Success by design
By Kim Deans
Consider all the activities you have done this past week. You may have cooked a meal, built a fence, planted trees, planted a crop, purchased livestock, moved livestock, or reorganised the office. These activities all involve designing.
Designing happens when we are solving problems with a specific goal in mind. Design is any process that involves more than one decision. A design process can be applied to anything and everything. We are always designing, whether we are conscious of it or not.
There is a difference between being a designer and designing. A designer uses an intentional process instead of taking a random, unstructured approach.
When we predominantly design in an unstructured way, we can end up creating systems that are unproductive and may unintentionally create environmental degradation. We may spend a lot of money and not achieve our goals to create regenerative outcomes. Instead of randomly designing and creating we can choose to use an intentional design process.
Professor Stuart Hill points out in the Forward to Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability by David Holmgren how people who work primarily with non-living materials, such as engineers, are trained in design principles. Yet, people working in living systems like agriculturalists never discuss or learn the principles of design.
This lack of awareness of the importance of design, mutualistic relationships and biodiversity within ecosystems is responsible for many of the problems we now face in terms of the declining state of natural resources. Whole farm planning is a framework for becoming more intentional in applying a design process in our agricultural business and landscape. The whole farm planning process involves planning, acting, reflecting, and evolving. We start with a jumble of ideas and possibilities in our heads and intentionally unravel these threads to map out where are we going, where are we now, along with the actions we will take to get from where we are now to where we want to be.
Whole farm planning process:
1. Develop your vision, values and goals (planning)
Vision: the direction you want to take the farming business
Values: the guiding principles that determine how you operate and define what is most important to you
Goals: the achievements you want to accomplish as you pursue your vision.
2. Assess your current situation (planning)
3. Plan actions to take you from where you are now to where you want to be (planning)
Action Plan: clarifying the steps you will take to achieve your goals
4. Take actions (acting).
You must take action to succeed
5. Monitor (acting)
6. Review (reflecting)
7. Replan (evolving)
Monitoring and review: once a plan is made monitoring becomes essential. A whole farm plan is an evolving document that will be monitoring and reviewed over time to be effective.
We each start our whole farm planning journey from our unique context made up of the land we steward, our people, our finances and resources. There are many paths we can take to reach an outcome or destination, not one right way. Our unique map for our whole farm plan is contained within our people, landscape and business.
When we have not clarified our vision, values or goals for our business we are on a journey with no destination in mind. When we don’t clarify where we are going someone or something else will. We can unintentionally end up following someone else’s vision or continue taking random actions with no consideration for whether they are taking us where we want to be, wasting time energy and money and not achieving our goals.
We can have the best farm plan in the world, yet things rarely go to plan. Ongoing monitoring, review and reflection are the keys to planning for success. This is where we consider what worked, what didn’t work and why so we can turn challenges into opportunities.
If we create a plan and then leave the plan on the shelf the planning process is abandoned. We are wasting our time creating a plan if we are not going to use our plan as a living, evolving document and keep working with it. When we don’t monitor our plans, we lose the benefit of an early warning system that will pick up unintended consequences early and won’t know if we are heading in the direction we want. Not monitoring our farm plan is like driving a car without a fuel gauge.
Many people use uncertainty as an excuse to avoid planning processes. The environment in agriculture is constantly changing. Our capacity to evolve and adapt to changing circumstances is essential to survive in any business. Your plan is your road map, not a strict schedule to live by. Detours can happen in any journey.
Reviewing plans regularly provides increasing clarity on our progress and the best chance of success, confidence and peace of mind in a complex, uncertain environment. The planning process enables us to make more informed decisions so we can see and take opportunities less prepared people miss. Planning can enhance our capacity to adapt to changing circumstances, so we proactively make changes in our business instead of waiting for change to show up in an unexpected way and reacting to it.
The planning process empowers us to step back and take stock, so we notice what is working, rather than focusing solely on problems and our never ending to do list. Recalibrating our focus towards success, effectiveness, and focusing on the aspects of our business within our control are the benefits of incorporating a design framework like whole farm planning into our business. Your plan can be as unique as you are. It might be a one-page plan or it might take the form of a several page document. The best farm plan is the one you will use so the key to success is in making the process work for you.
Kim Deans is an experienced whole farm planning facilitator and can work with you individually or deliver group workshops to bring your farm plan to life. Contact Kim for more information.