March 13, 2018
The Sweet Spot
March is often associated with March Madness. I want to wish our men’s basketball team “good luck” in the NCAA tournament.
Nevertheless, I want to talk about another sport, baseball. As I was watching a spring training game this weekend, I got to thinking about how many hours players spend over their lives taking batting practice. They spend countless hours honing their swing, focusing all their attention on making sure that the special place on the bat, the sweet spot, connects perfectly to the ball. They know that when this happens, baseball magic ensues! It got me to thinking, what is Extension’s sweet spot? I didn’t have to think long. Our sweet spot is that exchange between an Extension professional and a learner or learners. When we hit that moment just right, Extension education magic ensues! Optimizing that exchange should always be our primary focus of attention. Whether we are directly involved in educating the public as an agent, specialist, or program assistant, facilitating Extension educators in administrative support roles, or as an administrative leader of our Extension system, our focus needs to be on optimizing that interaction.
There are times when a particular issue becomes our focus. If Issue X directly relates to optimizing the educational interaction between our educators and the public, it should be our focus. If it doesn’t, is it really worth our time? Such issues and the effort to resolve them distract us from our sweet spot.
Think about what happens when we focus on optimizing that educational interaction between Extension educator and the public. If an Extension educator’s focus is on optimizing that interaction, needs analyses, program planning, and, to make sure we got it right, program evaluations are more enthusiastically done by the educators. Our great office professionals even more diligently take care of all of the thousands of “behind the scene” activities that facilitate those interactions, and our administrative leaders focus on channeling our limited resources to better enable our Extension educators to reach more and more Kansans. In short, when we focus on our sweet spot, Extension magic ensues!
Let’s make some Extension magic. Let’s focus on our sweet spot.