I'm Brian Myers. I'm Mike Ritalik. I'm Becky Hiread. And this is Al Pelletz, a podcast featuring tips for Ad teachers.
We are your agricultural education resource across the web, sharing research based tips and tackling the tough questions facing agriculture teachers every day. Hey Al Pelletz, this is Brian here with Mike and Becky. We are here by the Al Pellet. So excited to have you all back with us as we continue season 10.
Season, we kind of forget about this. 10 seasons of this. Sure, I was doing 10 seasons ago. What were you doing 10 seasons ago?
I was in the high school classroom. I had a school. Yeah. I have kids yet.
Look at that. The before times. Well, today we are honored and privileged to have with us Kevin Lamb. Kevin, welcome to Al Pelletz.
Thank you. Thank you so much and thanks for having me. Well, we appreciate you being here with us today. Kevin, why don't you give all of us a quick introduction about the cool things that you're doing and the cool guy that you are.
I'm not sure that I can live up to that. That's what I thought. It's great to meet everybody virtually. My name is Kevin Lamb.
I'm an associate professor at the University of Georgia. And I focus on agricultural leadership. And by way of a little bit of how did I get to where I am today? I actually grew up on a small cattle ranch in Northern Colorado.
Did the 4-H program for about 11 years and so deeply rooted and passionate about agriculture. So of course I went to engineering school for my. Naturally, naturally. You can see how the links connect.
But no, so I did mechanical engineering as an undergraduate. And then after that, I worked for a Fortune 500 management consulting company called Accenture for about a dozen years, which was fascinating. Getting to work with so many different folks and corporations around the globe. But I found myself really being drawn into the human dimensions of the work that I was doing and answering some of these questions that I kept seeing in the work that I was doing.
Why when we tried to implement a change that sometimes it worked and sometimes it not work if we're doing the exact same thing and why. To some folks react very positively to particular leadership styles versus others. So that's what led me back to graduate school. And I did my masters in PhD at the University of Florida in agricultural leadership.
After graduate, I did I ran my own private consulting company as a president of that for a few years before joining the faculty at the University of Georgia. So it is kind of through that meandering path that I am here with you all today. So thanks so much. Yeah, thank you for sharing that Kevin.
We talked a lot about career development with our students and they think it's a nice, great little line point me and no, I appreciate you sharing that so many times that it isn't meandering path and appreciate you sharing that all with us. But we're also going to talk about a pretty exciting topic with a topic that sometimes we say the words a lot but maybe not mean so we're going to talk about system thinking a little bit so once you give us an overview of the topic for our conversation today Kevin. Sure. Yep.
And actually my background is probably a good example of systems thinking compared to the linear thinking that we do so often. And so thanks for that Brian. Systems thinking is really about looking at holes and I mean W H O L E S is not a big. Summ right space.
Yeah. Can you spell that again? Yes. I've learned through teaching this a few times in a few different settings.
I have to clarify that at the beginning because really so much of what we do in life and I just talked about my career trajectory and how I landed here. It was really a system path. It wasn't a linear path. And so systems thinking gives us a little bit of that language to be able to talk about well how did you ultimately end up in the role that you are in.
And it's typically not a led to be be led to see and see led me here. It's a led to a prime which led to Z which led to you know, alpha one. And it's just overtime you get to these places and so I love linear thinking. I'm an engineer like I alluded to so I love a good equation and I can calculate you know the static load on a trust.
But that's not the way the world really works. That's what I kept seeing time and again is that there's all these dynamics and systems thinking gives us the ability to actually you know put language to what we see in real in the real world. So in a nutshell systems thinking is looking at the interconnection between events activities and so forth whereas linear thinking just looks at cause and fact. I think that idea I mean even thinking about your own career in terms of hold of the W and dynamics probably lends itself all to you about some of the workforce pieces both in terms of how do we think about what CTE does in trying to develop a workforce and thinking about the workforce that our teachers are participating in and recognizing that that's changed.
Looking at it through this lens allows us to kind of think about that change differently. Absolutely and I think that that's one of the really exciting things about the work that agricultural educators are doing is you all are on the front lines of helping to prepare the future generation of the workforce right. And so I think that what systems thinking allows us to do is look at the way that things are heading not only in the agricultural industry but more broadly that we're moving away from necessarily needing strictly just technical skills but we need things like communication we need critical thinking we need problem solving collaboration communication and most importantly really preparing for future challenges. And I think that that's what agricultural education has always been is preparing for those future challenges.
My hope and goal would be to maybe get folks a little bit excited about thinking about using systems thinking to prepare folks for that. You know, daunting task of taking that. I share that aspiration. I think the opportunity to do that is something that we need to give some serious thought to and as you think about that what's that look like and what tips what recommendations what advice do you have for us as ag teachers.
