How often do we slip into delivering random acts of extension? This is where we run a field day, webinar or workshop because it’s familiar, expected or already in the project plan. In this episode, we’re looking at how starting with the desired outcome can help us choose extension activities more deliberately and give our work a better chance of creating impact. Before choosing an activity, it helps to… Read more »Avoiding random acts of extension
How often have you seen a great piece of agricultural research fall through the cracks because nobody thought about adoption until the final report was due? We’ve seen it more times than we’d like to admit. It’s one of the reasons we’ve spent the last three years in a project called Research for Impact. We’re now excited to share what we learned—and some of the lessons that emerged from… Read more »Designing research for impact
Why do some workshops feel energetic on the day, but lead to very little change afterwards? In this episode, we’re combining a couple ideas from previous episodes to explore how the COM-B model can help us design workshops that support real action, not just good attendance. The challenge is to think less about what we want to present and more about what people need before, during and after the… Read more »Workshops that shift behaviour
Have you ever run a workshop that went brilliantly on the day, only to follow up with participants a few months later and discover that almost nothing had changed? The feedback might have been excellent, the energy in the room was fantastic, and yet very little of what was covered made it into practice. If that sounds familiar, you’re definitely not alone! In this episode we’re going to explore… Read more »Use AGES to make learning stick
What if one of the most used tools in our facilitation kit wasn’t a sticky note, a whiteboard, or a carefully designed slide deck but a pair of comfortable shoes? Between us, we’ve been running workshops for a long time and if there’s one technique that consistently surprises us with how well it works, it’s the walk and talk. It’s a simple thing, just getting people outside, walking and… Read more »Get moving with a walk and talk!
Have you ever needed input from a diverse group of stakeholders, only to find that organising a meeting became harder than solving the actual problem? In this episode, we explore how the Delphi method can help us collect and refine insights from a diverse group of people and help us make collaborative decisions without actually meeting. As enablers of change we tend to work in environments where decisions need… Read more »Use Delphi for collaborative decisions without meetings
Have you ever watched a grower at work and realised they just know what’s going on? No checklist, no book, just a confident read of the paddock, the crop, and the season. Meanwhile, we’re standing next to them, mentally running through anything that might be useful that came up at uni, and wondering what on earth would be the next step. Same paddock but completely different experiences. So what’s… Read more »Understanding how we learn: The Dreyfus model
In this episode, we explore the simple idea that the usefulness of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in agriculture depends less on the technology itself, and more on whether people trust its outputs. Across agriculture, use of AI continues to build, with tools for analysing weather, soils, crops, and markets becoming available, all of which supports faster and more informed decisions. Global conversations, including those at the recent AI4Agri 2026 event,… Read more »Trust enables AI to work
Have you ever wondered how to get everyone in a group actively thinking, contributing, and building on each other’s ideas, without the discussion getting stuck or dominated by a few voices? In this episode, we explore the bus stop technique, a simple tool for enablers of change that helps structure group work. The bus stop technique is useful as it helps break a large group into small groups. Each… Read more »Use the bus stop and move!
Have you ever taken an AI-generated answer at face value, only to later question whether it was actually right? In this episode, we build on something we mentioned in a recent ‘Using AI in extension’ workshop about why tools like ChatGPT and Copilot can sound convincing even when they’re wrong, and what that means for us as enablers of change. In that online workshop, many participants shared how quickly… Read more »Why AI often gets it wrong
