holagram calls this a holarchy and means by it, as the home page says, an interwoven network of nested experiences that resist totalising descriptions. It does not mean ranks.

What it is for

Not to explain an ecology, but to ask what is going on in it and what its people want it to become. Holagram is a way of thinking for asking questions and setting ambitions, before anything is solved.

Agents, human or not

Anything that perceives and acts can have a hola: a person, a team, an institution that senses through its offices, a model. They perceive in different ways, from different places, with different things to hand. Holagram does not rank them. It asks that each hola is taken seriously and that it is said whose it is. About a model it claims nothing about experience: a model’s hola is what it has been given and what it made of it.

Seven principles

1 · Say where you stand

Every hola is perceived from a place, at a time and from some distance: a body in a street, a team in a building, a ministry in a country. The distance changes what can be seen, so say it. Distances are ways of looking and not layers of the world. They overlap, one thing can belong to two wholes, and the choice of distances belongs to the question being asked (Wimsatt 1994; Potochnik and McGill 2012; Marston et al. 2005). Holagram uses holarchy in Koestler’s sense, nested wholes with a life of their own. It is not a management scheme, as in Holacracy (Robertson 2015).

In practice

A gram says where, when and how near it was drawn from.

Guards against

Views that slide between near and far without saying so.

2 · No view adds up to the whole

A view from far is not the sum of the views from near, and a view from near is not a small copy of a view from far. Wholes have qualities their parts lack, and parts keep a life of their own that the whole does not control (Koestler 1967; Simon 1962). A 2012 paper by Latour and colleagues takes its title from Gabriel Tarde’s reversal of the usual order, in which the whole is always smaller than its parts (Latour et al. 2012). Adding up is fine for keeping a budget. A claim about the whole is its own claim.

In practice

A view of the whole is drawn from what was perceived of the whole. It is not made by summing the views below it.

Guards against

The average that describes nobody, and the plan assumed to be present in each of its parts.

3 · Many perceivers, many holas

An agent can be a person, a team, an institution or a model. Each perceives the same ecology through its own hola, built from what it has met and what it has been taught or asked to notice. A model’s hola is neither neutral nor independent of the prompt it is given (Sharma et al. 2024). Where holas disagree, the disagreement is kept and not settled: it is information about the ecology and about the perceivers (Aroyo and Welty 2015).

In practice

More than one agent perceives the same ecology, each draws its own gram, and the spread goes in the record.

Guards against

The single authoritative view, including the model’s.

4 · Keep the ambiguity

Lived experience arrives ambiguous. Ambiguity is placed and not removed: it may sit in what was there, in how to read it, or in what it means. Design research has treated ambiguity as a resource and not as a defect (Gaver et al. 2003). A way of working that clears every ambiguity before anything is written down has thrown data away.

In practice

A gram says where its ambiguity sits.

Guards against

Premature agreement, and precision that was never in what was perceived.

5 · Let it be answered

A view that no one else can answer is a private myth. A hola is offered to another perceiver, and to the place itself, and the answer is taken seriously. The narrator of Applied Ballardianism reads everyday life as coded, and every coincidence confirms the code (Gillott 2018). Interpretive traditions have asked for the same discipline in other words: against overinterpretation (Eco 1992), for several working hypotheses (Chamberlin 1965), for criticism as the social condition of objectivity (Longino 1990), and for real dissent over role-played advocacy (Nemeth et al. 2001). The regress is real, since an observer of an observer is still an observer (von Foerster 2003; Luhmann 2018). Holagram stops at an outside reader, as a decision, and claims that a hola can be contested and not that it is valid (Ulrich 2022).

In practice

Every gram goes to someone who can answer it, and the answer is kept.

Guards against

Self-confirming pattern-finding.

6 · Imagination is welcome, and said to be imagination

A story set in the world where a reading would be true helps to find out what the reading means. It is labelled, and it is never offered as evidence. J. G. Ballard took the paper of reports and advertisements as material for fiction and called it invisible literature (Stainforth 2016). Design fiction does the same for objects (Bleecker 2009), and strategists already write labelled stories, called scenarios, whose effect on judgement is mixed (Phadnis et al. 2015; Healey and Hodgkinson 2024). Models write such stories readily and converge on the most likely world (Rettberg and Wigers 2025; Xu et al. 2025), so the label and a person’s edit matter.

In practice

Imagined passages are marked as such and kept apart from what was perceived.

Guards against

The vivid story taken for the finding.

7 · Draw it so that others can meet it

A way of thinking that cannot be shown is an opinion. Science has long travelled by inscriptions that can be carried, compared and disputed (Latour 1986), and boundary objects let groups with different views work on the same thing (Star and Griesemer 1989). The gram is that, for Holagram: who or what drew it, from where, what it carries, and what happened when others met it. See Gram.

In practice

The gram, and the record of how it was met.

Guards against

Private conviction.

What it is not

• Not systems thinking. It does not treat an ecology as a system with a boundary, a purpose and a controller, to be understood and steered. It keeps the old point that every observer is inside what is observed (von Foerster 2003) and goes on to perceiving and drawing.
• Not a claim that ecologies are hierarchies. Holarchy here means nested experiences and not ranks.
• Not a way to organise an organisation. Holagram does not prescribe how to organise.
• Not a replacement for the disciplines. They look along one or two dimensions, and Holagram asks how to keep their views from standing in for each other.
• Not a claim that models perceive as people do. A hola is defined by what an agent has met and what it made of it, and no claim is made about experience.
• Not tested. The first studies are proposed under Proposals.

Where it comes from

The word holon is Koestler’s (Koestler 1967). Holagram takes seriously the critiques of levels and scale: that a city is not a tree (Alexander 1965), human geography without scale (Marston et al. 2005) and nonscalability (Tsing 2012). That every observer is inside what is observed comes from second-order cybernetics (von Foerster 2003), and that every view is partial and from somewhere from situated knowledge (Haraway 1988). Ambiguity and lived time come from design research and from Lefebvre’s study of rhythm (Gaver et al. 2003; Lefebvre 2004). Two related lines are not yet in the review: Gibson’s ecological approach to perception, in which an environment is perceived in terms of what it offers the perceiver (1979), and Varela, Thompson and Rosch on enaction, in which a perceiver and its world arise together (1991). What each principle inherits, and what Holagram adds, is set out on the Research page, and the rest is in the literature, which sets out the objections as well as the support.

The statement in full