Adapting to Ambiguity

Adapting to Ambiguity

The Rise of Systems Thinking in The Nature Conservancy

by Nathan Senge

Systems Thinking is hard enough for an individual. For an organization it is staggering. And not just any organization but a largely stratified one that is bigger than the next ten like-minded organizations behind it.  

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has for much of its history operated with a state-by-state way of doing things. Each state had its own operational idiosyncrasies, and while they communicated with one another, they all approached land and water protection in their own way.

Using organizational charts in their own particular styles, these 31 states protected their land in traditional ways. As Michael Reuter of the Missouri chapter says, “there actually was a lot of sharing, but more like how one part of a franchise might share an innovation with another part of the franchise. Lots of innovations at TNC were replicated, and there was some consistency, but there was not much synthesis.”

Reuter says this all changed when they learned that the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico (where the Mississippi empties out) had reached its highest levels in recorded history. This is a zone that undergoes natural oscillations in contaminant concentrations, but if you perform decade-long averages over the numbers, they are for the most part increasing.

The two culprits are nitrogen and phosphorous runoff from the many farms spread over the 31 states feeding into the river. As Reuter says, “USGS has a very solid read on where the contaminants are coming from by measuring loads in streams and linking them to various land use and source load estimates, but there was a lot of uncertainty about how to address it at scale.”

31 states—think about that for a moment. More than half the country contributes runoff to the Mississippi, the nation’s greatest river and long the lore of American narrative and emblem of America’s agricultural might. 

Slowly, those highest up at TNC began to understand that their status quo ways of doing things were no match for the issue. They had to understand the big system at play. As Reuter says, “we had thought about systems and complexity before, but something about how we adopted it in 2014 really shifted our mental model about how we needed to approach this challenge. The systems thinking framework gave us a way to overcome our relentless organizational yearning for certainty, simplicity of strategy, and transactional approaches. It was a huge breakthrough and our energy skyrocketed.”

The Systems Thinking framework they adopted differentiates systems into the simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic. These distinctions are compelling in that they differentiate linear from nonlinear systems, in the parlance of the trademark field of study developed at M.I.T., System Dynamics. Linear, or simple systems, do not in theory exhibit leverage points. An intervention here, practicality aside, is as good as anywhere. But nonlinear systems, of which the complicated, complex, and chaotic span the gauntlet in terms of the number of nonlinear variables present, require an understanding of ‘leverage.’

At its simplest, this means being comfortable with interventions that may make things worse before they get better. That means you have to accept a certain amount of ambiguity in your actions, as they rarely yield immediate positive results. 

“This was tough for an organization like TNC,” says Reuter. “We are so bound by metrics—we want results because that’s where funding comes from. But operating in a system as complex as this requires releasing that expectation.” 

Those at the Mississippi River Basin program embraced this new kind of thinking, and first began to achieve real lift-off when Roger Milliken and his wife, Margot, began funding the effort.

“I flew over the gulf zone and knew this had to be done,” says Milliken. “That zone looked like a fatal wound in our country’s central artery.” 

Thus the Mississippi River Basin Project became a national project from the start, despite whatever resistance some states initially offered. As Mace Hack says, “it was not optional to ignore it if your state was important to the effort, though quite a few tried to. Former Central U.S. Division Director Rob McKim made the project a priority, something you couldn’t opt out of. He expected state directors to show up, and to participate, and eventually requested that all the key states showcase at least one contribution to the project in their list of objectives. So it was this and the Milliken ‘push—‘ both the funding and the emotional urging he and Margot brought to the effort that got it to launch. And we actually had a lot in place already to build from, as we had been working on the Mississippi River since the late 1990s. But it had always been at the margins of our priorities.”

For the first time, Reuter says, “we began really talking across state lines. And we saw real results that evinced a new level of organizational collaboration, like when the Gulf of Mexico project contributed funds to Iowa to effect a crucial policy change. They knew Iowa was facing an important decision that would affect all downstream states. When you look at the pollution maps of nitrogen and phosphorous flows into the Mississippi, they mostly come out of Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. The basin covers 40% of the country but these are the states where the contaminants are mostly coming from, and our staff was beginning to think systemically and understand that.”

As Systems Thinking began to catch on, the project’s staff began seeing on-the-ground changes that defied long-held political biases, like when a river gauge was installed on the Wabash river to measure pollution runoff. “It’s one thing just to say you’re a Systems Thinker,” says Reuter, “but it’s another to actually think and act that way and then see real on-the-ground changes like this. It’s beyond just policy shifts. Things on the ground that have never happened before because they were politically blocked are actually happening now.” 

Milliken agrees with Reuter on this. “I’ve always seen myself as an on-the-ground kind of person. That’s why I adopted a binocular focus for this project, meaning that we would focus on tangible ecological results in local areas alongside the growth of a team separated over great distances. Both are crucial.” 

