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Testing your ideas against reality can be challenging. Not everything will go as planned. It’s about keeping an open mind, having a clear hypothesis and running multiple tests to see if you have enough directional evidence to keep going.
This is the How I Tested That Podcast, where David J Bland connects with entrepreneurs and innovators who had the courage to test their ideas with real people, in the market, with sometimes surprising results.
Join us as we explore the ups and downs of experimentation… together.
David J Bland (0:1.112)
Welcome to the podcast, Michael.
Mike (0:2.862)
Hey, thanks, David. It's great to be here.
David J Bland (0:4.974)
I'm so happy you're here. We first connected several years ago and I was always fascinated about how you're blending sort of design and habitat design and testing all together and innovation. And I know we were talking a little bit and we collaborated a little bit in the past on how do you test habitat design and everything and use kind of assumptions mapping and experiment design.
Mike (0:26.372)
happen.
David J Bland (0:28.318)
And I'm so glad you were able to make some space out of your busy schedule to join us because I would love for you to share some of your background and your story with our audience today.
Mike (0:37.114)
Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited to share. I mean, there's lots of good lessons and things that don't work. So it's all part of the journey.
David J Bland (0:44.622)
Yeah, so maybe you can give people a little background on yourself and this kind of unique blend you have on sort of design and habitat design, but also be willing to test things and learn at the same time.
Mike (0:47.994)
Yeah.
Mike (0:56.248)
Yeah, absolutely. So I actually started my career as a zookeeper. So loved that work, did it. That took me for a number of years working around the US in a few zoos, moved to Africa to work with in situ. So wild species in Africa and conservation work and how that all went, which was really eye opening and then came back to the States and took a different path. I wasn't planning on, but got my masters in organization development and change management and worked for not for profit. They worked with a lot of different types of organizations.
basically how do you design change and create the conditions for change. So I loved that work, did it for about six years and then fell into actually working for an architecture firm of all things that specialized in designing zoo and aquarium habitats. And so it may not sound like it makes a lot of sense, but architect is all about design and thinking and creativity. My background is all about animals conservation and design thinking. So I did that for about six, seven years and I still
hold a role within that team. And then about 18 months ago, I started in as the strategy director for Reverse the Red, which is a global coalition to halt the extinction of threatened species. So we work in about 196 countries and 20,000 plus partners and it's wonderful and chaos all at the same time.
David J Bland (2:17.304)
You know, so much in my work, I talk about environment design and how leaders are responsible for designing the environments of their organizations. You have this really interesting take on that where you have that expertise, but you also have literal environment design of how do you decide an environment where things can grow and things can live and everything. So maybe explain maybe the parallels of it there that you see throughout your career.
Mike (2:34.586)
Thank you.
Mike (2:44.942)
Yeah, absolutely. It's um...
I think you're spot on about that. Design thinking applies to just about any scenario you can find yourself in. I think the general tendency is whether you're an individual or organization, you kind of go day to day operating in status quo. Just whatever the norm is, is kind of what you keep. And one of my favorite change theories actually comes from St. Augustine from a long time ago. This is my version, not his. But basically there's only two reasons anybody changes, is either you're
by a compelling vision or you hit the end of the rope. And so it's like, generally I watch companies or organizations, they don't change what they're doing until everything falls apart or they change it if you get a leader who has this really compelling vision or something is dynamic that you're going for. And what's weird is when you work with environmental efforts and species and biodiversity, we don't wanna change when we hit the end of the rope because that's where we're dealing with,
species where there's only 200 or less left. mean, the work that you have to do when you're down to the 11th hour is really difficult. And so at the same time, how do we prompt change in an in a environment, no pun intended, but in a community where we're, we are trained to kind of maintain and conserve and preserve, but we're living in systems that are incredibly dynamic, that have all these inputs that we barely understand all what's going on. And then the last
layers you put on top living animals, living plants, living fungi, and we have science and we know a lot, but I would bet we only know a fraction of what's actually happening in the complexities of the environmental world.
