The need is to strike a balance between too much complexity and too little. Twelve is probably the largest number we can hold in our heads and visualise as a whole, striking the balance between too much complexity and too little. The familiar visual image of the clock face assists us with this intuitive capacity to hold twelve factors in mind at the same time.
The twelve factors in the IFF World Model have been chosen as essential to understanding what is needed to develop viable and sustainable societies at every level from the local to the global. The common catch-all terms of economy, technology, politics, environment and society have deliberately been avoided. The test for inclusion is that removal of any one of the factors destroys the viability of the whole system.
With twelve factors, any one of which might have an effect on or be affected by another, there are sixty six possible interconnections. The connections can be mutually supportive in the human ecological system; they can be absent and weaken the system; or they can be negative connections, throwing the system into imbalance and non-sustainability.
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