Managing Pests with Your Whole Mind

Your good feeling is gone. Just when you hit your stride for the week, your email rings out like an undertaker’s bell. You don’t need to look; you just know it is bad. Your suspicions are confirmed when you finally open it to see that Mrs. Smith called the office, again, because she found more droppings in her pantry.

To be fair, it isn’t your fault. After all, you followed your company’s residential rodent control guidelines. Despite your best efforts, the problem seems to be getting worse.

Whether this describes you or your employees, we have all been there. It could be a restaurant with German cockroaches, a food plant with warehouse beetles or a condo with Norway rats. Good pest management can be challenging — and it is frustrating!

So, let me suggest something, and as the title suggests, it involves the way you think about managing pests: right-brained pest management. Now, before you think I am going to bore you with neuroscience or Roger Sperry’s split-brain theory, hang on, because this is a bit simpler than you think — sort of, anyway.

LEFT-BRAINED PEST MANAGEMENT. The start of solid pest management begins on the left side of your brain. Since none of us dreamed about “killing things” for a living when we were children, we all started by learning the basics as adults. Things like setting out at least five snap traps near droppings if your client saw one mouse. Or, if your client found ants in the kitchen, begin with sanitation, and if that doesn’t work, follow the ant trail to the source and apply an ant bait.

These types of guidelines address most of the pest problems we face and help us develop consistent service across an organization. It condenses pest management into clean, repeatable performances, and it works well — most of the time. That is, left-brained pest management works well most of the time.

When you are facing a difficult pest, begin by asking yourself some open-ended questions, such as: What are some reasons my control solutions aren’t working? Are my actions getting in the way of the control solutions? How can I change my control solutions to achieve success?

But what happens when it doesn’t work? What happens when we set the snap traps where the droppings are, but we don’t capture a single mouse? What if, after we apply ant bait to active trails, the ants avoid the bait? That is when we need to realize, as author Stephen Covey suggests, “The way we see the problem is the problem.” A new level of thinking is required. We need right-brained pest management.

RIGHT-BRAINED PEST MANAGEMENT. Outstanding pest management is found on the right side of your brain. Now, before you move your salad fork to your left hand and purchase prints of Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory,” realize I am talking about learning how creative thinking fits into pest management.

What I am saying is, no mouse has ever read Truman’s Guide. That means they don’t know to only travel 10 to 25 feet and mostly along walls. So, if pests don’t know the rules that we have created for them, then we must be willing to think outside of our rules.

Pest professionals who use their right brain understand that no matter how well planned our control measures are, pests are diverse and adaptive. So, sometimes we need to implement creative, outside-the-box, innovative ways of thinking to tackle the challenging problems we face. Become a detective and think three dimensionally. When we implement custom, creative, non-linear control methods, we demonstrate right-brained pest management and open ourselves up to tremendous success in all sorts of control strategies.

LEARN TO USE YOUR CREATIVE BRAIN. Learning to use your creative brain may take some work, especially if you are entrenched in systems thinking. When you are facing a difficult pest, begin by asking yourself some open-ended questions, such as: What are some reasons my control solutions aren’t working? Are my actions getting in the way of the control solutions? How can I change my control solutions to achieve success?

When we ask these questions, we use our right brain to creatively think about and alter our control efforts. The hardest part is to stop long enough to think about the situation, and most of us struggle with that. We usually need to just stop being busy for a moment to think about the problem.

When I was a technician, I learned to do just that. Stop, sit down, say a quick prayer and think about it for a while. It is challenging to get past how wrong it feels to waste time by sitting down on the job to think. But I promise that after solving one difficult problem, you will look at your time differently.

If you are coaching an employee toward right-brained thinking, help them become the expert. Give them enough space to discover the solution on their own. Instead of giving them a list of solutions, empower them to take some time and think for themselves by asking them questions like the ones listed above.

This article isn’t likely to remedy all your pest management problems, but perhaps it will help you gain control of that one solution that has eluded you. It all starts by using your whole mind.

Alex Blahnik is an associate certified entomologist and a preventative controls qualified individual. He serves the operational teams of Terminix as a technical manager.