David J Bland (4:31.308)
Yeah, I think about systems thinking, you know, and I think about how that really needs to come back or be popularized again, you because we don't understand the complex systems and we start testing and we don't understand the implications of our testing. And so when you were talking, I was thinking about this idea of testing environments, literal
Mike (4:38.765)
Yeah,
Mike (4:49.838)
Yeah.
David J Bland (4:58.616)
physical living environments and how that impacts things. almost as if from what you're saying to me is almost as if there's a risk in not changing, right? There's a risk in, we have to be so conservative, we're not gonna change anything. And in that in itself is inherently risky.
Mike (5:0.730)
Thank
Mike (5:9.754)
Yeah.
Mike (5:18.170)
100%, I think that's a spot on way to think about that, is to continue doing what we're doing today with the trajectory you understand it, that's a risk. So we have to be willing to do something differently, but at the same time, whether we're talking about endangered species or endangered and kind of threatened ecosystems, we're still relying on 50, 60, 70 years of science, which is good, we shouldn't throw that up.
out, but that doesn't mean that that 50, 60, or 70 years of science has the solutions yet.
And so we're still facing, often I'll talk to organizations because there tends to be this big separation between the corporate world and the environmental world. We don't always play together very nice. And the reality is that most of biodiversity loss comes because we're extracting some sort of an economic value from biodiversity. That's, and that's not inherently bad. I'm not, I'm not raging against that. However, when that's done out of sorts, it is bad. And we see a loss of biodiversity at too great a rate, but the challenge
is these corporations are putting millions if not billions of dollars into advancing technology and strategies and extraction methods. I mean, they're strategically growing their ability to do this, but on the species conservation side, environmental side, we're still kind of trying to nickel and dime our way with the same strategies we've always used. So to me, I'm always going, we've got to be willing to engage different conversations and think differently
come up with new, you know, nature positive, biodiversity positive methods of existing, we have to. Otherwise you're right, you're totally spot on. It's the risk of doing nothing different.
David J Bland (7:8.878)
So speaking of doing things differently, can you share an example where you used your expertise to help really do things differently with habitat design and species and with a focus on maybe outcomes and, we don't have all the answers, but we think we can test our way through this.
Mike (7:28.930)
Yeah, I'll give a, so let me give a, like a really narrow example and then we can always broaden out to more complicated stuff. But so we did a project through the architecture firm with a zoo in Southern California, Palm Desert, and we started in on that project. So traditionally zoos are, you know, here's this animal, we put it in essentially this environmental box and we meet all the basic requirements that it needs to live and survive and thrive. That's kind of the traditional way of thinking of zoo habitats. And some of your really good zoos, you know, they're
beautiful and they're lush and there's lots of plants and all that kind of stuff. We went into this one differently. We wanted to focus on black rhinos because they are a critically endangered species. They are species that lives, you know, lives well in that particular climate that we were dealing with, but we didn't want to simply create a rhino habitat and put rhinos in it. What we wanted to do was look at what is the greatest range of what we call competent behaviors for rhinos. So what does a rhino do in the wild, right? A black rhino
is a browser so it actually eats trees it doesn't eat grass. They would live in relatively small groups they use their scent as their primary feature so they do these wonderful disgusting things where they rub their nose actually in the feces of another rhino to figure out if they like that rhino or if if it's a male they want to find out if the females cycling and so for us it's like that's really disgusting but man for a rhino that is just that's the tops like nothing like a really strong urine odor to identify what's
going on. So anyways, there's all these natural behaviors that we know of these animals in the wild. The other part of the natural behaviors is they do interact with other species. I mean, that happens in the wild, we see it. And so we started down this journey of saying, okay, what if we design with a different outcome in mind? What's this vast range of behaviors? And how do we create kind of a mixed species habitat where multiple animals are living in this space in a really dynamic nature? And so what was interesting was with
within the kind of the top zoo community that we're a part of, the belief was that you cannot put rhinos, specifically black rhinos, in with other species because they're too aggressive. So we started asking questions and saying, okay, well, why? Like, where's the data to show that this is true? And the funny thing is we made tons and tons of phone calls and the general curator, now deputy director at that facility, we called all these people and everyone said the same thing. You cannot put black rhinos in with other animals, they're too aggressive.
