Harnessing the Latent

Harnessing the Latent

The Rise of Empathetic Dialogue at The Nature Conservancy

by Nathan Senge

Listening begs for mergence. Instead of jousting opinions, it offers an embryo of synergy. It is not a vehicle for petty competition.

Two hallmark developments at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) sparked the Mississippi River Basin Program: adopting Systems Thinking and de-balkanizing state-centric conservation programs, but the rise of empathetic listening and communication has sustained it.

Real listening requires empathy, which in turn requires easing one’s innermost assumptions. When one travels through a foreign country, one can hold to one’s bubble of habits or one can release them in the expectation that there is no expectation.

This kind of empathy requires surrender. It requires admitting that you do not know entirely what is going on simply because you do not have the reserves of history the residents of a given place do. So you must surrender what you think you know in order to glean a way of life that has for others long been gliding along. If this occurs, there can be a mergence of traditions brought from both sides, the outlander and the denizen, and in that fusion can be growth.

Mores change across regions for important reasons. Climates change. Traditions change. Rituals change, and no less so than in the 31 states comprising the Mississippi River Basin.

Communicating in this way across state lines has been the third and final lynchpin for the unprecedented success of the Mississippi River Basin Project at TNC. Both Mace Hack and Jan Glendening, who personally oversaw much of this transformation, testify to this. As Mace says, “Initially, I didn’t think any of this could work. There was just no way. Shrinking the hypoxic zone was too big a goal and TNC was rutted in its state-by-state way of doing things. I thought it was complete pie-in-the-sky stuff and I said no.”

But as communication across state lines deepened in tandem with the the spread of Systems Thinking and accompanying de-balkanization of TNC policy, Mace’s view began to change. “Those two developments combined to show me this was actually possible. We could do this. TNC could expand beyond just fencing off land plots in different states. I began to see the Mississippi River Basin as a project with amazing potential and I felt it was important that we consider the whole basin and not just the river. In this, I had some ‘One Conservancy’ cynicism. Are we really going to share our abilities, our funding, our credit for success? Was this going to be something different? Were we really going to listen to one another? Collective intention requires alignment, not just agreement, and  success was going to be found in the empathetic valuing of all perspectives.”

This attitude was pivotal in guiding how the dialogue at TNC began to deepen. “At first, our meetings could be really adversarial, especially when crossing state lines,” says Mace. “We think this. They think that. To engage in conversation involving empathetic suspension, that took patience. And it took the funding from Roger Milliken and his wife Margot to show that there was muscle behind this.”

Jan Glendening echoes this sentiment. “I remember the St. Louis meeting. This was the first time we invited a trustee, and I brought one of mine, John Ashenbrenner, from Iowa. He kept making the point: ‘This doesn’t have to be this hard.’ We had a number of breakthrough moments in that meeting. We learned to focus on the quality of our listening and the timing of what we needed to talk about and decide on things together instead of just filling out our templates. I remember the group struggled with the concept of reciprocity, in terms of the states being asked to share their resources with one another. My philosophy has always been to give money to others without asking for something in return, and I spoke to that by way of a personal example in the meeting and it seemed to move people. It’s how a lot of the first inter-state communicative bridges were formed.”

This St. Louis meeting didn’t merely involve a couple key people taking the reins. It was about fueling a team that saw its collaboration as the success behind all conservation.

“I made a plea for reciprocity,” says Jan. “This project needed to be more than just a collective fundraising effort for the benefit of a few places and states. In the past, we had always spoken up about what we were against, but I argued to re-frame our perspective to one of what we could support and see promise in. Shifting that perspective boosted our alignment as a spatially dispersed team with no clear hierarchy, which is not a typical governance structure at TNC. This new project has grown from the bottom up, not the top down. It involves genuinely shared leadership. We’ve had tough conversations within this leadership team, and have held to our scope and focus.”

This way of operating began to attract major attention from other divisions of TNC and beyond, says Jan. “Our way of working moved beyond just the Mississippi River Basin. ‘You are doing something right over there’ is something we began to hear a lot of. There has been a direct connection to the growth of this ‘shared leadership’ approach at the North American regional level.”

To buttress this new approach, Mace championed a journaling exercise that people could practice independently and at a distance. “I wanted to know what other people were thinking about this new way of working. As they completed periodic journal entries, it became apparent that we were all learning about becoming a part of something bigger, and this released a lot of energy. It was all tied to making sure people were heard. We don’t by default always practice good listening behavior or reflection; it’s always needed reinforcement and practice. Zoom calls and the like are necessary, given our dispersed layout, but these kinds of exercises have proven fruitful in holding people together throughout the interim gaps between in-person meetings.”

Conversant ‘adjust’ meetings were also helpful in holding this new dispersed team together. As Mace says, “We had to figure out how to build a durable way of collaborating, a way that would endure the many pauses between our meetings. As Anne Murray Allen says, ‘dispersed teams need reinforcement. It’s easy for their momentum to fizzle once they are apart in the wake of a few great in-person meetings.’ Routine check-ins are integral to this kind of virtual solidity, because while in-person meetings are imperative, they just can’t happen all the time.” And now in the time of Covid-19, they happen less and less, rendering virtual strength of this sort essential to the project’s success. 

Jan likens this kind of group functioning to the fusion of individuality and togetherness at the heart of a successful track and field squad. As a former javelin-thrower, she says, “part of the challenge we faced was trying to get new people to see how we could work together differently. How to ‘on-board’ them? In this, I remember using a track meet metaphor. What does it take to win as a team—especially when each person has their own event? I had first hand experience with this from high school and it was profound. I was in a field event, but the whole team could not do well without top results from the track athletes as well. It’s a team; even though we have all these events, these states, and these particular roles and ways of doing things. Without them all working together there can be no victory. And there has been victory. The Mississippi River Basin program is still the number-one example of success at TNC in terms of increasing collaboration across state lines. It allows leaders to let go of control, because people want to feel a part of the bigger picture beyond their state. It’s about shared leadership as a team, working together and identifying the contribution we all have to make.”