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 spiritual 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. Luckily nobody has monopolized it by putting it into a standard curriculum defining what it IS. So, we all have the opportunity to discover together what whole systems are about. 

Systems thinking involves the use of various techniques to study systems of many kinds. In nature, examples of the objects of systems thinking include ecosystems - in which various elements (such as air, water, movement, plants, and animals) interact. In organizations, systems consist of people, structures, and processes that operate together to make an organization "healthy" or "unhealthy".