 I'm Dale Benson, I'm a professor and Extension Wildlife Specialist at Colorado State University. My job today is to talk with you about how we link humans with the land. You're learning about how the land works, how soils and water and plants and animals interrelate, how they evolve in a natural way. You're also learning about how humans impact those natural systems. The workbook will give you other ideas about how humans have changed the system over time, but just think about it in general terms at this point. Think about what happened when the Native Americans moved over the land and altered the land by their fires, their trails that they built into the landscape, the way they moved animals to and from situations, the crops that they planted. Think about then how the Spanish and the other Europeans moved up from the south and from the east, and the French came down from the north into the United States. Think about the alterations that took place on the landscape, perhaps converting trees to crops. Those crops then might have been converted into housing developments. Out in the Great Plains the same thing happened. Native grasslands that Bison roamed on were now occupied by cattle. Once the cattle time perhaps started to suffice, then those grasslands were converted to agricultural lands. And then many of those lands over time were also converted into cities and human dwellings. The cities themselves turned not only from small towns but to larger cities and eventually into metropolitan areas. So what our quest is to think about those landscape changes, understand them within your context and my context as natural resources professionals, and then think what we can do to help the people who live on the land, who impact the land to manage their natural resources better. The land is always changing. Whether it's changing from natural ecological processes or whether it's changing from human-caused intervention, perhaps doesn't matter. We know that the changes that take place when hurricanes or storm interventions or natural fires go through a system. And we also know what's happening around our vicinity, but it doesn't take very long for us to leave a natural system and to see the changes that have taken place over time. Humans are always working on the environment. They're making changes for their own purposes, they're making changes for their own benefits, and sometimes they're making changes for the benefit of the environment. What I'd like you to think about right now is what changes have you seen in your life? What three things would you write down that are very significant to you that relate to changing environments where you grew up, where you live now, where you work, perhaps it's places where you joined together for recreation? Think about those land use changes. We'll give you some examples of land use changes on a national scale in the workbook, but what's most important is for you and for me to be able to internalize these changes. Think about three important top changes that you've seen in your environment since you've been growing up in it. While you're thinking about three situations in your community that have changed over time, let me give you the three situations that have happened to me. We could start first by where I live. The town that I live in now was 40,000 people when I first knew it. Now the population is nearly 120,000. That's a three-fold increase. I'm not sure we're better off than we were at 40,000, but we might be. Think about the town that I grew up in. The town was very small, only a couple hundred people. There was 1,500 people in the whole county. On the rangelands there were deer and elk and antelope and cattle grazing. Now if you go back to that same community, there's 4,500 people. Those lands where the deer and the elk and the antelope played are lands that now are occupied by family dwellings. In the base of the big mountain range that we lived in, there's now houses where a lot of the land used to be devoted to hay and cattle use in the wintertime. Think about my recreational area. We saw these problems coming, so a few partners and I kicked our money in together, decided we'd buy some property that we could use for some of our recreational interest and do a little livestock management in the process. What's turned out there is that the land that we own right now has five houses that overlook our property when before there were none. Changes have taken place where I live now, where I used to live, and where I like to recreate. What are the changes that you've seen? What I'd like to do with the time that I have with you folks is to give you ten different thought processes that we all should go through when we're trying to work with people to affect the environment. Number one, we need a common philosophy, and I'm going to call that philosophy land help. It's just a way that we all can think about what we do in our programs and how that relates to the land and to the landholders. Secondly, I'd like to talk about our role. Your and my role as coaches, how we can help the landowners by giving them the kind of coaching that they need to do their jobs better. Third, we'll talk a little bit about planning, the method to make all of this happen. Without a good plan, we can't have good actions. Fourth, we need to think about how people make decisions. Decisions are not made in a vacuum. Decisions are not always made by lots of different inputs. Sometimes decisions are made by very singular ideas. We need to think about how people think that way we can work with them better. Number five, we need to think how we all can work better together, whether we as professionals working together or as professionals working with the people that we serve. Number six then, how do we think about involving the community? Who is the community? Are they our traditional partners or is the community made up of people perhaps that we haven't tapped into yet and that we