Mike (9:58.708)
And then we said, okay, where's the data point and no one could give us a data point? Like there wasn't a single story. So all we had was examples of in the wild where it's possible So what it did and this is I think so important it changed our question it went from can we mix black rhinos to What would what do we need to do in order to? Have black rhinos living with other species and that's really subtle but I think it's a like it's a really important difference and so we
started going in design and ended up with this beautiful habitat. like, it's basically like a big donut, it's about four acres, and guests walk kind of under it at one point and then over it at another point. So the donuts kind of like on an axis. But what it does is it lets the the staff of this organization, they don't manage individual animals, they actually manage an ecosystem. So they're like little ecosystem architects where they're creating reasons for animals to be curious, what they
found really quickly was that they actually had behavioral data that all the different species that lived in there, so there's birds, antelopes, rhinos, smaller deer type animals, they actually have daily migration patterns. So they're literally moving and journeying around this entire habitat. They had instances where like, where you would have the rhino would go up to the guinea fowl, which are like an African chicken, basically, they would go up to them and actually
like knock them off the logs. I didn't hurt them at all, but like they were playing. They're literally like having fun interacting with them and the chickens would hop back on the log and I mean just really cool stuff. But these are all things that are possible because we asked different questions and we created an environment that was capable of outcomes versus you know this very kind of prescriptive way to just do what we've always done before. So it's been amazing to see this this habitat come to life and for me I've worked with a lot of
both in the wild and in a zoo setting. I mean it put me in tears one of the first nights I was there watching the younger male rhino literally running laps like up and down the hills and you had people literally saying that like you can't give rhinos hills it's too steep they can't handle it. It's not true like again we see them doing this in the wild why are we not doing this watching these guys go up and down and antelope and deer kind of running all over the place and weirdly the pelicans instead of being in
Mike (12:27.834)
the pool that we thought the pelicans would like to be in, this beautiful expensive pool we made for them, no they like to sit at the top of the hill like the highest point in the whole thing up above everybody and you just have these giant pelicans just just chilling up there. So even in our best attempt we still can't predict all the outcomes but we can try to create systems that can do some amazing stuff.
David J Bland (12:49.260)
I like that you challenge the assumption, you and you asked around to say, is there any evidence to support this, you know, assumption? And it didn't sound like there was much evidence, but people make these beliefs, right? Like these assumptions become your belief and then you build upon those beliefs and you're kind of building upon faulty assumptions. So I love that you challenged that.
Mike (13:7.844)
Yeah.
David J Bland (13:7.854)
And in organizations, right, we'll just say, oh, you have to go interview your customers, right? You can't go interview your rhinos, right? You have to, to some extent, have to observe and understand what's going on and do, you know, to an extent, I guess, ethnographic research. But it sounds as if even you design this environment, which does sound very different from how other environments are designed, there are still things you're learning from watching the behavior. it seems like it wasn't just the
Mike (13:14.297)
Yeah.
Mike (13:22.318)
Yeah.
Mike (13:28.986)
very much,
Mike (13:32.917)
Yeah.
David J Bland (13:37.782)
assumption that rhinos couldn't be put with other animals, but there are other assumptions about how the other animals would even operate within that environment.
Mike (13:46.798)
Totally.
