Sapiens is our philosophy and our methodology. In other words, it is our way of seeing things and our way of working on our research projects. But we did not invent gunpowder, we did not start from scratch. We apply our perspective, but based on approaches made by others before.  

Talking to many different people and studying many different sources, we have come to know many theories and other references that have influenced us, and we have incorporated elements of all of them into our methodology. From our experience, we have made our synthesis and our interpretation.

Just as we did in the restaurant with everything that we incorporated and that had already been raised before, we consider it essential to recognize where it originally came from. This section collects and synthesizes a selection of the most notable references, structured in four large blocks.

The main block is that of systems theory, the set of interdisciplinary contributions that study systems, which we can define as sets of interrelated and interdependent components. It originates from the biologist's general systems theory. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, which had a great influence on different scientific disciplines, and which continues to be a fundamental reference in the analysis of all kinds of systems, including human groups.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy

Ludwig von Bertalanffy, born in Austria in 1901 and died in the United States in 1972, was one of the most important theoretical biologists of the first half of the XNUMXth century. He is known for having developed the General Systems Theory, originating in biology but applicable to any other field, and he himself applied it to psychology and the social sciences. He was a professor at various universities in Austria, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada.

Systems theory has evolved and has been applied to the business world from, above all, the contributions by Peter Senge, who developed the notion of the business organization as a system, and who proposed systemic thinking as the key to the so-called intelligent organizations, or organizations that learn. Subsequently, this gave rise to the application of chaos theory in organizations, and the concept of complex business adaptive systems.

peter seng

Peter Senge, born in the United States in 1947, is an aerospace engineer from Stanford University and has a master's degree in modeling of social systems and a doctorate in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for having translated the abstract ideas of systems theory into concrete tools for analyzing organizations. He has been a professor at several universities, mainly the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The other three blocks are: knowledge and science, education and communication, business and innovation. Between the three of them they collect and synthesize around twenty more references, in a shorter way. These blocks coincide with the main areas with which we develop interdisciplinary relationships at elBullirestaurante.

These are, by blocks, the main references of the Sapiens methodology:

In addition, we have also had other references such as: the 7s model of McKinsey (Robert H. Waterman and Tom Peters), the management 3.0 (Jurgen Appelo), the relationship diagram’s most emblematic landmarks, the oslo handbook (OECD), the nursing model (Betty Neuman), the catastrophe theory (Rene Thom), the handbook Frascati (OECD), the Theory of mind, epistemology’s most emblematic landmarks, the creativity triangle (Paul Pascale), the multiple intelligences (Howard Gardner), the voluntarist theory of action, the book How objects are born (Bruno Munari), the art theory’s most emblematic landmarks, the trivia y quadrivium, project-based learning and holistic education.