haven't helped yet? Number seven, how does communications work? We all communicate every day but we always don't use the best techniques. We're not always effective in our communication. What can we do to be better? Number eight, how do people adopt information? People don't always accept information and actions at the same rate. What thought process do they go through in order to make up their decisions? Number nine, may seem like a very simple idea and objective but how do we make good meetings? We've all been to meetings that have failed. We've all been to meetings that we didn't enjoy. So what might we do to make our meetings better? And number ten, we're going to talk about how success with our job necessitates success with working with people. We can't just think about the natural environment alone. We can't think about the agricultural and changed landscapes alone. We have to think about the people, why they want to do what they do and how we can help them to do it better. Well, we're about to make a transition now from the more natural environment up on the hill to an environment that's been altered by humans. This brings me to my first three objectives and I'll summarize those by saying coached planning for land help. Land help is the objective. We want to make the land better somehow by helping people so that's where the coaching comes in. You and I can be those coaches to work with the landowner to help them understand their situation, to help them know how the world works, help them understand the modifications they make and how that impacts the environment and themselves and their families and also helps us to understand how we should help them with a plan. The plan is the basic tool that everyone needs to understand what they have and what they're going to do with their resources. So we'll talk more about how we can help with planning so we help the landowner to affect their plans better. Chances are when you start to make plans you're going to be working with a landowner in their backyard over the kitchen table or somewhere out in the pasture. So what's important is that you think about who you're working with. It involves as many members of the families as you possibly can and sit down and start finding out what the folks need and how you can help them. I'd like to talk a little bit more about the elements of this coached planning process just so that you understand along with me how my mind is working and I've put together a little mind map idea that might help to illustrate the points. Well let's start out with the philosophy then. Remember it's land help. How we can help to work the land better. The client that we're working with, the consumer, the customer, the person's going to get the job done as a landowner. The idea of coached planning then is the process that we all go through to help the landowner to do their job better. I've outlined a few of the key resources and issues and so forth that we're going to need to go through. You need to think of what resources we have in the community as planners. You need to think of what issues and needs the clients have, what plans can be done, what programs we have to offer them, how we can work with various cooperators to implement those programs and eventually reach this land help goal. Let's start first with resources. What resources are we talking about? We're talking about natural resources. We're talking about agricultural resources. We're talking about a quality of life, the resources we all need to be effective and happy as humans. We're talking about the human resources that exists in our family, the men, the women in our life, the adults, the youth. We're talking about the volunteers that we might have to come out and help us with projects. Don't forget any resources when you're thinking about that in the community. Next, issues and needs. What are the issues and needs? I can't answer that question. You probably can't answer that question very well. That's when we have to work with the community. Those people out there on the land, in the city halls, on the tractor who are making the decisions. It's their issues in relation to their neighbor's issues that's very important. Plans then become very important. Where do the plans come from? Well, it's an individual plan in some cases. What I can do to manage my property, but we can't just think of our own properties because what we do interacts with the neighbors. So we have to think about the neighbors, helping the neighbors work out their plans. We can't even stop there. We know that there's communities. There's watersheds. We need to think how our plan interrelates with the overall planning of the community in which we live. And then that interacts with the region, whether it's a region of our state or various states combined. And then finally, we can interrelate our regional plan into international plans. How we do in the United States interacts with what's done in Mexico, what's done in Canada, what's done in other countries. And then finally, what programs are we talking about? Well, we're talking about the programs that you have right now on the ground. We're talking about programs that yet need to be developed. And we're talking about programs amongst the various partners that we might work with. So we're talking about ag programs, wildlife programs, forestry programs. We're talking about programs for small acreages. We're talking about programs that involve youth, that involve the community, that involve older folks. And then finally, we need to get those cooperators together so that in our coached planning process, we're getting all the right elements brought in to bear on the issues that meets the needs of the landowners to help them to make a plan the best they possibly can. Our fourth objective is to understand how people make decisions. I'm going to introduce a decision-making hexagon that covers six different items. I think it's very important to