by Peter Senge
There is no doubt that the Mississippi River Basin Project represents a historic step for a pragmatic results-oriented organization like TNC. But there is an equally important, deeper logic starting to emerge around a long-term goal like this when measuring success in the short run is virtually impossible. By stretching toward an aspirational aim that is truly meaningful to people in TNC, the Mississippi River Basin program has “transformed the TNC energetic system,” in the words of one participant. It has fostered new networks of collaboration, such as among scientists now working across state boundaries. It has led to new conservation and fundraising strategies. It has broadened and deepened overall ‘nutrient load’ knowledge across the states. And, it has led to valuing new individual and collective leadership skills like deeper listening, more authentic conversations, and building relationships of trust across institutional boundaries –and how to build such capacities.
In short, ripples of benefit have reached into areas no one could have predicted.
“The MsB effort has changed the way senior leaders are expected to operate,” says Glendening. “We have gone from a federation of states to seeing collaboration as a core competency.” “Systems thinking and shared leadership would have never been seen as priorities twenty years ago,” says Reuter. “And this has been done in an external environment, especially in the last few years, that is very polarizing.” “The matter of voice is really the backbone,” says Smith. “When people feel their voice matters and that others are really paying attention, they will follow up with actions that can be counted on.”
Larry Clemens, Indiana State Director, then North American Agriculture Director of TNC
The shifts in engagement have led to shifts in strategy. “The MsB had major influence on my organization and in turn on the TNC Global Ag Plan,” says Clemens, head of TNC’s North American Agriculture organization. Working on the larger agriculture supply chains has led to “Over 150 soil health demo farms have been established in the basin. The Midwest Row Crop Collaborative has been established with seven-figure investments and nine companies, and TNC has set the bar for the entire width of the supply chain… with on-the-ground implementation with 41,000 non-farmer land owners.”
We had been trying to work with a ‘conservation by design’ philosophy for many years – aimed at embracing the needs of people and nature,” says Reuter, “but it had not taken off. Now, it seems like we are getting traction. Knowing ‘what you are for’ versus what you are against has made a big difference in talking to farmers about how the land is managed differently and soil health—not only about fertilizer application, as well as in working with fertilizer industry and other ag businesses… We have soil health success stories of a dozen more states in Mississippi Basin. At our recent big 4R (nutrient reduction strategy; Right Source, Right Rate, Right Time, Right Place) summit in Chicago over 300 growers were present… it just feels like the right ideas in the right time and right place.”
“When the decision was made that the MsB effort needed a dedicated fundraiser, we decided to use existing state chapter resources versus hiring MsB’s ‘own’ fundraisers,” says McLane of the Missouri chapter. “This was a huge shift in my mind. I expected the same old approach where a program has to hire and control all their own resources, which always ends up building wasteful boundaries and redundancies. When this didn’t happen, I was really impressed…this same approach has now been repeated several times and has proven a worthy way of working efficiently and effectively across boundaries.” This shift was aided by a next round of grants from the Millikens to enable existing state resources to participate on the Mississippi River Basin whole system work, which created bandwidth for states to contribute resources without sacrificing their own state chapter priorities in the process.
Of course, successful fundraising also hinged on how to tell the story and evoke the sense of possibility that was growing within the organization. “We started gaining ground about how to talk about really doing this,” said Smith. A big part of this shift revolved around moving from planned programs and targeted quantitative results, like acres of land preserved, to the aspiration to reduce nutrients throughout the entirety of the Mississippi system. “We tried things and got to feel more comfortable with failing”, said Smith.
It helped that they found a few funders drawn to the ambition of the effort, starting with board member Brenda Shapiro, and then a $5 million gift from The Enterprise car rental company. “Without such a big project in which we were already in action, we would not have been considered for that (Enterprise) gift, especially as state-by-state staff need to fill their state buckets,” said Smith. According to McLane, “Myself and others at TNC working on the grant believed MsB was in a good position to handle $2M per year and put it to good conservation work, not just hiring people. And the money was applied directly to the levers without argument from any of the states in the basin. The Shapiro funding (private individual) had some of the same hallmarks.” The lever of “whole system fundraising” will undoubtedly be a strategic focus for the indefinite future, “Although Roger loves hairy complex problems, other people don’t.” said Margot Milliken. “But If only 10% of donors have appetite for something like this, that’s still a big enough group of people to find partners and people who care as much as the people doing work.”
Along the way, a significant organizational change started to unfold as McKim, began to build in explicit Mississippi River Basin collaboration goals into the TNC North America’s and individual states’ formal objectives, aided again by the Millikens’ support for state funding to backfill local resources. Especially in the early stages, such extrinsic incentives were needed to break down internal structural barriers and as complements to the excitement and intrinsic aspirations of those already dedicated to the effort. “Many state directors had to be impelled to do this work from the top-down,” said Smith, and that, “thankfully, has changed. Now those at all rungs of the work feel compelled to make the work part of their core contributions.”
Starting in November 2016, a new collaborative approach to building collaborative leadership skills was piloted at TNC. Teams from three river system programs, Mississippi River Basin, the Colorado and the Central Appalachian, came together for a 12-month capacity- and community building process guided by Conversant with the Academy for System Change. The program was organized around core tools for systems thinking and collaborative leadership and was seen as one way to further embed these tools within TNC and accelerate impact. With each team focused on their own real project work at hand, it was a good chance to gauge how widely these capacities had begun to spread. McLane felt that the process helped clarify “how our skills had improved and… helped… the Colorado River team for sure to speed up their learning. I believe it also caused Central Apps to rethink some of their own assumptions and approaches.” This aim of cross-cutting learning community is to speedup “sharing challenges and learning across all the TNC river system projects,” says Murray Allen.
The ripples also extend beyond TNC, though these may be a bit harder to discern in such a short time. The early learning of the Mississippi River Basin influenced a shared leadership approach adopted across the North American organization and reflected in a new structure and collaborative way of working. “There has been a huge increase in collective awareness of the role nutrients play, for instance how nitrogen and phosphorous contaminants affect the Gulf of Mexico,” says McLane. “This awareness both within and outside TNC went up a standard deviation in magnitude, and not just for the science folks!” This is also reflected in several recent policy and public funding wins including the recent federal Farm Bill and H2Ohio, where many TNC people from across the organization shared resources and expertise across business units to achieve outcomes that we would not achieve alone. As Justin Brooks, Government Relations (GR) Director in Mississippi, said, “I’m especially thankful for the role MsB has played in pursuing GR resources for states within the basin. Without these capacities, MsB and the individual states within would lack the comprehensive voice needed to accomplish such a large mission.”