De-Balkanizing The Nature Conservancy
The Rise of Collaboration Across State Lines
by Nathan Senge
Every cause deserves its patron saint. Some are lucky enough to get two. For the Mississippi River Basin Project at The Nature Conservancy (TNC), this pairing has been former TNC Chairman Roger Milliken Jr. and his wife, Margot.
The Mississippi River Basin program is the vanguard of TNC. It is a project of a scope unprecedented, and its success—in terms of reducing contaminant inflows to the Mississippi river and in fostering new levels of organizational collaboration—has already defied everyone’s expectations.
Organizational inertia can be a juggernaut in large, stratified companies, and TNC for one had long been a “balkanized” organization, in Milliken’s words, for its state-by-state way of doing things. “The Nature Conservancy has always had a state-based focus and that has been the biggest hurdle to overcome,” he says. “When I joined the Maine Chapter board in the mid-1990s, our maps didn’t even include New Hampshire, let alone Québec and New Brunswick! And yet the Mississippi watershed includes parts of 31 states, and the Gulf of Mexico is supplied by waters from numerous countries, so we knew this kind of insular viewpoint would have to change.”
In this, there had been little effective communication between the states until the project began to take shape. “There were updates that were exchanged,” says Michael Reuter, “but not a lot of synthesis of ideas.”
Now the states not only work together but are united around a grand vision of reducing nitrogen and phosphorous inflows to the river that have been pouring into the river’s delta in the Gulf of Mexico. This wash-out has contributed to one of the world’s largest hypoxic, or dead zones, where biodiversity is quickly fading in the wake of record algae blooms.
Thankfully the project is already beginning to have an impact. Not in terms of reducing the size of the zone just yet, as that may actually take decades, but in terms of local initiatives gaining momentum, like the spread of the 4Rs program that started in Ohio and has moved across the state and into two others. The ‘4Rs,’ meaning ‘the right place, the right time, the right amount, and the right product,’ represent the growing trend for agricultural retailers to work effectively with farmers who are adopting new ideas quickly and learning from one another how to implement them.
“None of any of this would have happened without Roger Milliken,” says Michael. “He’s the spiritual and financial guru of the whole initiative. He and Margot gave a gift of $2.5 million to a special advisory committee dedicated to working at the level of whole systems, one million of which ended up going to the Mississippi River Basin project over a period of four years.”
Indeed, Roger speaks of the project with the steadfastness of a watchful father, and those at TNC reference him with a kind of hushed and thankful reverence. His motivation for an undertaking of this magnitude came from a visceral response he had when he first saw the delta after the Deepwater oil spill of 2010. “Back in 2010, in the middle of my Chairmanship, the Deepwater well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. I went to Louisiana to be with our people there. It was while flying over the Gulf after that huge oil spill that I felt the amount of destruction we had wreaked on the river, the delta, and the Gulf over decades. TNC had to do more!”
Roger learned quickly that the policy entrance to the global, or at least the large-scale/systemic, is through the local. If you think about it, it’s actually a truism. There is no way to simply effect global change. Every action must have a point of contact.
Before the project took flight there had been an undue conflict between the local and the systemic in TNC’s policy initiatives, as if one had to win out over the other. As Roger says, “we are living in a time when the challenges to nature are staggering, and the evidence is overwhelming that we humans are diminishing the planet’s life-sustaining capacity on which we depend. There’s a tendency of high-achieving leaders to conclude that the answer is to work harder, to work faster, to do more and to do so at the largest possible scale. This approach was wearing people out, compounding desperate frenzy with a message that, consciously or not, anything less than a global focus was a waste of time. This was leading to a cultural crisis. People felt devalued and disheartened at best—angry and upset at worst.”
But the Millikens understood the critical intersection of local and systems-wide influence, as leverage points are invariably local. Indeed, Milliken says the antidote to this global-intimidation malaise was a renewed focus on the local—hence this half of his ‘binocular approach’ stressing positive ecological effects on the ground that writ large amount to systemic change and increased team performance.
For there is simply no other way to effect change, and this the Millikens have stolidly emphasized. “We had not yet learned as an organization that place-based work is not the antithesis of global impact but the genesis of it. We had to help people at TNC understand that achieving goals in specific places was not contrary to but essential to watershed-wide success. This is not an either-or proposition; it requires all hands on deck, working at every level.”
Such a proposition has actually been curiously popular at TNC, as the organization is structured in a way that insists that state chapter leaders focus first on their own state programs before helping others. So while TNC staff grew up with an idea of state boundaries, and they still addressed local issues as a necessary means of securing funding, their views began to expand as they recognized new scientific developments that pushed them towards a more systems-based perspective.
Rebecca Smith says that it was indeed by way of the states operating individually that they came to embrace their new inter-state role. “We saw key leadership coming from people like Michael Reuter, Scott Davis, Larry Clemens, Jan Glendening, Mace Hack, and Rob McKim. Rob went around and talked to state directors and said that you have to put the 31-state focus into your goals and objectives. And all the while the scientific work done by Director of Science and Impact Measures in TNC Missouri Steve Herrington and his colleagues helped identify the needed intervention points, such as the Wabash river. We did this state by state, and it began to inform a bigger strategy so that state conservation work represented a more expansive, all-encompassing goal like hypoxic zone reduction. Thanks to a systems mapping exercise led by Conversant consultant Scott Spann, we began to identify key leverage points, such as the necessity of exogenous funding. We then began to shift personnel around to pull these various levers and assess their results both within and between states.”
