By day, I spend my time thinking about strategic planning and organizational change, but by night, I’m weaving kitchen towels. Recently, I started thinking about a new weaving project and similarities in these two seemingly different parts of my life collided. It occurred to me that weaving is a good metaphor for the planning and change process.

For the past few years I've had the great good fortune to work with the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies' North American Conservation Education Strategy. For the past six years or so, conservation educators from fish and wildlife agencies around the country have worked to develop tools to support high quality conservation education in everything from field investigations to outdoor skills to connecting children and families with the outdoors (check out www.fishwildlife.org, focus area Conservation Education).

Those of us who work in fish and wildlife conservation tend to hang around with people who are as passionate about the resource as we are. We attend meetings with each other and reinforce to each other the importance of what we do. We assume most people know about the history of wildlife conservation in the United States and that they've heard of Aldo Leopold. We're all members of the same choir. You know what? Most of the world doesn't think the way we do, or know anything about most of that stuff - they don't belong to our choir. Hard to imagine, I know. But true.

Have you ever tried convincing someone of something they didn't want to do by persuading them with facts? How did that work for you? No? I didn't think so.

At a recent staff meeting we discussed the challenge of keeping meeting participants engaged and mentally "present" when smartphones and other work or personal situations are vying for their attention. No doubt you've experienced people reading email, sending text messages, and taking calls during meetings. I admit I'm guilty of that. It's a fact of life that budget and staff reductions mean a few people are doing the work of many, and focusing on any particular topic is a luxury, no matter how important the topic in question.

Making good decisions is difficult, particularly when competing priorities and trade-offs are involved. Structured decision making (SDM) is a process that provides a framework to help us think through a decision in a methodical way — it is common sense made explicit. The term structured is misleading to the extent that this is not a rigid process that limits creativity. In fact it’s quite the opposite — by providing a framework and various analytical tools, it melds values and science into decisions in a very documentable way.

It's human nature to solve problems. We are a goal-oriented society and finding solutions is what we do. Unfortunately, the solution - however elegant - often does not match the problem we are trying to solve. Most of us aren't nearly as good at defining problems as we are at finding solutions. Defining problems is hard work. This is especially true of natural resource related problems that are nasty, ugly, complicated, tangled, thorny, difficult, and often seemingly unsolveable messes.