“I gave so many signs,
So many signs,
So many signs
You didn’t even see the signs”
- Taylor Swift, Exile
What do DJing and lake management have in common? You need to read the vibe and adjust.
I recently read the book Night People by Mark Ronson, a renowned DJ and music producer (Amy Winehouse, Bruno Mars, and much more). In the book, Ronson describes DJing as an act of radical attention. It’s not about showcasing your own taste or proving how deep your record collection is. It’s about reading the room. He writes about watching body language, noticing when energy rises or dips, and understanding that a dance floor can shift in seconds. The best DJs, in his view, are part psychologist and part anthropologist, studying micro-reactions and adjusting in real time.
For Ronson, great DJing is empathy. The next song isn’t the one you most want to play. It’s the one the room needs. That might mean raising the tempo, pulling back to build tension, or pivoting genres entirely. Success comes from surrendering ego and staying attuned to the collective mood. It’s not about forcing your preference on others. When it works, the DJ and the crowd become collaborators, building something together moment by moment. It’s magical.
That philosophy feels deeply familiar to me in my work facilitating watershed planning meetings.
When I’m sitting in a room with county commissioners, Soil and Water Conservation District staff, farmers, lake association members, and state agency partners, I’m not just moving through an agenda. I’m reading posture, tone, side conversations, and the subtle shift when energy tightens or softens. Just like a DJ can lose a dance floor with one wrong track, a facilitator can lose a room by pushing too hard, moving too fast, or ignoring an undercurrent of concern.
The next “song” in a watershed meeting isn’t always the next slide. Sometimes it’s a break. Sometimes it’s naming the tension in the room. Sometimes it’s setting up subcommittees to work through specific issues.
And it doesn’t stop in the meeting room.
Adaptive lake management works the same way. We set goals. We implement lake projects. We monitor water quality. Then we watch what the lake tells us. Did phosphorus drop? Did clarity improve? Are aquatic plants responding the way we hoped? Are fish responding the way we hoped? If not, we adjust. Change the mix. Try a different approach. Build on what’s working. Keep monitoring.
Like DJing, lake management isn’t a fixed playlist. It’s responsive. Conditions change with weather patterns, land use, funding cycles, and community priorities. The work requires humility. The lake doesn’t care what we intended. It responds to what we actually did.
In all three spaces (the dance floor, the meeting room, and the lake) success comes from deep listening and the willingness to adapt. You can prepare all you want. You can build the perfect plan or queue up the perfect set. But eventually you have to look up. You have to pay attention. You have to notice what’s shifting beneath the surface.
And that kind of attention is harder than it sounds. Listening that closely to a dance floor crowd, a room full of stakeholders, and subtle ecological signals requires being fully present. It means holding complexity without rushing to simplify it. It asks you to manage your own reactions while staying open to others.
But it’s also meaningful work. Like a perfect night on the dance floor, it can be magical.
There’s something deeply human about choosing responsiveness over control. About trusting the feedback you’re getting from a dancing crowd, a tense conversation, or Secchi disk readings. Maybe that’s what good stewardship really is. Not rigid certainty. Not ego. But empathy in action. A steady willingness to listen, to learn, and to adjust moment by moment, season by season, in partnership with the people and the waters we care about.
Moriya Rufer is a lake biologist with 20 years experience working with and loving lakes in northern Minnesota.
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