For if you focus only on the local you are in danger of coming up short on the funding, as donors need to know that “dream” initiatives are at stake. As Roger says, “I did speak up and say that local goals alone weren’t transformative enough to get me—or any other donor– to add another zero to a check I might write. I said the goal must be visionary—and achievable—enough to inspire donors to give transformational gifts. We needed to know we weren’t taking small steps but were part of an inspiring effort to reverse the downward trajectories of one of America’s most magnificent intertwined ecosystems—the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. So I suggested in a meeting that the team look to the Gulf—the recipient of all the nutrient pollution from upstream, as the ultimate scorecard for our success in the watershed. They came to determine that the ultimate measure of progress would be to reduce the size of the hypoxic area of the Gulf. To turn around 150 years of degradation is daunting, but the prospect of putting the river and Gulf on the road to health and vitality is worthy of a lifetime of work. I know it’s overwhelming to think of the whole Mississippi like this, but at the same time we never would have gotten anywhere if we had only worked state by state. The 20% reduction of the zone by 2025 is an aspirational goal, which is crucial for fundraising long-term, even though we know we might never get there.”
This kind of orientation helped secure one of the biggest outside grants for the project, the Enterprise rent-a-car gift. Rebecca says that “the Enterprise gift was for our new focus on the big system.”
Given TNC’s traditional reward structure, which focused on intra-state conservation goals, effecting key local changes en route to such a grand vision—such as installing the Wabash river gauge to measure contaminant inflow in a political averse region—could only be made possible by granting key staff incentives.
As Roger says, “the job of every state chapter director is to fill their own budget first and only then to look at something that transcends that geography, which makes it hard to count on the support necessary to build momentum. The Mississippi project, with Conversant’s help, has been having honest conversations about this. For example, ‘are we aligned on our shared commitments to the watershed, or will it be the eleventh item on each of our ten-item to-do lists?’”
Making this key shift in objectives took time, and there were plenty of setbacks. As Smith says, “after that meeting we went back to our regular jobs and we began doing things the way we’d always done them. We didn’t plan that this one-day collective effort would end up being such a big part of our life. So, for the moment things began to stall. We needed more funding to keep this new project moving. People didn’t see it as part of their jobs yet, whereas now most of the staff sees it as part of their work. That’s a triumph.”
This occurred in part thanks to the usage of USGS maps of nitrogen and phosphorous runoff that Rob Mckim provided. Looking at those giant blemishes trickling their blood trails into the river made it more clear than ever that the different point sources were like acupuncture points in a dying patient. As Roger says, “Steve Harrington and Scott Spann put out maps of the nutrient loading, and at that time Rob Mckim headed The Nature Conservancy’s Central Division. He said that when he looked at the USGS heat map that showed the location and intensity of pollutant runoff, it struck him that it was like looking at a map of cancer cells in a terminally ill patient. The map and his response to it convinced us that we had to focus on reducing nutrients where the runoff was greatest—not following our usual approach of saying, ‘nutrients are a problem for this whole watershed, so let’s create three nutrient reduction projects in every state chapter.’ Instead, we decided that focusing on the ‘I’ states—Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, and Indiana, and especially Indiana’s Wabash river—which were the biggest point source contributors—would be essential to our progress. It was particularly notable that, as part of the Gulf of Mexico initiative, Iowa received funds from many states for a new initiative dedicated to reducing its nutrient pollution. It was one of the first times that Margot and I understood that culture change was underway, a change that addressed a major impediment to whole-system thinking. Mike Tetreault, Chief People Officer of TNC, caught some of the buzz about the excitement and became intrigued, and Michael Reuter launched a like-minded 90-day project in the Great Lakes around Sustainable fisheries.”
TNC staff also began to focus on the Atchafalaya Basin in Louisiana, as 30 percent of the Mississippi’s water drains through it en route to the Gulf of Mexico, making it a key sponge that can draw contaminants out of the river before they can settle into the ocean. Bryan Piazza oversaw this project to ensure that while all efforts were being made to reduce contaminant inflow upstream, all efforts were also being made to ensure the longevity of this key natural outflow in the system.
This new systems-wide orientation is critical in light of the immense geographic scope of this problem. As Roger continues, “At this point we are delighted with the collective effort now underway. Fundraisers have learned how to ‘sell’ a project that lacks all the usual markers of a successful project—a defined, iconic natural area that will be protected forever in a short period of time with a limited amount of money. The Mississippi river is a continent-sized watershed, with multiple interconnected problems, and the best we can do is test and develop effective responses to small bits at a time. The Nature Conservancy cannot do this alone. It will require numerous partners and we will need billions of dollars to address it. It took us 150 years to degrade the river to this point, and it will take decades, at the very least, to turn it all around. Thankfully, we succeeded in raising a total of $8 million from two donors this year [2018] alone, so we’re starting to get the response we need.”
In sum, the Mississippi River Basin Project has successfully launched and is hurtling forward. As Roger so poignantly puts it, “The Nature Conservancy is learning how to think—and act—like a watershed. What’s more—the excitement is contagious, and programs all over the organization are reaching out to learn about the secret sauce that is being cooked up in the Mississippi watershed.”
Nathan Senge is a Writer for the Academy for Systems Change. He holds a summa cum laude B.A. from Dartmouth College in Chemistry, with a Minor in Physics, and a M.A. in Journalism and Media Studies from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He also holds certificates in System Dynamics from M.I.T., and in Advanced Negotiation from Harvard University.