Communicate in new ways
In a captivating opening and closing presentation to bookend the 55th annual meeting of the National Mastitis Council in February, Jolanda Jansen urged advisers in attendance to think outside the box.
Jansen is outside the box herself, with a Ph.D. studying communication in terms of achieving better udder health in dairy cows. She now works for an advisory group on projects to motivate behavioral change, knowledge development and innovation in agriculture and animal health.
With two others, she authored "Communication in practice" for veterinarians, a manual on "clienthusiasm" and now speaks frequently about communication in animal medicine.
Social Psychology in Practice
During the conference, Jansen spoke more about the communication and persuasion techniques other countries use to make change happen from all corners of the dairy globe.
In her opening presentation, Jansen showed the power of social psychology. She put the numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4 on the screen and asked the crowd to pick a number. Upward of 90% of the crowd raised their hand in favor of number 3.
On the next screen, Jansen showed she predicted the outcome.
"I know that people don't like picking the extremes, 1 or 4," Jansen told the crowd. "I also said "3" several times in previous slides, to get you familiar with it. You were conditioned to pick the number."
While education is a great tool to convince people, Jansen said there are other communication options out there we forget about, mostly because they are not straight-forward.
"If you want to convince people, you need to make use of the subconscious level," Jansen said, because there is often a large gap between the intention of a persuasion and the actual behavior.
The R.E.S.E.T. Model
Jansen and her co-authors adapted the R.E.S.E.T. model to describe effective ways to reduce mastitis.
- R - Rules and their enforcement lead people to change.
- E - Education works best with intrinsically motivated people.
- S - Social pressure imposes certain norms and values
- E - Economics such as costs and benefits inf luence decisions.
- T - Tools can be used to create barriers so workers must change behavior and adhere to standard operating procedures. For example, if you don't want milkers to attach units too quickly in a rotating milking parlor, make a fence where they cannot easily pass.
In the Netherlands, Jansen is seeing many issues affecting agriculture early. For instance, the future of milk quality was affected by antibiotics being reduced via legislation. Currently, farmers in the Netherlands use only 65% of antibiotics compared to levels in 2009.
To get there, the country used less economics and education in their advertising, and instead used more peer and social pressure.
"People tend to be very consistent in their actions," Jansen said. "Give freedom of choice and provide options and possibilities to motivate farmers to change something."
Utilizing the Health Belief Model (HBM), developed first in the 1950s by psychologists working in the U.S. Public Health Services, is one way to get there. HBM works because in terms of health-related actions (whether it's AIDS in humans or mastitis in cows), people need to:
Feel like a negative health condition can be avoided.
- Expect a recommendation will help them avoid the negative health condition
- Believe they can successfully implement the recommendation.
But in every step along the way, people can be skeptical there is a problem, that it's truly severe, and there are solutions.
Psychology in Practice
Jansen's opening presentation was followed by talks about on-farm education, cultural barriers to understanding and the future of animal welfare. Nina von Keyserlingk, an animal welfare professor at the University of British Columbia, presented research that found calves in social settings—calves paired together in hutches—performed far better in learning experiments than calves housed alone through weaning.
Presentations on the future of animal welfare audits, implementing stockmanship, motivating employees, and establishing relationships with consumers greatly overshadowed the scientific presentations held throughout the week.
In her closing presentation, Jansen asked the crowd if they looked most for threats or opportunities in moving forward on milk quality.
"The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand, but listen to reply," Jansen said.
Miscommunication, in her mind, is a sender error. People who assume they are "communicating" often believe the communication has been successful. However, if the message wasn't received as it was intended, the perceived "communication" is only an illusion.
Being from the Netherlands, Jansen sees the future of animal rights first hand. The Dutch already have political parties, ambulance, police, and funerals specifically for animals.
There is a "cow garden" in the town of Groenlo, Jansen said. A farmer is testing a design with a rubber f loor, hedges to make it look more natural and access to pasture. There's a balcony that allows people to overlook the new farm design with a freestall system on the other side. To view a video of the experimental farm from the Cow Signals company visit www.dairyherd.com/cow-garden.
"When it rains, look for rainbows," Jansen suggested. Adults tend to put up umbrellas while kids jump in puddles, she noted, asking which side our industry wanted to be on.