Yeah, we, mean, there was so many things that were surprising on that. Like we, again, with all these assumptions, we assumed the rhinos would be kind of the dominant animal out on this savanna habitat, which we found to not be true. It was actually the smallest little deer. They ended up being the one that kind of, you know, bullied everybody around the spaces. Um, they kind of called the shots, which was just so surprising, you know, or we did another, we built this little island that was specifically for
vultures. So we thought, oh, this will be great. They'll hang up on these, you know, kind of like your your Disney storybook style, where you think about the vultures sitting up on the, you know, the dead limbs or whatever. So we did one of those. And sure enough, that's not where the vultures wanted to hang out. So we're constantly being surprised. And I one of the things I love about working with nature is that it's almost like a pure form of feedback. If you just pay attention, where I think, you know, I've worked with a lot of organizations and like you're saying,
we have all these assumptions and we have these habits and frameworks that I think most of us are really not even aware of, to be honest. Even organizationally, I think we're really not aware of most of the structures that limit us or the ones that make us succeed. But with species, there's no BS involved. They're going to do whatever is most advantageous for them in kind of an objective way. And there's no, it's not positive or negative, they're not, you know, they're not trying
to make the boss happy or they're not trying to, you know, make sure that they're lining themselves up for the future promotion and saying the right things. you know, not that those things ever happen, I'm sure. But, uh, but animals are just like a pure, it's either working or it's not. Here's your environmental identifiers.
David J Bland (15:37.664)
It's like you have a belief and you're going to test that against reality and you're going to see the feedback. And that's where our biases creep in. think we think we can outsmart nature. We can outsmart everything else around us, which is probably a longer podcast episode. OK, so that's amazing. you applying your kind of blend of innovation, design thinking, habitat design and designing this space that really sounds
Mike (15:43.587)
Yeah.
Mike (15:50.926)
Yeah.
Mike (15:55.383)
Hahaha.
David J Bland (16:7.522)
like it's thriving. mean, is ownership there looking at these constant things that are changing and providing feedback? Are other organizations looking at what you've done and trying to take notes and learn from this? maybe give us some insight there if you can.
Mike (16:26.276)
Yeah, absolutely. Short answer is yes. Particularly within kind of the conservation environmental world, change is really slow. I think there's a number of reasons for that. And we can unpack that if you want. But what we are seeing is the basis of design thinking for that environment was fundamentally different. And one of the challenges is that, and we actually, I had this conversation with another organization that said, went, we saw, it was amazing.
we want to replicate it here. And my encouragement to them was, it's not about replicating it here, it's about replicating the right questions for you. And again, I know that's a subtle little change, but the context in every environment is different. And so the solution in one place doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be the solution in, you know, place two or three or four. We can learn from it for sure. Let's build off of it and kind of take those lessons.
But what I see often happening is kind of this carbon copy methodology where it worked in one place. Great. We're just going to do the same thing. But they miss out on the the wrestling through the design thinking that went into it. And so like one of my fears using that example and then maybe I'll talk about another one that's more broad environmental is if you for that organization, number one that was involved from from, you know, the start of it, their entire staff
believes in the goal and they believe in the outcome and so they see their role in it versus if you took the same exact habitat same design and you placed it with a team that doesn't think the same way it will not work I would actually argue that it would it might be worse the end outcomes might be worse because they're not operating with the same kind of understanding of how the system works so there's a process piece that's really critical and maybe an example I can share about that so right now we do work reverse there
work all around the world on protecting threatened species and endangered species. And so in Africa, there's a number of really successful initiatives where they've created anti-poaching units. So what that is, is if we're losing, you know, elephants, giraffes, rhinos, whatever different species are there, and they use these units in Asia, as well as Africa and South America. But essentially, it's a small little paramilitary that goes in and protects these animals in this particular region.
Mike (18:55.884)
people, it's super difficult, super dangerous work. And it's working in some places. What we've seen though is that new areas in the world are trying to replicate that system, but they didn't do it in the same way, and it's actually causing social issues. So imagine if a local community that lives adjacent to like a preservation or a protected habitat, and all of a sudden one day you wake up and there's now a small paramilitary next to you.
that doesn't work. I mean, that causes real tension. And again, I understand that the people doing it are saying, well, this worked in place A, it should work in B. That might be true, but you also have to explore the process of system thinking and the collaboration that went into A to see if it will potentially function in location B. So, I don't know, just one example, very high level, but.