remember any time you're thinking about developing a plan. Now, obviously, when we talked about natural resources, that's an important part of anyone's decision-making. The physical and the biological environment is always a parameter to be thought about. And we're going to talk a lot about that throughout this program. But there's other parts of that hexagon. Part of it is the legal system and the political system. Another part to think about is the individual person, what they think and how they behave. Then you take the individual, bring them into a group, and you have group norms and behaviors. Another point on the hexagon is one's personal, financial, and economic decisions. We also have situations where the administration, the skill level, or the technical level of what we're dealing with causes problems for our decision-making. Let's examine each of those six points one at a time, starting first with physical and biological. That's the one that we know most about. That's the one we think about all the time. That's the one that we think will solve all the world's problems. And that's probably, in reality, the one that's most least likely to solve anything. We're expert about that, but many of the other people aren't using that to make their decisions. We need to think about it, we need to make people understand it, but we don't think that's the only solution that we have. Think about that individual side for a minute. People make decisions based on their own individual thoughts. They don't need any input from anyone. Sometimes they don't listen to anyone. Maslow, a psychologist back in the 50s said that we go through various hierarchy of needs where people first make decisions based on their physiological needs. They have to have food, they have to have shelter. And if that's not fulfilled, they're likely to make a decision very well about anything else. If you follow physiological needs with security needs, people need to feel safe. They need to feel like they're food safe. They need to feel safe from a marauding tribe or a neighbor or another country. And they also have to feel like they're safe to make their own expressions about how they feel and act. So helping people to feel safe in a society is very important. As you go on up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, finally you get to a place where people need to feel good about themselves. They want to know that the decisions they make are accepted by people around them, their neighbors, their friends, their associates, their peers. And eventually you get to a stage called self-actualization, and that's where the individual really feels so good about how everything's working that they're very creative and open and they try to do very new things. This may seem kind of off the base of managing natural resources, but you have to realize if people aren't doing the kind of individual activity and feeling mentally about what they're planning in a way that makes them feel good, they're likely not to do anything about natural resources that we might think is important. Add to that society. All of society with all the peer pressure that relates to religion relates to various ethnic groups and cultural groups. All of these impact what an individual is going to use to make their decisions. So we're influenced individually now by society. Well, one of society's factors, of course, is the economics and the financial. We just can't make good decisions if we don't feel like the finances in the home, on the land, are going to make us survive. So you can't expect anyone who is in a land use situation, whether it's a farmer or rancher, or whether it's an urban dweller, to make good natural resources decisions if it's going to hurt the pocketbook too much. There's only so much we can do out of altruism and where there's not many philanthropists among us. So we have to think about why people make decisions based on economics. All right. Now the one that you may have wondered why in the world I brought up at all is this idea of administrative and technical and skill levels. What's pretty easy to understand? If you don't have the skill to do something, if the landowner we're working with doesn't have the skill to do something, they probably won't. It's that simple. So they have to be trained with that skill. Perhaps they don't have the technical abilities with them. We're asking them to look at a computer program or to view something on the internet. They may not know how to do that. And then finally, administratively speaking, we may have the wants and the wishes to do almost anything, but in reality, maybe the boss won't let us do it. Administratively, we're not allowed to do it. So you have to consider those kind of technical administrative skill level parameters that keep you from doing something or enable you to do something. And then of course, there's the political system and the laws. That's often what we think of first. We say, oh, we've got to change the laws about that. But in reality, maybe the law doesn't need to be changed at all. It's someone's personal attitude. It's the impact that the group has. It's helping them understand the economics. It's improving their skill level or teaching them about how the environment works that might really help everything to work much more smoothly. Our fifth objective is to talk about how we can work together better as professionals. I think to start with, we have to kind of forget the old style of maybe doing jobs as usual. We thought about our organization, our mission, our goals, our objectives, our procedures and our programs. And we failed to look at the other organizations that exist around us. So the first step then is to think in a more multidisciplinary way. Think of the various organizations in our community that deal with the landowner who deals with the land. Obviously, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Cooperative Extension, State Divisions of