Why bold decisions and extreme choices matter in agriculture

More than two thousand years ago, when Athens was the centre of the democratic world, a group of Athenian students used to gather at the Lyceum, a centre for learning just outside the city walls along the river Ilissos.

The students were there to listen to a brilliant new teacher by the name of Aristotle. He was one of the most esteemed and influential thinkers of his time, a strikingly intellectual man known for his methodical approach to learning and teaching, captivating everyone with his profound insights and engaging discourse.  

This man would lay the foundation for Western philosophy with his comprehensive works on ethics, politics, and metaphysics. He would revolutionise the study of logic, creating the first formal system of reasoning that influenced centuries of thought.

And, most tangibly, he laid the groundwork for our modern understanding of science, establishing principles of observation and inquiry that would inspire the likes of Galileo, Newton, Descartes, and hundreds of others whose combined discoveries would fundamentally transform our lives and societies.  

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When establishing what would later become codified as the scientific method, Aristotle divided the world of science into two parallel realities— theoretical and practical. Theoretical science is concerned with understanding natural phenomena beyond human control that, in his own words, “cannot be other than they are.”

These include fundamental aspects of nature; the rising of the sun, lunar eclipses, and gravity. On the other hand, practical science deals with human actions and decisions, which are within human control and can be different based on human agency and free will.

He said, “Most of the things about which we make decisions, and into which we therefore inquire, present us with alternative possibilities.… All our actions have a contingent character; hardly any of them are determined by necessity.” Aristotle believed that people have the power to radically change the future. 

Today in agribusiness, I think that we have massively over-indexed towards theoretical science because it feels safer and frankly, more modernly scientific.

But I think that it has also conditioned our industry to be price-takers; victims of some vague boogeyman we call “market forces.” And it has disproportionately restricted our perception of what could be possible through a different set of choices.

As the business thinker, Peter Drucker, famously said, “Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”

It is time for businesses in agriculture to make bold, innovative decisions that change the future; it is time for us to realise that, while we can’t – and shouldn’t – change everything about our business, we can make choices that deliver meaningful change for the customers we wish to serve.  

Choose your customer, choose your extreme

Imagine that you are opening a hotel in your town. One approach is to design a check-in experience like everyone else’s. Your customers book their rooms and give their names at the front desk. A clerk finds the reservation on their check-in system and hands over the keys while quickly covering tomorrow’s breakfast menu and hours. “Room 325,” they say with a smile. Enjoy your stay.” 

This is considered a good customer experience. It’s the approach everyone uses because it’s predictable and perfectly acceptable. But patrons of your establishment are not going to tell anyone about it. It isn’t memorable. It doesn’t distinguish you from the hundreds of other hotels in the area.

It turns your product into a commoditised expense to be minimised instead of a genuine exchange of value.  

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The remarkable way to design your check-in is to make a choice — to choose an extreme. Maybe you want to offer contactless check-in for busy travelers who don’t want to talk to anyone. Or perhaps you want to serve the vacationing family with an extremely high-touch check-in, complete with a hotel porter, a gourmet snack, and a tour of the hotel facilities.

Both experiences are worthy of remark, and critically, they serve a specific need for a particular type of customer, which meaningfully distinguishes this hotel from the competition.

The customer isn’t purely price-shopping the next time they’re in town because you have provided them with a new decision framework and a new story to tell themselves about why staying with you is different than staying anywhere else. 

The physicist Niels Bohr said, “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”

Oscar Wilde put it another way when he said, “In art, there is no such thing as a universal truth. A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.”  

In agriculture, as in physics and art, we must learn to embrace contradictions. This is what the mathematician Carl Jacobi called the ability “to invert.”

In other words, the wisdom to turn a situation or a problem upside down or to look at it backward. 

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This type of thinking looks at John Deere’s market dominance and designs; at SwarmFarm Robotics. It does not attempt to compete with the incumbent by investing in dealers, expanding equipment size, and innovating with a centralised development platform. Instead, it carves out a new category by selling directly to growers, untethering machine size from productivity through automation, and building an open development network. 

If you think about it, there are two suitable environments for human productivity: collaborative and concentrated. The middle — or the average — is boring and ineffective. That’s the open-concept office, where no one can talk or get any real work done. 

Unfortunately, most of what we have today in agriculture is similarly in the middle. It fills the market with a lot of “something” and frequently fails to ask whether that “something” was something worth making in the first place. It is a cheap imitation of someone else’s work. It changes no one. And more often than not, it dies in obscurity. Nobody even knows when it’s gone. 

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I think that the reason we frequently shoot for the middle answer in modern agriculture is due to an overwhelming sense of fear – many leaders today are terrified of controversy. The reasoning goes, ‘as long as no one says anything bad about what we do, then we must be doing something right.’  

What these leaders miss is that animosity is not the greatest threat to the life of our businesses, apathy is. As Seth Godin says, “In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.” Do something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.”  

Dan Schultz is an agribusiness psychotherapist who works with agricultural companies to think differently about their business and their approach to it. Subscribe to Dan’s weekly newsletter, Ag Done Different, for insights and strategies to stay ahead in the agricultural industry.