David J Bland (19:48.972)
Yeah, I think that is, I mean, I agree 100 % with that. It feels as if when you think about principles versus practices, right? So we have these principles, these underlying principles. So what I like to do is when I'm working with companies, it's, hey, let's extract our assumptions like desirable, viable, feasible. Let's map them, prioritize them, usually doing assumptions mapping, and let's go test them and learn and then use the feedback into our strategy.
Mike (19:58.094)
Yes.
Mike (20:7.236)
Go.
Mike (20:15.780)
Yeah.
David J Bland (20:16.098)
The practices, depending on the kind of company I'm working with, will differ greatly. In the Testing Business Ideas book, there's all kinds of experiments, but they don't all apply to every organization. And I always get nervous when companies sort of leap through that book and they say, oh, I just want to do these practices or these experiments without understanding the underlying assumptions or without doing that kind of work. And I do think we see this play out in organizations where you'll see like a podcast or YouTube video of...
Mike (20:35.086)
Yeah.
David J Bland (20:43.918)
you know, a company saying, hey, we should just fire our product managers or another one saying, hey, we, operate in squads and not in teams. And, it's, so easy from the outside to say, well, they're being very successful and this is what they're doing. And then let's just copy those practices, but they don't really understand the underlying principles are built upon and they don't understand how these practices could affect the organization. And so I do see this time and time again, and it kind of comes with different fads. Like we happened way back with lean and other things. And I do see this.
Mike (20:49.870)
Yeah.
Mike (20:59.735)
Thank you.
Mike (21:4.740)
Yes.
Mike (21:12.420)
Yep.
David J Bland (21:14.230)
It doesn't seem to be unique to just tech companies or auto manufacturers or, know, it just seems like, I don't know if it's human nature for us to do this, but we look at something as being successful and we say, oh, let's just copy that and it's going to work here. And as you're saying, it's almost like you have to take a pause and understand the why and understand the deeper impacts of adopting that. And that's hard because if you start with the principles, you should almost have to cultivate the practices that work for you. And they may be slightly different than the practices you're seeing.
Mike (21:19.458)
Yeah.
Mike (21:25.018)
you
Mike (21:33.272)
Yeah.
Mike (21:40.334)
Yeah.
David J Bland (21:44.142)
another organization used to be successful. And so how are you navigating that aspect of, you know, it's almost like your success could lead to people copying your stuff without understanding the why.
Mike (21:47.086)
Absolutely.
Mike (21:51.640)
Yeah.
Mike (21:59.885)
100%. Yeah, I mean what you said is so good. So I want to lean in on that is I think you're spot on that it's really like there's an underlying set of you might use or practices. Some people would use culture habits is maybe what I would use. But we have these
maybe cut into this kind of thought here. I think fundamentally one of the biggest challenges we have, like what is driving us to do that kind of carbon copy, cut and paste methodology. And I think it kind of comes down to this human nature or human malady that I would call hurry sickness. Not my term, I've adopted it from other brilliant people. But this idea that we have to just constantly do more. We have to be producing and be productive and everything has to show kind of immediate results.
lead that leads us to want to kind of replicate what seems to work. Like what's the easy button, right? Oh, that company laid off those people, or they change this department, cool, we'll do the same thing. When the reality is, we have to work at creating, we have to create the environment capable of the outcomes we're after. And again, like everything, I feel like everything I always say is these subtle little tweaks on what we talk about. But it's not just getting the outcome, it's creating the environment capable of getting
the outcome. And so for us, we're working on these national scale strategies to recover species. These are huge tasks with thousands and thousands of organizations involved, thousands of species, huge amounts of acreage, national governments, multi... mean, it's complicated stuff. It's solvable, but it also has to look different in every single country, in every context. And so we work really hard to build relationships as the foundation
place to start is can we be in relationship and trust each other because the journey we're about to go on is going to be difficult and we will encounter challenges and we will fail and I know that's a really like that's not the great pitch to start the journey right but but it's true because we're trying to do something that isn't working like we're trying to go in a different direction than where we are today so we we if we knew how to get there we would do it right I mean that kind of cliche thing so we're
Mike (24:19.820)
we're in this process where we have to clarify the overarching goals, what we're trying to achieve, and an agreement of how to get there. But once we get to step one, the rest of it is completely co designed, it has to be. So what it looks like in Indonesia is going to look different than Fiji, then Canada, then wherever it the context has to be really different. And so yeah, it's definitely a big, a big challenge is not having just that replication.
of success and it's a much slower, much deeper work and we do know that it works but we've got to be willing to take a little bit of that slower road and not kind of fall into just that condition of hurry.