Wildlife, State Departments of Natural Resources, State Departments of Agriculture, local soil conservation districts, federal agencies, other state agencies, local businesses. All of these people have something to bring to bear in the multiple disciplines that we need to think about to help the landowner, to help the land. But having a multidisciplinary approach is not enough. That just brings various people to the table who may not think together, work together and plan together. What we need is a mixture of all of that. Throw us all into a big bucket and think in an interdisciplinary way. So those same organizations, those same ideas are brought together with coordinated thinking, integrated thinking, interdisciplinary thinking, and that's going to help the landowner to help the land much better. Now that we're working together as organizations, objective six is to think about how we can work together to involve the community. If we're going to work with the community, our first need is to think like a community. So we need to represent the kind of diversity that exists within the community in which we're working. If we engage those diverse interests, our chances of addressing the modern issues, the issues that exist locally will be much greater. We also need to develop new leadership. We've worked with an audience group in the past that's been faithful and organized and now with new people there, there's also new leaders that we can work with. It doesn't mean we stop working with the old leaders, but engage as many new people as you possibly can. Amongst those leaders are going to be women and men. Agricultural audiences have been dominated in political circles, at least by the men, but women are making the decisions, helping with the financial activities, managing the home and the children, and if we don't include them in the decision-making process, we're missing out on a very strong group. Likewise, when we talk about people, we must think about youth and we need to think about older people. Some of the most eloquent people you'll meet might be those FFA or those 4-H youngsters who are working in club activities or who might actually be influencing land use decisions testifying before a city council somewhere. So don't forget the youth. Likewise, folks who have retired, they're going to be very instrumental, perhaps having different time frames than they used to have, and they can devote some of their time to be coaches, to be volunteers, or to help with landowner-based programs. While we're talking with folks, while we're getting a diverse group involved, we have to think as a system and help them to think as a system. Not just me and my, not just this and that, but all the system, how everything interrelates and how we as the people interrelate. So get them thinking as a system just as we're trying to think as a system. Out there, there's some spark that's going to ignite people into action. It might be a problem, it might be an issue, it might be an opportunity, there might be a leader somewhere, but something is going to cause the spark to get us all more involved in our activity. So find that. Look for it. Ask people what's important. Let them provide the spark. We don't have to find them, but we need to locate it and make sure it ignites our action. If we ignite the spark, you'll probably ignite innovation. Good things don't happen overnight. People aren't apt to just revolutionize farming and ranching activities or urban planning based on immediate activities. You have to cultivate those and so you have to encourage those innovators who are trying something new, helping them with information, coaching them along the way, but making sure they have every opportunity possible to succeed. As lands urbanize and we often deal with rural people, we have to foster those linkages as much as we possibly can. Get the urban folks understanding what goes on out on the landscape. So they're more supportive of rules and regulations that might affect rural lands. Likewise, make sure the rural folks are thinking about some of the urban problems and plights, and then the issues that are developed will be issues that everyone cares about, not just people in very localized segments around the state, the county, or the country. If you've done all these things, you're going to be able to plan and be able to work together. You're not going to be working with one group here and a different group over there. You'll have them all in the same room, thinking about common, interested, natural resources issues. We as natural resources agencies often aren't trusted by those citizens. We need to think what it takes to be trusted and to trust other people. Sometimes it's extremely difficult for government to empower the private sector to do something. We don't trust they're going to do it quite right. Maybe not the way we do it. Well, that has to change also. We can help, we can coach, but ultimately the decision is going to be there as anyway. Let's find a way that we can build trust and empowerment amongst the people that we're working. And then finally to do all of that, we need to learn to communicate properly and effectively. We'll talk a little bit later about communication techniques, but just think about it now. Communicating isn't just talking. Communicating is listening and communicating is figuring out how to do both in the most effective and planned way that we possibly can. Once we've recognized that we need to work with a diverse community that we're living in, you need to do a community needs assessment to find out who's out there and to find out what the issues are and to find out who is out there that's going to get the job done. So we'll go over a little matrix to show you some questions to ask and some types of people and organizations to work with. As you work on that community inventory, think about what are the important questions to ask? Who are the individuals out there? Identify