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 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 we been overlooking some of the most influential voices in our communities? In this episode, we explore how everyday interactions, beyond the usual expert networks, can highlight new pathways for change, and why this matters for enablers of change. When we think about influence, it’s easy to default to the usual suspects. People such as industry leaders, progressive farmers, researchers, or well-known advocates. These voices are important, but… Read more »Everyday influencers matter
Have you ever sat through a two-hour Zoom webinar thinking, I could have just read a summary of this? Or conversely, tried to complete an online self-paced module on a topic that really needed a good conversation to make sense of it? If so, you’ve already identified one of the practical design decisions we face as enablers of change. Our dilemma is whether this learning happens together in real… Read more »The learning design dilemma
Just over three years ago, ChatGPT entered our world and shifted the conversation about artificial intelligence almost overnight. In this episode we reflect on how far that conversation has come, exploring a recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute and what that might mean for us as enablers of change. We’ve discussed AI from several angles in previous episodes, so the report Agents, robots, and us: Skill partnerships in… Read more »How AI is changing our work
Have you ever wondered what makes a digital tool feel useful to farmers, rather than just another platform they ignore? In this episode, we reflect on what makes digital technologies effective for farmers, using the work of Digital Green as a lens and asking what we can learn from their experience. John first came across Digital Green while writing the e-extension module for The New Extensionist Learning Kit for… Read more »Learning from Digital Green
As enablers of change we often find ourselves working in complex systems where change isn’t just about swapping one practice for another. We actually need to understand how the whole system works, in order to provide constructive support via extension. In one of our earlier episodes we shared a framework described by Geoff Kaine, Vic Wright and Suzanne Vallance which gave us a way to understand practice change not… Read more »Delivering extension in complex systems
We’ve shared some simple hacks in a previous episode to improve our productivity as enablers of change. In this episode, we’re going to help you with clever ways to find books on your bookshelf, plug in those pesky USB chargers, and seamlessly copy and paste text in Windows. Our first tip relates to finding books on a bookshelf. If you’re anything like us, you’ve probably got more than a… Read more »More work hacks to improve our productivity