David J Bland (25:7.630)
Yeah, I like how you frame that. I when you think about co-design, I'm definitely seeing a lot of my companies like Coach air towards more co-design. And I have this kind of saying of test with, not on. know, least test with people and not necessarily on people. I'm wondering when you think about animals, you know, how do you take that same approach where you're testing with them and not on them? Because again, you can't necessarily just
Mike (25:18.969)
Yeah.
David J Bland (25:35.470)
schedule a Zoom call with one and talk to one. I keep coming back to that, how do you test with animals using design thinking principles?
Mike (25:43.138)
Yeah. Yeah, man, great question.
I think it's so in a really small scale, you know, if you have animals in your care, like you could literally do this with your your dog or cat, you know, as a as a if you just want to have some fun testing something, you know, you can start to like even thinking about my dog who's just sitting over there not too far. But, you know, she she knows when my like I have a certain backpack that I travel with and she knows when that backpack comes out, she starts to get passive aggressive.
So you can kind of watch like being able to observe what's going on and if you just tweak little conditions even as simple as like move a piece of furniture the cliche thing I know if you've ever heard the study that says like if you were to lift a like a door threshold it's like a quarter of an inch or something most people will trip over it like it's that minimal of an adjustment and our we're that tuned into the environment we have so you can really play with stuff and then the key is observation.
So that's why with like a pet at home, it's easy because you tend to be there and you can kind of watch them and see how they do it. In more of a professional setting or a wild setting, it's still the same basis. It's observation. And so getting in and looking at, know, if we make this tweak, how does this animal respond to it? An example at really like a global scale is for quite a long time, the conservation field thought that we could, you know, if we needed to put
20 new tigers in a particular area, we could just, if we have 20 extra tigers, because that happens sometimes I guess, somewhat joking there, but you know, if we have 20 extra individuals, we can just pick them up and we can put them somewhere. Well we found that that actually doesn't work. What happens the way that species naturally grow and move is they slowly expand their territory one little bit at a time. They don't just pick up and move to a whole new location, which is hard to do.
Mike (27:47.472)
because humans have really fragmented environments, so that's one of the challenges we face. But that observation over the last number of, you know, last couple decades has led to a new innovation, fairly new, on wildlife corridors. And so you see them, I California actually has a lot of them, right, it's the overpasses and then under tunnels, that came out of observing that, this isn't how animals move, this isn't how their populations are connected, we need to find a new way to allow them to
move back and forth. And that way we're not fragmenting out their environment, which highways are a big fragmenting element. Cities are a big fragmenting element. So it really does come down to observation. And I think, you know, even looking at testing business ideas and some of the stuff, so much of that is built on test and observe, like get real data, watch your real customers do this. Or if you're a boss and you have some leeway, you know, you can kind of play with your employees in a helpful
ways like how do they respond if you know if we do this or if we do this but then you just have to observe
David J Bland (28:54.498)
Yeah, I think it does take a lot of patience and this idea of an outcome, right? A goal, right? And I think about like your black rhino assumption, right? If you ran a survey across all these different experts that had them answer and they would say, yeah, there's no way you can mix these together. And we're like, oh, the survey results said we can't and therefore we can't, right? Like the evidence, the type of evidence you have matters as well. I want to zoom out a little bit before we wrap up today with
Mike (29:0.495)
Yeah.
Mike (29:15.428)
Yeah.
Mike (29:21.195)
Yeah.
David J Bland (29:23.790)
this bigger effort you're doing, because it sounds fascinating. So can you explain a little bit more about the overall effort of protecting our species and how sort of your role and what you've learned through habitat design is kind of influencing them?
