With growing global attention on the biodiversity crisis, including the links between ecosystem health and climate change, conservation is rapidly rising on the public agenda. This growing interest and urgency is driving efforts to step up investment in effective conservation measures that deliver results for both people and their environment. 

But an overlooked key to achieving greater conservation results lies in the realm of organizational performance. Jim Collins, the best-selling author of multiple books on business performance such as Good to Great and Built to Last, highlights the central role that organizations play in human progress across all sectors: 

“It is through the power of human organization- of individuals working together in common cause- that the bulk of the world’s best work gets done.” 

For conservationists, a diverse range of organizations- global networks, local associations, advocacy campaigns, or nature-based businesses- are all key to scaling up efforts and delivering solutions.  But conservation organizations, large and small alike, face many challenges that constrain their ability to achieve greater impact. In a recent study, researchers from Oxford University identify shortfalls in staffing capacity, strategic clarity, and funding availability among the top constraints to conservation organizations’ success. 

These constraints can be particularly pressing for local and grassroots organizations, particularly those in the tropics or the Global South that are working at the frontiers of biodiversity loss, where organizations may have more limited access to the skills, resources, and social infrastructure that they need in order to build successful and durable organizations. As one founder of a local, field-based conservation organization in southern Africa recently told the Maliasili team: 

Most people in the conservation field get into it because they’re passionate about the cause, but rarely do they have the training and experience in the myriad of skills needed to run an effective organization, particularly as the organization becomes successful and grows. You just figure it out as you go, and make more than your share of mistakes in doing so. 

These kinds of dedicated local organizations are precisely the groups that need to be able to scale up their work to address the most urgent conservation priorities. 

While there are many components to effective, high-performing organizations, three areas are particularly fundamental and relevant to conservation efforts: 

• Conservation organizations need to be more strategic, with greater focus and clarity on the impacts they are trying to deliver, and how they bring about change.

• Conservation organizations need to have outstanding management, which drive effective implementation of their aims and strategies.

• Conservation groups need to be able to attract top talent and form them into great teams with strong and dynamic leadership.

Strategic Focus

A clear and compelling strategy is a key foundation for all organizations. A good strategy articulates an organization’s core purpose, its niche relative to others, and what it will do to deliver on its aspirations. This helps keep an organization focused on what it wants to achieve, what it does well, and what its priorities are. 

But conservation organizations’ strategies can be unfocused and muddled.  Organizations often evolve as disparate collections of projects, where the whole winds up being less than the sum of its parts.  Organizations that scramble for funding can wind up being reactive and opportunistic, without a clear core purpose and vision for how they are going to bring about change. One recent report from a gathering of conservation groups noted that a prevalent challenge is the “inappropriate strategic focus of conservation NGOs,” observing that some organizations “try to be ‘all things to all problems in all places’ and thus do not achieve real impact.” Another published commentary calls a lack of clear goals one of five common reasons why many conservation efforts fail. 

These challenges afflict both big and small conservation groups. Small organizations, particularly those that are focused on a particular site or place, often never take the time to develop a clear strategy and can wind up working opportunistically and reactively for years, never fully interrogating why they do the things that they do. Larger organizations, meanwhile, sometimes operate like aggregations of numerous different programs and projects, with little common connective tissue and vision to define the overall organization’s focus and strengths. 

Conservation organizations need to invest more time clarifying their core role, niche, and intended impacts through a clear and focused strategy. This will be critical to accelerating the delivery and efficiency of the solutions which conservation efforts around the world need. 

Management and Execution

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results” –Winston Churchill

A defining feature of great organizations is their efficiency and focus in executing against their strategy- in other words, getting s&%t done.  Management is all about ensuring that organizations deliver results and execute on their goals.  

Conservation organizations, particularly smaller, field-based organizations, tend to chronically underinvest in the management skills and processes that enable efficient execution. Organizations tend to grow organically with a focus on taking on more and more work, and usually outstrip their own capacity to manage their work, teams, and internal development. This is often due to an insufficient appreciation of the importance of management systems and how much time and attention they require as organizations grow and expand their work, and of the importance of investing significant time and energy in managing and developing people. 

In contrast to business training, most conservation training, with its roots in the biological sciences and a focus on technical concerns, does not focus on management at a critical topic and skillset.  Yet conservation organizations of all sizes need to have strong management skills and systems, and make the internal investments to prioritize them. 

Teams and Leadership

The sine qua non of all great organizations is that they have outstanding people at their core. As Jim Collins notes in Good to Great, his best-selling study of business performance, the most successful companies consistently prioritize on getting ‘the right people on the bus’- i.e. recruiting teams made up of talent- before they do anything else. 

Fred Swaniker, the founder of the African Leadership Group, including its School of Wildlife Conservation in Rwanda, highlights the need for conservation in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa to be able to attract the best young talent: 

Sectors cannot grow unless the most talented, passionate, and driven talent is drawn into it. People who would otherwise choose to work at top companies like McKinsey, Bain, Goldman, Amazon, or Google must be drawn into “environmental investing” in Africa.

But as Alex Deghan, the founder of Conservation Xlabs, puts it, “the problem with conservation is that it’s filled with conservationists.” Conservation organizations tend to struggle to attract the kind of diverse, entrepreneurial, multi-disciplinary talent that is needed to foster innovation, build future leaders, and create high-performing teams. 

Conservation organizations need to attract and develop what author and MIT scholar Peter Senge calls ‘systems leaders’; individuals who can build diverse collaborations that can achieve change at a systemic level.  An increasing number of conservation organizations and academic institutions are developing new approaches that incorporate these ideas, such as the new 10-year strategy developed by Cambridge University’s Masters in Conservation Leadership, the African Conservation Leadership Network, or Women for the Environment Africa. 

***

Stepping up to the present scope of global conservation challenges demands urgency, but also greater focus, efficiency, and human talent to be vested in the work of conservation organizations. Conservationists need to build high-performing, well-managed, strategically adept organizations that deliver results. Ultimately if we are going to save the planet, we need not only greater financial investment and more ambitious policy targets- we need truly outstanding conservation organizations as well.

Written by Fred Nelson, CEO, Maliasili