the groups. Identify the institutions, the businesses. And think of others in the area and perhaps it's others in the county, the neighbors, the other states, other nations that have similar programs. But let's think of the important questions to ask first. Who has the skills? What are the technical skills, the educational skills? Who has the business savvy, the organizational savvy? Who has the personal facilitation techniques that's necessary for you to help get a job done? Identify those folks and bring them into your team. Likewise, you'll need to think about who gathers the information. Some people like to gather information. Some people like to put it to work. You just need to figure out who it is and get them on your team. Who works together well? We all know that some people do a little bit better at that than others. Find them, match up the ones who like to work together, avoid the conflicts as much as you can, but train them all, help them all, and chances are they'll all enjoy being together and working together if you enable them and empower them to do so. Find out what we want, not what you want, not just what one group wants, but what does everyone want? Ask those questions. What's our role? What role does one organization have versus another? What does one cooperator have as their role versus the other cooperators? Who can get the jobs done is an important question to ask. Some people have great ideas. They make wonderful inputs at business meetings, but they're not the ones to get the job done. Find those who can. Next, even though they might want to do a job, we have to think how do we get them to do it? What's it going to take? What's the motivating factors? Could it be financial? Could it be personal? Could it be social? It doesn't matter what the motivators are, it's just what does it take to get the innovators and action people doing the job? Another question, how do we keep track? How do we know what we're doing and finally what records do we keep? What records do we need to know that we've progressed or in fact perhaps what do we need to know and maybe suggest we failed? Alright, let's look down that individual column now. You know the individuals in your counties, your state's better than I do, but just think about this. There are some folks who are innovators without a doubt. Find them, get them innovating on the subjects that are important to the community. There are specialists out there who love to focus in on certain issues. Get them involved, get them on the team. Civic leaders don't forget them. They're already involved in some kind of leadership role, so it's our job as natural resources folks to work on our team. School teachers, what a better group that are engaged in education all the time, wanting to get their students into action, perhaps even have some ways to get in-school activities relating to out-school activities. Let the school teachers work for natural resources and work for the land. There's club leaders of all kinds who have devoted their time to whatever club it might be and if you can show that that club needs to interrelate with the environment and help to manage for land, wow, those club leaders might be on the team right away. And don't forget the retired folks. There's folks working at home. There's philanthropists that might be willing to fund some projects that you hadn't thought about because you hadn't been thinking about it. There's the young, the old, the male, the female, various races, various ethnic mixes. Some might have a greater interest in the subject than the ones you've been working with. So don't forget any kind of a pluralistic part of your environment. Bring them to work for your natural resources land health team. I'll mention some groups and I'll be quick. 4-H groups, scout groups, clubs, United Way, AARP, stock growers, grains, farmers union, League of Women Voters, ethnic organizations, then all the natural resources groups like the Elk Foundation, Wildlife Federation, Ducks Unlimited, Nature Conservancy. Find the groups, they're already organized, organizing them to help the land is just the next thing to do. Then, of course, institutions in the next column, schools, churches, local governments, NRCS Extension Forest Service, BLM, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, water organizations, wildlife organizations, anybody in government would be useful. Anybody in the private sector would be useful. Speaking of private sector, think of the businesses. In most cases, the business community is there because of either the natural resources or the human altered resources that we're talking about and trying to work with. So, engage the banks, the service clubs and organizations, the service industries, food services, people who work with various commodities and don't forget the real estate folks. They're helping to modify the focus of the land so work with them to work for land help as well. And then finally, get evaluations from other programs. Find out what the neighbors are doing. They may be doing the best thing possible. Capitalize on that. What's happening in other states? We have some examples in this video series that explain some neat programs going around across the country. Learn from that and use that as an example to find some in your own areas. And then of course, we can always learn from other countries. The United States doesn't have the lock on how to do things well. Many important approaches to land help, to land care, as it's called in Australia, to private land enterprises, as you might think about in Africa, come from other countries. So let's pay attention to what other folks are doing, learn from it, and help them to help ourselves. Well, here we are at my university home to talk about Objective 7, 8, and 9, and that's how to communicate better with people. Objective 7 deals with the communication process, just how communication flows to people and through society. Objective 