I am a holistic thinker to the nth degree, so maybe I can answer a few of your questions.
A. It’s not so much how many “paths” there are to solving a problem, but rather how many factors are involved/considered at one time.
For example, someone asks me: “Do you want to get pizza?” To a linear thinker is a simple question. How much do I want to eat pizza? A lot, a little? Translate that to yes or no. Done. But for a holistic thinker, answering that question is more complicated, because “want” vs “not want” is considered from a holistic point of view. If I WANT pizza, that involves either heading out to a restaurant or ordering in, both of which are expenses/trips I might not WANT to make. Maybe I just took my shoes off, and I don’t WANT to bother putting them back on. Maybe I WANT to lose some weight, so eating salad would be a better option. Maybe I WANT to look good for a date this Saturday, and I know pizza makes me break out. Plus if I WANT to learn to be a better cook, why miss this opportunity to fix myself something? And I definitely don’t WANT to inconvenience you, if you’d rather stay in, or eat something else instead . . . Etc, etc.
To a linear thinker, those WANTS are all independent concerns. But to me, they all combine into some generalized sense of want-vs-not want that gets applied when making a decision. How much I want to do anything is a combination of how much I want/don’t want all relevant factors’ positives and negatives, mashed into one metric that eventually spits out a yes-or-no answer. But it may take me a while to arrive at one, and I’m liable to respond with “I don’t know, has it stopped raining yet?” in the interim.
B. I’d see nine individuals on a shared journey.
C. I think that to holistic thinkers, linear thinkers often seem . . . rather dense, and also rather blunt. When I say “I want to go to the park,” as a holistic thinker, that means “I’ve considered all relevant factors (including how inconvenient my request might be to YOU), and I’ve come to the conclusion that the positives that would be gathered from acting on my desire to go to the park with you outweigh any negatives that might be accrued in the process of doing so. Meaning that either, I don’t predict that fulfilling this request will be a major source of inconvenience or negativity for either of us, OR, I know this will be a pain in the ass to accomplish but it really matters to me!”
Whereas a linear thinker saying “I want to go to the park” means “I have a desire to go to the park.”
You see the problem, of course. Because if you express that desire to me, a holistic thinker, I’m going to presume you considered all relevant factors before coming to that conclusion. So I might be liable to think (or respond to you with) something like: "what, you expect me to drop everything I’m doing right now so that we can go to the park? Is you getting to go to the park REALLY that much more important than what I’m already doing?
But of course, you didn’t consider what I was doing at the moment, nor did you think expressing your desire to go to the park implied that you expected us to drop everything to go to the park. You were just expressing a desire that you felt, because you wanted to. But to a holistic thinker, what you said might sound almost selfish, like: “my needs are the only ones that matter here.”