When Young Farming Champion Lucy Collingridge recently interviewed Michael Bungay Stanier (MBS) she put to him a Wool Industry challenge.
MBS used the Drama Triangle concept to frame his response ( Lucy’s full interview with MBS will go live on 8th Oct 2020.)
Australian Dairy Farmers President, Terry Richardson’s OP-ED last week put the Australia dairy industry’s toxic culture front and centre.
Word on the street is there is no shortage of people who agree with him.
Now that Terry has opened Pandora’s Box – What next
My experiences have shown me the Australian dairy industry ( at all levels) has spent so much time perfecting the drama triangle it has no concept of what its world would look like without it
As Lucy and MBS have highlighted the agricultural landscape isn’t alone in favouring the drama triangle over the TED model. We all can default to this culture when its the predominate culture. How do we reframe the toxic negativity? How do we help victims become creators, persecutors become challengers and rescuers become coaches ?
When boiling the ocean isn’t an option perhaps dairy might like to take a leaf out of the NSW Local Land Services model and provide extensive personal and professional development for their team members to be resilient to the negativity and help farmers who are entrenched in persecutor or victim mode to have outcomes focused conversations.
What can we do?
We can all boil our own glass of water by learning to recognise Drama Triangle patterns and call them out
Great example from Unions NSW today on Twitter. Sounds like some-one is feeling undervalued. Classic mix of Victim/Rescuer and maybe even a little bit of persecutor/finger pointing thrown in for effect.