8 is the adoption sequence, how people adopt information and how they adopt ideas and how that's diffused amongst groups. And then Objective 9 deals with meetings. Perhaps a simple concept, but in reality we're going to talk about how we might be able to organize our meetings better. Alright, Objective 7, how communication works. You'd think at a university we'd always have the lock on those answers, but we don't do the job here any better than we do anywhere else in society. Communication is rather simple. You have a sender, you have a receiver, you have some channels of various types of media that you can send messages through from the sender to the receiver. Those media might be everything from knocking on someone's door to sending it over television programs or radio or newspaper or asking them to pull information down over the internet. Seems simple, but often we use the wrong technique to meet the needs of what we're trying to accomplish. So you have to select the right technique. You have to prepare the technique properly. When the sender decides what they're going to code to send to the receiver, they have to think about that just enough to say, well, what's that receiver likely to listen to? What they likely to understand? Are they going to care about the topic that I have to cover? How can I give that information to them in a way that they'll understand, that they'll listen, and eventually that they'll adopt the information? The same thing happens when the receiver gets a chance to listen to the information. Half the time when we hear something on television, we might be doing something else, eating or sleeping when it's actually on the air. So we're not encoding that information and putting it into our behaviors, into our minds at all. So we have to help the listener to find the way that they can take the information we send and readily encode that information so that they put it into their behaviors. But communication doesn't stop with sender sending something to receiver. Also, you need feedback. You need to know whether that message is being transferred at all. So you need feedback loops that the sender then can use to receive information back from the receiver. The same process as work. The receiver might knock on the door and say, hey, I got your message and let's go out for pizza tonight. On the other hand, that might be an interchange of information on an internet message, where an email message is sent back to the office, or there's some kind of a recording of a hit on an internet site. But there needs to be some way that that communication process flows from sender through certain channels, that there are most appropriate channels for the persons you're trying to contact. And so that means you know that audience very well. You know those receivers very well. And you do it in such a way that that receiver is likely to take that information, listen to it, and move it into their behaviors. So when we think we've communicated with someone, the real test of that is whether they adopt the ideas. There's a whole sequence that we go through to decide whether we're going to adopt information. First of all, in that sequence, we have to be aware. We're made aware by all those different communication processes that we know about. But just because we're aware doesn't mean we're going to do anything about it. We have to have an interest. The interest might be spawned from something negative or something positive, but we go from being aware to saying, oh yeah, I guess I'm interested enough to pay attention. If we're not interested, we won't listen to the best communication that happens. When we're interested, we may say, well, I need to evaluate that a bit further. And how do we evaluate? Well, we ask the neighbors. We ask our friends. We ask our wives. We ask our children. We read more about it somewhere. We bring something down from the internet site. We find out what other people think, more depth about the subject. We somehow evaluate whether we want to adopt it ourselves. Once we're convinced maybe that it might be a good idea, then we might try it. We put it through a trial period where we take that Innovative Farmer Ranch Management Practice or Natural Resources Management Program. We try it on our place. We see for ourselves whether it's going to work, whether we like it, whether it meets the needs of our family, our friends, our society, our economics, and so forth. And then finally, if it seems to work out, if the trial period went well, we're likely to adopt it. If the trial period didn't work well, if we weren't properly trained to initiate the program, to apply all the techniques that would be required, we might reject it just because we weren't properly prepared and that communication process didn't flow to us the way it really should have. Objective number nine is to practice the art of facilitating good meetings. We all might think that we know how to handle meetings. We've probably handled many in our lifetime. We've been to good meetings and we've been to poor meetings. But I think if we practice just a few simple steps of how to organize folks, how to make the room better, we'll do a much better job of communicating with folks, and I think our land help will be facilitated to a much greater extent. Okay, my top ten list of how to facilitate meetings. Point number one is that you have to have an agenda. That may seem very common to some folks, but I first learned about agenda when I was in grade school somewhere. My counselor said, what's the agenda for the meeting? I don't really have an agenda. He says, well, what you're going to talk about? I says, I'm not sure. He said, well, you've got to know what you're going to do in the meeting. You need to know how the meeting is going to flow from point A to the end of the meeting. So it's extremely important that you've thought about this ahead of time, that the agenda's been prepared by you, by the group of