Maybe even state leadership or state staff that want to start shifting their thinking and having those conversations not only probably with themselves but also with fellow teachers or even their students. Sure. Great question. Great question.
And if I had the answer to that definitively I probably wouldn't need to be working for the University of Florida. You would be on a better podcast. I'd be a pain to be a podcast. But I you know just all in all seriousness I think the first thing that we need to do and this is kind of for for all academics if you will is to just realize that sometimes we get a lot of questions.
And so we realize that sometimes we get a little bit in love with our language and our jargon. And so we can try to dial back this idea of systems thinking is this huge wall to be scaled and instead it's just a tool in the toolbox. And one of the ways that I have found that's really great to make this engaging and is to attach stories to systems thinking, which then makes it very visceral for folks. And when we start to see it in small ways it's easier to kind of add 1% on top of that and then 1% on top of that and before we know it really built a deep broad skill set.
So it could be something as simple as talking about you know you want to create the most delicious apples possible out of your orchard. Right. And systems thinking is a way to think about how do you get there. You can't just decide and snap your finger that I just want to have the best juice as apples systems thinking allows you to start working back upstream and say okay well apples come from trees trees come from the soil.
The soil is augmented with fertilizer and water and all those other things and the systems thinking gives us a touch point at each one of those areas. Right. And so it's something as simple as that to demonstrate how systems thinking can say we want X, but in order to get there we need to do these three different things. Like we have to go back and now we record the introduction to the series.
Attaching that idea of attaching stories to systems. I think one of the image of just how a story progresses. It is the perfect example of something that feels linear when you first open a book because you progress page to page to page. But as you read there's so much complexity there when it comes to plot and different characters and all these different things that are going on in the thinking lets you kind of see that full.
Let's you see the full story rather than just like taking a page at a time. Which is just I think you've alluded to pieces of just why this is such an exciting way to kind of think and process and kind of help our students do that how we help ourselves do that. But I think it's just like that that of the that attaching stories to systems is a really exciting way to think about it and makes it more tangible hopefully in terms of processing with our students. Right.
And I think that and thank you so much because I love the book analogy and and that's so frequently you know we kind of get caught up in this you know the narrative fallacy that you know this was a foregone conclusion. And the reality is that systems thinking allows us to zoom way out. What if you know exit happen. And so it also gives us a little bit of that ability to start seeing around corners and to not only say well this is where we are today in agricultural production, which is great and we absolutely have to meet today's needs.
But where could we be in five years where could we be in 50 years. And that's the sort of conversation that I think can get folks really excited about using this technique in the classroom is that it's not just strictly about repeating what's been done in the past but it's about starting to kind of see what the future could be, which at least in my experience tends to be a pretty exciting place to think about. What would your advice be for teachers as we start to have these conversations with our students what kind of what's the language we should be using to help communicate this to our students and to give to our students to help them to communicate this with others as they enter the workforce at the various entry points that they're going to in the next several years. Again another excellent question and one that I would really encourage folks to just think about their own lived experience because it doesn't take a whole lot to kind of look at what are the different links in my journey that got me here.
And then to be able to use that as a launching point to say well the reason that I'm so passionate about ag leadership is not because when I grew up I envision myself being in this position but it's because I had exposure to mentors that got me excited about analytics and then it got me exposure to different corporate cultures through Accenture and then that took me to places like India where it just completely shifted my paradigm of the way the world worked. And that's that's the sort of story building that I think is really powerful and so as an ag educator I can't say definitively but just through my own anecdotal exposure. Most of us are doing this work not strictly because the pay is so fabulous but there's probably a story behind why you're doing the work that you are. And starting there you know I do the work that I do because I grew up on a whatever happened to be or my grandfather was a farmer or I got to see how important it was to have good nutritious food in the house and so I'm passionate about helping to create the next generation of the workforce to help to fulfill that whatever that is you can create a narrative around it you can build a story around it and then you can use that when you get the hook in to kind of get folks excited to say that systems thinking.
Well I certainly appreciate the conversation and the discussion and I think you come at this from a unique perspective that many of us wouldn't with all of your business and industry experience and helping us kind of connect that back to ag education back to education and so I appreciate your sharing kind of that story as you talked about and because I think that's helpful and certainly connects to a lot of the conversations that we've been having this season about knowing your why and a variety of other important elements and pieces so any other tips or thoughts you know if you were working with a group of ag teachers what what other things would you share with them. Sure I think that you know first again thank you so much for the opportunity to be here and the great questions and the dialogue I think another suggestion that I would have and this maybe goes back to a little bit about what Brian was asking how do you initiate this conversation. Ironically quite a few of what we call the archetypes of systems thinking kind of these recurring patterns that we see time and again these archetypes actually come from agricultural roots. So looking for the low hanging fruit pardon the pun.
