Examine your Holistic Goal, item by item, relationship by relationship. Make a note of how you can tell when you do not have each condition. In a value, such as "feeling loved," you might say "feeling unloved." Maybe a more sensitive early warning condition would be "feeling unappreciated." There may be a lot of items that would give similar criteria as monitoring guidelines. However, move a bit further, and list the way you feel when you actually take corrective action.

In crisis management, or reactive management, you might take action when you "feel insecure," or "threatened." However, early indicators are the allow more effective, and actions become more subtle "adjustments" rather than "interventions." After the results have deviated far from a path toward the holistic goal, a crisis may have few options within the resources available, and none of them may be attractive. The crisis might mean financial or personnel disasters are looming. A friendship may be threatened, or a health crisis may be looming, or a marriage may be headed for the rocks. Notice that "denial" of the indications is a counterproductive response; it has no chance of redirecting the diverging path of results/consequences. Denial itself is an indicator --  a symptom -- of low trust in the relationship or low confidence in oneself. When denial is first detected, move to address the more basic problem of a limiting resource -- trust or confidence. 

The options you have depend largely on your resources. Most of us have far greater resources than we realize. We may overlook some of our best options for action, which is a benefit of collaboration and team work. Monitoring to detect alternative actions, when we feel that "no option is good," we can examine our specific resources that we list in the Whole that we are managing. Thus, we have both a Holistic Goal, with resources of a  specific nature for the decision process, and also the Whole which may include more of the general resources we see that support our efforts.

At this point we begin to consider that we may need to join with other people, which increases the size of our Whole by adding either human resources, or decision makers. If the newly added people are part of the decision team, a new version of our holistic goal will be developed that encompasses the holistic goal of each individual. The inclusiveness of the holistic goal follows the inclusiveness of the Whole. Nevertheless, it is better to be more inclusive than necessary, rather than exclude those who may become important resources, if not among the decision makers. People will usually decline to participate in decision making if they do not have a balance of risk and potential rewards. Holistically made decisions are rarely "secret" and it is a general characteristic that the "robustness" of holistic decisions encourages people to become more trusting. (Nevertheless, trustworthy means that those trusted are both competent and share the holistic goal in order to be worthy.)

Since we are considering monitoring results of our previous actions that may be moving us toward our holistic goal, or not, we need many eyes and talents (perspectives) to notice some of the unexpected results. This often is what good neighbors do for one another. Diversity is a strength, when coordinated for a common goal.

Why don't we begin taking "proactive" measures when we begin to feel the slightest anxiety, or suspicion that something may be out of place in our lives? I suggest that we may fail to act early because of fear. We have not recognized that such feelings offer opportunities to act in modest ways, allowing us to try other actions that have low risk, take little effort, use few resources, and have a huge return on the "investment" when they are correct! Furthermore, if these actions are incorrect, the low investment has fewer poor side effects. Our reluctance represents fear and learned responses from past experiences, based on less effective or incomplete decision making procedures. This is one of the initial reasons some people are cautious to begin managing holistically. If they continue and gain some basic skills, however, they soon learn that past experiences do not determine their future!

Think of riding your bicycle. If you waited until you were clearly falling over, how difficult it would be to take corrective action. We soon learn that the small corrections made almost without thinking about them are vastly more effective, and make riding seem easy! Life gets easy if we followed the same principles of monitoring our lives and taking early, very modest, corrective actions. Confidence and skill are interdependent, and practice improves both.

Therefore, you have the beginning criterion for effective management: Act quickly, but gently, when the warnings are subtle! Improvements in the way we establish the "warning signals" come with experience, and with understanding how the mental, social, economic, and ecological processes work. Our education, in the largest sense, becomes invaluable in improving our decision making through better monitoring or progress. This decision making initiative is in stark contrast to the lessons learned which make us more reluctant to act, which were not based on a holistic goal, and were not monitored in regard to the holistic goal.

When we begin to consider taking action, we usually have, indeed, should have, several alternatives from which to select. How do you select the "best" one? This brings us to the topic of Testing Alternatives after we determine we need to take corrective action.