folks, by the cooperators, but folks who attend the meeting need to know what's on the agenda. So point number two then relates to getting the agenda to those folks in advance. They're going to have done their homework better if they know what's on the program. And they can also do their program better by objective number three or point number three, and that simply send out any supplemental materials that relates to the topic. If they know what it is that's going to be talked about and they have a chance to read it, they're more than likely to do that. You have to keep it fairly simple. There's always the chance that you'll get too much detailed information and so therefore folks won't read it at all. There's the chance that they'll think, gosh, all the work's been done. Why should I read anything? There's no chance for me to contribute. Or if they read it and it's all one-sided from one organization or the other, they may say, hey, that group's made their mind up. They're only talking about one side of the point. They're not going to listen to my point of view anyway. So what are we to do? Have a good agenda. Make sure it's out ahead of time and have any supplemental materials that can possibly be used with it to those folks so that they do their homework much like you've done your homework when you've come to the meeting. Point number five is to select some very good facilities. People are only going to be able to withstand what their body can tolerate when it comes to going to a meeting. A meeting arrangement is extremely important, usually a circular arrangement or half-circle arrangement, perhaps a square or a rectangle set of tables, or maybe even a herringbone where people are kind of in rows and they're not really rows, but they're kind of like the fish scales on the back of a fish. Those can work because they can see at an angle, they can see one another, and they can see up front to the speaker. The absolute worst kind of room arrangement is a classroom arrangement where people are sitting in rows behind one another. That is not conducive to discussions. But also not just thinking about room arrangement, make sure the lighting is right for all the visual aids that you might use. Make sure the heat is proper. It can't be too cold, it can't be too warm. Make sure that you're thinking about the creature comforts, the refreshments, the breaks, and all that sort of thing for the meeting to be successful. Point number six is to set ground rules for discussions. It can be ground rules that you make, it can be ground rules that's facilitated by the whole group, but there needs to be a few rules to follow to keep everything in order and to break up some of those problems that sometimes exist when no one knows who's in charge and what's going to happen. One person speaking at a time is logical, not four people speaking. So make sure that's part of the ground rules. If it seems necessary, you might set a rule that everyone should raise their hand if they're going to speak. That's often not necessary, but the one advantage if you're seeing people raising their hand, you know that if someone over here talks more than others and some folks over here haven't, you can kind of avoid looking at the hands that are raised over here and pick someone on the other side of the room. You know they want to talk because they've got their hand up. So that helps you as a facilitator to know that that person wants to speak. Also a ground rule to explicitly state is that all of us should listen to what the others have to say. Too often, we the speaker are thinking about our argument, what we want to say next and we're not thinking about listening to what the other person said and how that relates to the overall solving of the problem that we're here to discuss. If it's a contentious situation, a conflicting situation, sometimes ground rules even need to get more formal than that. Using Robert's rules of order might be necessary for very formal times when people can input, make motions, second motions and lead discussions and so forth. But otherwise, you can kind of work a more informal process and people are going to follow the process as long as they know what the rules are in advance. Otherwise they're might likely interrupting and raising their hand and standing up and doing things that we don't want them to do. A final part about setting those rules is to decide who the chairperson is. I've been to lots of meetings when no one knew who was in charge. If you've organized the meetings, if you're facilitating the process, you know who's in charge. That's been decided ahead of time. But if it appears that there's no real chairperson, find one, volunteer yourself, ask for volunteers or just designate someone to keep on schedule and decide what that schedule will be. Because if you didn't do an agenda in advance, if you didn't set the ground rules in advance, now is the time to catch up and do it right. Point number seven deals with getting the inputs from your people recorded in several ways. What I always like to do is record people's inputs from the audience directly up on a board, a chalkboard, a flip chart, to be written on an overhead transparency and might be typed in into a PowerPoint presentation. But somehow, audience inputs are put up on some medium that the audience recognizes that number one, aw, they heard what I had to say and they recorded what I said properly. They have validated my presence here. Secondly, it communicates to everyone else what's been said. It puts that information down to a point where other people don't have to add to that. It's already been stated and one of the ground rules probably says, hey, don't add information if it's already been put up there. That information that's posted up on the board can then be reorganized in different forms and actually can get a meeting report very easily done by just using that information. But another key is to have another recorder, someone