By terrible story from earlier about you know your do's the apples but you can talk about things like the tragedy of the comments. You can give your students a little bit of an exercise of okay everybody has you know 10 cows and we have you know this common area where we've got 100 acres how are you all going to manage that 100 acres. Because if everybody puts their 10 cows on simultaneously in three months you're not going to have any for any you know for grazing land and so that is an example of systems thinking that's trying to avoid those sort of situations and and just you know like I said hopefully. If we just get folks a little bit excited about it once you start pulling on that thread that's when it starts to get really exciting because you know I can talk about you know tragedy the comment comments or limits to growth.
Escalations success to the successful but that's again where we start to fall into a little that academic jargon that starts to get folks really overwhelmed. I would really encourage you just do a tiny bit of reflection on how you got into the position that you are or some sort of a very locally relevant event that's happening and actually just go through a little bit of this process of like okay what's happening here and how did we get to this situation. Maybe it's trying to launch a farmers market in a rural community or maybe it's trying to improve the you know the efficiency of greenhouses or whatever it happens to be I suspect that there's some sort of inputs that got you there. And so giving giving our students our learners an opportunity to explore that that can be one of the best ways to kind of make this sticky and if we get it to stick then hopefully it just builds more.
I'm going to use another one of our systems thinking metaphors but this idea of the reinforcing loop think about that tiny snowball at the top of the mountain at the bottom of the mountain it's picked up so much others know that it's this huge ball but it starts at the very top with a little momentum. So give it a try. Well and I think Kevin you've given us some great tips and some great things to be thinking about here and I'm going through this one of our themes is we've been running a miniseries around teacher retention. And I think not only this is one more example of we need to be teaching systems thinking and about systems thinking in our classroom to our students but as teachers and leaders in agriculture education we also need to be using system thinking to address some of these problems and challenges that are being presented before us here so I think it's again we need to also walk to walk to talk the talk kind of a thing here to use this and so it's very exciting stuff.
To that though I think I have heard based on some of the other work that that we've been trying to do this idea of we don't work in a system or we don't operate we don't operate in systems I'd be really curious for Kevin thoughts on kind of this idea of what I don't want to just outright reject that like that's that's not helpful. So we think about this who stands to lose or what what might we lose by thinking in systems and not not just the yeah this is a great way to think it. I'm on board, but how do we kind of help help process. I don't know if that's my question.
I think kind of batting around this idea of the counter counterpoint of who stands to lose or what what might we lose by thinking in systems is it all is it all as sunshine rainbows and awesome as it has sounded for the last 17 minutes. And I think Brian you said we are capped at 20 so maybe I won't try to address that. Fair and I appreciate that question as well because you know so frequently something gets buzzy and suddenly we hear it everywhere and then it's like well so what's the flip side of the coin what's the downside and I think that that's a very fair question I would expect ag educators are probably very similar to many of us where we've already got full time jobs and now you want me to add this but I would say that from a downside perspective probably the biggest risk is that it can be. I'm trying to frame and find my right words here it is a fascinating literature and you can dive very very deep it's kind of like you know reading about it or not that I have ever done this but when you click on a Wikipedia page which leads you to the next Wikipedia page which fleets the next and suddenly three hours have gone by.
Oh, like making vanilla extract. Yeah. You don't know exactly how you got to where you got but you know this time has passed and it all be perfectly logical since and I think that that that's actually one of the areas around systems thinking that I would caution is to like I like I alluded to earlier it's okay to start small. I think that's probably you know my biggest recommendation because if you dive into the deep end you can very quickly find yourself reading literature and books that can make it seem really inaccessible.
Unfortunately kind of the way that I started out. It's like oh this sounds neat let me buy every book that I can find on it by you know folks that dedicate their entire career to it and suddenly what was a really neat tool has suddenly become so relevant. So I think that that's one of the areas of caution which I would share is to just dip your toe in and kind of get comfortable with it and familiar with it and let it kind of emerge organically rather than kind of this idea of linear thinking that you know I want to know about systems thinking so I'm just going to flip a light switch and then be an expert at it. Like that's probably the quickest way to get overwhelmed and then decide it's just not for you.
Yeah, well thank you Kevin. This has been a fantastic conversation really appreciate you guiding us through this discussion around system thinking not only how we can use it to teach our classes but how we can be using ourselves as we address some of the big challenges we've got here. So Kevin thank you so much for being with us today here on Al pellets tips for Agteachers podcast. And on another episode of Al pellets tips for Agteachers.