Mike (29:26.564)
Yeah.
Mike (29:39.256)
Yeah, absolutely. So reverse the red and kind of as a coalition, what we're trying to do is to look at and address the real threats facing species. Some of the conditions, again, I always think about what's the environment we're sitting in so that we know what things we need to tweak to try to get to a new outcome. Ultimately, the outcome is really lofty is all species have a thriving population and are doing well. I mean, that's a really big goal. And we're far from that. We've got about 50,000
species on the planet that are threatened with extinction right now and that number continues to go up. So we have a lot of work to do. At the same time, we do know how to recover species. We have the science, we have the tools, we have the technology. So at face value, you're like, well, why isn't this happening more? If we know how to do it, we have the willingness and the people to do it, but it's not happening at scale. How do we do that? So as the team that predates me got into this, some of the big gaps are the fact that
that we don't have a lot of alignment of strategy. It's probably one of the biggest things. And so you mentioned kind of clarity of goals and outcomes. Many groups that work on conservation efforts, they do it because they love this particular species. They're passionate. They're trying to solve a problem. What they aren't doing as frequently is saying the goal is a thriving recovered population. What do we need to address to get there? Right? They're almost kind of starting from the little problem and just doing action.
without ever pausing to see what will it really take to change the long-term outcome. So it's one of the first things that we have to do is how do we train that thinking and support that thinking. Another thing to consider, so if anybody's listening from like more of kind of a corporate background, that thinking is really common in corporations because the long-term ROI is usually financial, or at least partly financial. So there's kind of an easy, you know, an easy problem statement and an easy thing to develop within the species conservation.
world, most of our, most of the people, they're trained as biologists and ecologists and entomologists and oceanographers and you know, they're not people who are trained in strategic thinking. They aren't. So they're doing really good work, but they're like missing a lens that's really critical to be able to see impact accelerated. So we have that big gap. The next gap we have is this lack of collaboration between countries and civil society partners.
Mike (32:8.731)
And so people, most people probably don't know that all 196 countries have agreed to a set of global biodiversity, it's called a global biodiversity framework, but it's a set of targets and actions to restore biodiversity on the planet. But governments aren't really equipped in most instances to implement the work. So they need the partners like corporations and NGOs and everybody else to do that. But right now what's happening is the NGOs are kind of, they're
doing whatever their species stuff is, know, good work trying to do good stuff, but it's not aligned with what the governments have agreed to. So the governments aren't able to fund it, the governments aren't able to legislate for it, because often, you know, if you're talking about things like poaching of species, illegal take, overfishing, all of that, that requires governments to legislate and convict in the instances where that's happening. You know, an NGO, no matter how big they
are can't give somebody a crime, a criminal punishment, right? It's not possible. So we need to actually be working together, but those gaps are massive. So we've created a couple of initiatives. Probably the biggest one is a thing called the species pledge, where we are asking organizations and groups, what species are you committed to reversing declines on? What country are you operating in? And what actions are you taking? So we kind of break it down to a set of seven actions. But that
and we have over 4,000 pledges already and our goal is to get up over 10,000 this year. But that is the first ever map of who's actually doing what. Because we don't know. Right now everything is so disparate and unconnected or disconnected that this is the first attempt. And you talk about experimentation all the time. This is a fast, loose, quick experiment. You know, you get a lot of scientists in the room and they're like, they want 28,
fields of data for every single organization. And we're like, nope, we just want to know what's the least that we need to know in order to make the next set of decisions. And how do we test that, learn from it, know, tweak, add. So it's this really nimble thing. But that's a pretty foreign, it's a foreign way to think for this conservation and kind of biodiversity world. So I know that was a lot, but we can go into any other way. There's a bit there.
David J Bland (34:34.988)
No, it is. There's a lot to it. mean, maybe at a high level, like what are maybe some big assumptions you're looking forward to test with that really ambitious effort? You know, what are some near term things that you're focused on?
Mike (34:51.278)
Yeah, so.
