The corporate and agricultural worlds have many differences, but there may be one area that bridges both in a way that is vital for sustainable growth. Every day, things happen good, bad, or generally indifferently in all our lives; however, when money and other resources are on the line, those more negative situations impact our operations’ ability to thrive.

Event Management

In Bill Schwarz’s book, The Generative Organization, and his related training concepts, he describes these situations as events that must be managed from a place of curiosity and mindfulness. In our Kannar Kulture, we call this Event Management, but simply put, it means taking a closer look when things go wrong, so they’ll go right next time. We won’t go into all the tips and techniques (that’s how Bill butters his bread!), but here are a few considerations that can quickly change how we handle mistakes, messes, and goof-ups in a way that makes our processes AND relationships stronger as a result.

Mindset and Perspective

The starting point and most important part of Event Management is mindset/perspective, which involves training our teams and ourselves to approach situations with mindfulness and curiosity. Often, we get upset when negative-impact events occur. There’s too much dust with this polymer, nematodes are reducing our yields, the hydraulic speed sensor keeps causing the ECU to cut off – these events can cause our emotions to flare resulting in blame, quick fixes, and poor decisions.

• Step one is identifying if we’re upset (mindfulness) and take a deep breath or two – it’s going to be much more difficult to come up with effective solutions if we’re still ticked off.

• Step two is actively stating in our minds or out loud to others that this situation is “happening for me” (curiosity). It’s a subtle difference but changing the narrative from this is “happening to me” puts us mentally in a place of action rather than victimhood. It can definitely be difficult staring out at acres of struggling or damaged crops to think in such a positive manner, but taking the leap of faith that you/we can figure this out, in the end, is a great way to propel us forward to the eventuality of new and exciting heights.

• The last step we’ll cover today is blame-free idea generation. Wow, lots of fancy phrases in this article. Basically put, this is rounding up any parts of your team that are ready and available and throwing out ideas. An important consideration here is being sure to respectfully consider each idea that comes up. This is a chance for you and your team to be brave and bold and put yourself out there for the betterment of the whole operation. Anyone (young or old, new or experienced, highly-educated or school of hard-knocks) can come up with the next great idea that takes your team from struggling to success. Be sure not to belittle anyone and focus on ideas that will keep this event from happening in the future (extra credit if the idea saves time and money). As soon as an idea pops up that generally everyone agrees might work – give it a shot.

Following the steps above will help address the immediate issue, such as fixing the spill that occurs each time you transport between containers. But over time, those ideas will add up to an operation that exhibits sustainable growth and a balance that makes work much less stressful day in and day out.