Getting Honest About What We’re Willing to Risk for the Planet

A female proboscis monkey takes a leap in Bako National Park in Malaysian Borneo. (Photo by Gautam Shah)

As part of a small social enterprise focused on unconventional environmental solutions, I’ve regularly pitched larger conservation organizations and funders on helping us scale. Once the province of Silicon Valley tech companies, mainstream conservation organizations now have departments, officers, labs, and think tanks dedicated to innovation. For a while, this—combined with a growing number of conferences, publications, and organizations focused on innovation—made me hopeful that the conservation sector was ready for it.

But I’ve seen little willingness to take the risks that innovation—as distinct from technological and scientific advances like remote sensing and eDNA—demands. There are a few examples. The Seychelles was able to reduce its national debt in exchange for marine protection efforts, and a recent partnership between National Geographic and DeBeers Diamonds aims to protect the Okavango Delta. However, very few large organizations are taking bold risks to solve conservation problems. Their solutions to on-the-ground interventions, fundraising, public engagement, and conservation education remain largely the same as they were 30 years ago.

What’s Holding Us Back?

In a post for the Wildlife Conservation Society earlier this year, Allison Catalano, Jon Fisher, and Heidi Kretser identified some of the biggest fears when it comes to individual and organizational risk-taking. Loosely summarized, they include:

• Fear of losing money now or future funding
• Fear of losing credibility
• Fear of losing your own job or causing the loss of others’ jobs
• Fear of hurting your brand
• Fear of losing current or future partnerships
• Fear of causing ecological or cultural harm

Despite the demonstrated resilience of large conservation NGOs, most of which have been around for more than 60 years, funding and brand can feel especially fragile. A colleague recently asked Femke Bartels, now head of THNK, what made innovation difficult in her previous role as former director of strategy and planning at Greenpeace. “Most organizations are set up with a focus on three- to five-year plans with budgets,” she said. “You are in a glass house, so [the] ‘failing forward’ that is seen as great in the entrepreneurial world will be held against you in the social sector.” Intrapreneurs trying to innovate within large entities face governance issues, bureaucracy, politics, and a risk-averse culture. Many resign themselves to the idea of: Do what you’re good at, get through the day, and you’ll rarely be blamed for a risk you didn’t take.

Increasing Conservation’s Appetite for Risk

So what can we do? Governments are not usually the entities you look to for inspiration on risk-taking, but as part of its “ambition to cement [its] position as a science superpower,” the UK government set up a new, 14.6-billion-pound Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) that makes its intention to take risks explicit. The very first design principle in its official policy statement states: “ARIA will exclusively focus on projects with potential to produce transformative technological change, or a paradigm-shift in an area of science. While it is anticipated that most programmes may fail in achieving their ambitious aims, those which succeed will have profound and positive impact on society.”

We can also look to the private sector. In a 2015 keynote, Google’s former Head of Product Initiatives Ken Norton posed this question to businesses: “Are you 10x or 10%?” To achieve large-scale, 10x growth, he said, “failure must be an option. To succeed wildly means being comfortable with failing dismally.” And think what you will about Jeff Bezos, his perspectives on risk taking could well apply to conservation. A 2015 Amazon shareholder letter read, “Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a 10% chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten."

The 10 largest conservation organizations have a combined annual budget of $3.4 billion. Like most large organizations, profit or nonprofit, a 10 percent return on investment would be thrilling. But with the natural world, there’s so much more at stake than the success or failure of a business. To fill the estimated gap of $824 billion needed to reverse species decline, wildfires, and the loss of natural infrastructure, leaders of the most influential conservation institutions need to take a 100x mentality.

 

In other words, “failing dismally” needs to be part of our equation. In the same way that author Mark Manson suggests that we answer, “What are you willing to struggle for?” to help determine our life path, the conservation field should ask, “What are we willing to risk for the Earth?” to help determine whether it should innovate.

Back-of-the-Napkin Risk Framework

Most organizations usually only tacitly or implicitly consider questions about risk; it isn’t often an explicit part of innovation decisions or resource allocation. But as with ARIA, it needs to be. To help bring fears to the fore and help organizations get real about what they’re willing to risk, our team created a simple back-of-the-napkin risk framework based in part on the work of Alison Catalano, Fisher, and Kretser. Whether assessing the funding of an individual project or the development of a 10-year organizational strategy, we recommend literally writing out your answers on paper, on a whiteboard, or in an email. This will help move risk assessment from a tacit evaluation to an explicit conversation, and align and motivate teams toward a common goal.

As an example, say a large conservation donor called the Nature Protection Society (NPS) were deciding whether to embark on a partnership with a controversial timber extraction company, NRE, to set up new, protected areas in the Congo basin. Starting at the top, NPS would define whether it wants to achieve a tangible outcome, prove or disprove a hypothesis, or learn something unknown—whatever the “100x” means to the organization. From there, it would work through each of the six risk categories, and in the process, define what lines it’s willing to draw to achieve the stated outcome and whether those potential sacrifices are enough to get there. 

NPS might fill in the framework this way:

In Order to: Fully protect an additional 20,000 square miles  of pristine rainforest in the Congo basin from poaching, deforestation, and other destructive extraction

Financial (current or future project funding the organization is willing to “write-off” if it doesn’t achieve its goal): The loss of $500 million we could have otherwise allocated for other purposes

Brand/Credibility (damage the organization is willing to risk to its brand—in the eyes of donors, governments, partners, and the public—if it fails): Up to 20,000 negative press impressions and a 15 percent drop in ranking in the Most Trusted Brands report, due to partnering with NRE

Jobs/Livelihoods (willingness to put jobs at the organization on the line): The loss of up to 50 paid positions due to anticipated reductions in future funding

Partnership (current or future partnerships the organization is willing to forgo if failure is not acceptable to them or if the effort damages the organization’s reputation in their eyes): The loss of one important funder due to partnering with NRE

Ecological (loss of wildlife, habitat, or other ecological assets an organization is willing to accept if things go wrong): The loss of up to 1,000 square miles of rainforest due to the unknown, long-term consequences of the program

Cultural (individual or community livelihoods an organization’s work may compromise): The displacement of up to 10,000 people from land they may have occupied for hundreds of years

This exercise may seem simplistic, and the questions and metrics will differ from organization to organization, but as with anything you might write on the back of a napkin, it’s a starting point for diving into details, engaging staff and partners in conversation, and communicating a position. It also sets the stage for the creation of a risk-management framework that helps guide decision-making and project oversight.

As conservation organizations strive to achieve positive environmental outcomes, they also face a daily struggle to stay afloat and credible. But while failed experiments can create real setbacks for organizations, we can’t make the kind of progress we need to make against long-term, high-stakes environmental challenges without them—a lot of them. And the first step to increasing the field’s appetite for innovation is being honest and open about what we’re truly willing to risk for the planet.

Read more stories by Gautam Shah.