Preliminary investigation of prickly acacia dieback

Summary

Barriers to adoption of knowledge and skills in beef businesses have been shown to consist of both tangible (resources, time, labour, land capability) and intangible barriers (decision inertia and decision paralysis).  While traditional extension methods are able to address tangible barriers, the intangible remain more challenging. 
In this project, eight farming businesses participated in a variation of business coaching to help identify barriers to practice change and adoption. Through business coaching, means of achieving goals and moving farm businesses forwards were identified for each business. With the business coach, each business identified goals that were important to them and worked towards achieving them with a process of five- one hour sessions of business coaching over a six month period.  Coaching was delivered by an experienced coach using a mixture of face-to-face and phone/Skype coaching sessions.  
At the conclusion of the program, all participants were invited to a group session to review the success of the program. An important aspect of the program was that the coaching goals were self-selected by each participant and congruent with their personal values. Generally goals selected for coaching were more strategic in nature, being important but not necessarily urgent. All barriers to adoption identified by participants were related to themselves.  That is, something they needed to do, or action they needed to take, rather than being a lack of knowledge or skill.  
In one case, acquiring knowledge and skill was part of how they achieved their goal; however they identified the barrier as time to acquire the knowledge.   This is an important point to note as in most extension activities the emphasis is on providing knowledge and skill with participants planning how they are going to implement the information within the time frame of the activity.  Coaching offers a means of enabling participants in extension, to have additional opportunity to put the knowledge and skill they have gained from a range of programs and workshops into practice and follow through their actions to a satisfactory conclusion in the medium to longer term.