While the goal the Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) Gulf Hypoxia Task Force set for reducing the hypoxic zone itself—a 20% decrease in its surface area by 2025—may be ultimately unattainable, TNC staff have learned that they must target local strategies and support local champions and welcome both private and public funding in order to make things happen both locally and at scale. The gulf is simply too complicated a system, with too many exogenous factors not involving these thirty-one states, to be held to any kind of simple metric shift. It may shrink; it may grow. There is no way to know. All the more reason to galvanize these local efforts by way of a paradigmatic change in thinking driven by the biggest and most complex conservation organization in the country.

As Reuter says, “We had to target our resources to hope to have the impact we wanted. We can’t change the size of the dead zone unless we work in a certain number of watersheds. The Wabash, despite comprising a mere 1% of the Mississippi River Basin, contributes 11% of all nitrogen and phosphorous runoff to the basin and we can’t address the dead zone issue without addressing it. That’s why installing the gauge there was a crucial step. After the Wabash, the big contributors are the Iowa Cedar River, the Rock River in Illinois, and the Miami River in southern Ohio. But we also know we cannot only work in high contribution areas because the size of the basin is so big.”

The fact that the Mississippi River Basin Project is not only underway but gaining momentum is nothing short of miraculous in an organization like TNC. Indeed, Reuter says one cannot overstate just how fundamental a shift in organizational behavior it required. “To be this effectively aligned around a central goal that is so big it seems almost unattainable—it’s unprecedented. And the good news—and I think what’s keeping us going—-is that we keep seeing positive local results. There are massive time lags in this system, but eventually these local actions should contribute to a reduction in the hypoxic zone. And even if that’s not enough, we’ll keep going. We’ve got momentum now. By now everyone has felt the energy that arises within a collaboration of this scale, and it’s self-reinforcing. We are becoming more and more comfortable with the emergent adaptive nature of both the work and the organization. In this, the organization is becoming mimetic of the work itself. It used to be that some of us would crawl under a table three to four years ago when TNC mentioned gulf hypoxia. That pessimism has gone way down. It’s become not just about the gulf but all the tributaries and all the actions we need to take to manage water quality throughout the basin.” 

Indeed, the project’s success has hinged on releasing any expectation of quick change in the gulf, for as Scott Davis says, “it will be decades before any significant change can even be hoped to be seen in the dead zone, unless there is some kind of major positive exogenous influence we have not anticipated. But there’s no reason to suspect that there will be.” 

But that’s fuel to the fire, as Reuter says, and a major reason to redouble their efforts. “There’s no shirking from the complex any longer—we need to be comfortable with this level of ambiguity if we are going to achieve such grand results for people and for nature. It’s become a more fun place to work at because of that. We’ve got the freedom to imagine what is possible, and to do the work that’s necessary. We need to work on our specific probe points—such as the Wabash—knowing that the overall direction is to reduce gulf hypoxia even if we can’t promise a definitive time frame. We need to think about the basin as one big enterprise—what would we do if it was one big enterprise? This project is looked at as a place where we’re learning how to do this kind of new collaborative work, and it is serving as a source of inspiration for other like-minded projects around TNC. There is the international indigenous lands and local communities work, and the new Great Lakes fisheries work, for example. There’s the new work on water markets. And there are half a dozen other examples in TNC that this project can’t claim sole credit for but was certainly a key reference point and inspiration for.”

The project’s success has also supplied many lessons as to how spatially dispersed teams ideally operate, both within and beyond TNC. In this, Reuter says that “pace is very important in terms of this kind of management. The right pace draws us in and the wrong one separates us from one another. One big lesson is slowing down to engage together. You have to continually make connections with the team. That takes time. And at the outset we were typically going too fast. Another lesson is that you have to become conscious to lead with what you are for. It was long a habit in TNC to lead with what you were against. Someone would throw up an idea and everyone would say what didn’t work about it—they’d lead with concern. We’ve flipped that to what are we for—that’s big. We also began becoming comfortable with being vulnerable enough to say that this is what I’m thinking about and this is what’s accurate for me and now let’s look for intersections between each other’s work. This vulnerability was necessary for the team to take down its stress level and mend old degrees of separation.”

Both in terms of attaining local ecological targets and heightening dispersed team performance, Systems Thinking—and all the inherent ambiguity therein—has been the linchpin of the team’s success. For, as Reuter sums up, “we’ve become unleashed from having to promise certainty. We’re comfortable with this being an emergent, adaptive complex system—we are striving to test hypotheses and achieve outcomes from our actions but also to recognize that this is not a linear process. It’s important to ask ourselves this question: how often do we need to adjust to stay ahead and relevant in such a dynamic project? We want to follow through with our probes throughout the system, while we also recognize that we need to remain nimble as the system shifts. Look how much the world has changed since our seminal meeting in 2014. The division in our country about the role of government, for example, and how to approach water management smacks of revolution. But through all that turbulence I’m confident in the adaptability of our team now. I’m confident we can keep flexing with the system as it changes.” 

Read the chronological story of this project