that's perhaps working on the typewriter with a computer at the side of the room recording more details. Perhaps who said it, more details of what was said. And so that then can be a more permanent record that's recorded. They can feed off what was written that you put on the board, but it'll be a record that then can be published and sent off to the participants afterwards. Now, what I like to do also as a form of recording is to ask participants to write their ideas down on a 3x5 card. Before the discussion starts, I say, alright, what's your thoughts about this? Write it down on a piece of paper or a card and then you'll have something for sure that you've thought about to contribute to the meeting. If, for instance, their information doesn't get put up on the board or as a formal part of the record, you might collect those at the break or even after the meeting is over to make sure that you've thought about all the different parts of what people wanted to say. They may have been willing to write it down, but they might have been too shy to actually say it, but you still have a copy of that recording. My eighth point is to make sure that everyone gets a chance for inputs. By writing it down on paper and moving the discussion around the room, picking on people that have their hand raised, that's one way that you can make sure that happens. Another way is to break that larger group down into smaller groups and ask smaller segments of the audience to discuss the same points or different points and then bring everyone back together into the room for a joint discussion and a recounting of what's been talked about and then you as a facilitator can write that up on the board as well. Number nine, I'd like to talk about some different ways of looking at questions. The first way, you have to define the question. You have to make sure that the question, the problem, the opportunity is framed in such a way that everyone understands it in the same way. So that one person isn't talking about a problem and someone else is talking about a different problem. You can't have a good discussion if that happens. So the first thing you do is define and frame whatever it is you're talking about. Secondly, you might personalize it. You might ask people in the audience, well, what do you think about that? How does this affect you and your family? Prove to find out the true meaning of what it means to discuss this issue with the audience. You've personalized it with them and now you've probed. You can probe more deeply and say, well, how does that affect you financially? I understand that it does so but what does it mean to your crop production? What does that mean to your environmental management? So you've defined, you've personalized, you've probed and then finally you can bring it to some kind of closure. Every discussion needs to come to an end. It might mean that it has to be summarized or you ask audience to summarize the key points that they were making or ask the audience to conclude on one point or another. You might have to even vote in some cases or come to consensus on all the input that happened that evening. Well, what is it we're actually going to do? But you bring all of that discussion to some kind of a position of finality of closure at least for that evening. But it may not be closure forever because my point number 10 is that you need to know when to start, stop and start all over again with issues. Most of what we deal with isn't solved in an hour, in a day, in a week, sometimes in a lifetime or a career. So you have to know when it's time to intervene and when it's time to back out. But the important thing that we as facilitators and as managers and as coaches need to think about is knowing the difference of when we need to stop, when we need to start or when we need to change a bit because if you mix those up you can really mess up the process. You don't stop a meeting in the middle whenever one's working well. You don't have a meeting next week when people are just angry with the situation or don't understand the situation or are yearning for more details. You need to figure out where it is in the process. You can be most effective and figure out the way that most interaction can take place in the long term for the best results. And sometimes that may not be you making the decision. It might have to be someone else. Well, just like any good meeting needs to come to an end I need to bring this to an end and to a closure. I don't think there's any doubt that in order to affect proper land management the landholders need our help. We can be the coaches that make it work. We can help them to go from their awareness to their interest to their evaluation stages to start trying it and adopting the practices that we think are important. We have to do it together. We have to do it as an organized interdisciplinary group. And there's boundless examples of how it's happening like that all around the country. We're bringing some examples of those interdisciplinary actions to you through this video project. So for you that are doing it thank you very much. But we've got to do it better. There's too many times we spend too much time in our offices doing our own thing thinking we're communicating and in reality we're really not. The bottom line is the natural resources management doesn't just happen by working with the environment itself. You must work with the people. It's the people who are the bottom line deciders of whether we're going to succeed if land is going to get helped and if natural resources and agricultural productivity is going to be enhanced for the future. So don't forget the people side. You've got to work in how the world works but you have to understand just as much about how people work if you're going to communicate with them to facilitate them to empower them to do the job for the land. I'm going to go back to work. I hope you'll go back to work too. Good luck.