I would say those couple of key gaps is stuff that we're testing those assumptions right now. We think that people aren't aligned. Is that actually true? We think that organizations have a hard time developing objectives and strategies and metrics. Is that true? So far, what the species pledge information has told us, because we do have some questions that we ask to test these things, so survey style. But we are finding that more organizations
are at least aware of their national government practices than we thought. So that's good. What we are also finding is that more of them need help with developing strategies than we thought. So it's almost 60 % self-identified that they need, they're requesting help in developing their own strategy. So again, it's for us, that was kind of a first step to find out what's really happening. And then we can start to test that and say, okay, well,
can we get a small group that's willing to get together? How can we rapid test essentially how to develop a strategy? Because historically...
for one individual species, it could take up to a year or two to create a recovery plan just for one species. Well, we got 50,000 that need it now. So again, that's one of those other areas, like maybe that's an assumption we need to test too, is how detailed and thorough do we really need to be to promote action? I don't know, that one just came to mind. So you're helping me work through that.
David J Bland (36:31.938)
Yeah, I'm glad it's helping me as well. I think, you know, I remember talking to a founder who was trying to work on like HIV testing in remote parts of Africa. And the kind of underlying assumption was like.
Mike (36:42.542)
Yeah.
David J Bland (36:45.452)
Well, people can't leave their villages to go to this testing station because it's a long trip. They don't have transportation. They can't leave their family. So if we just bring that testing into the villages, then everything's fine. And the government put all this money behind it and everything. then sure enough, they bring the testing to the villages, finds out people don't want to be tested. Like even if it was there and accessible, they just they were scared. didn't want to know if they were infected or not. And so it was really interesting to see like, oh, we have this assumption that
Mike (36:54.041)
Yeah.
Mike (36:57.764)
Yeah.
Mike (37:4.644)
Yeah.
Mike (37:9.112)
Yeah.
David J Bland (37:14.062)
people don't have transportation, that's why they're not getting tested. We moved the testing to the villages, then we realized, wait, that actually wasn't the underlying problem here, which is valid, which is, I'm scared to get tested. And then they had to work on education and everything else. But I think this interesting interplay between government and local cities and villages and how this interacts, I mean, it's not straightforward. And I think...
Mike (37:21.518)
Yeah.
David J Bland (37:40.712)
We have to be careful, even I do, as even a consultant to come in and say, oh, you just do this, this, and this, and we're going to be OK. Quite often, there are just underlying assumptions here we have to start digging through. And I think design thinking is very, very helpful in that it gives us an overall set of principles that can help guide us through that process. And if we're open and willing to learn and know that our beliefs could be proven wrong, then it's very powerful. And I think
when it's applied to a mindset where you're not open to being wrong, it's not as impactful and powerful because you're kind of explaining away everything that doesn't match your worldview.
Mike (38:14.231)
Yeah.
Mike (38:17.784)
Yeah, and I think, you know, this is, if there's scientists listening, they might not appreciate this comment, but, you know, we need science, but it's not the only lens that is true.
And I think that's, that's really hard for, I mean, the world I'm in is very much a scientifically driven world. That's kind of how we make our decisions. It's how grant funding is doled out. It's, know, you've got to be able to articulate it's, it's your strategy, your outcomes, your measures, your metrics, all that kind of stuff. But in reality, like you're saying, I love that example of, of, know, doing the testing in a local community. That wasn't a scientific reason why it wasn't working. It's a social reason. And so, so much of what we have to do is.
be willing to literally perceive the world, even the natural world, differently. And this is probably a good assumption for us to be aware of too. At a foundational level, the Western mindset and scientific mindset sees humanity as separate from nature. It just does. That is not actually the only lens in which to see the world. But that's really challenging as most of these global agreements and the global funding is all
coming out of the Western scientific world. And so it's really fascinating to think, how do we really honor and lead with indigenous knowledge and wisdom? And that there is genuine wisdom and knowledge and experience that drives so much of that. And we might need that, like you talk about testing new ideas. We might need to go back and look at really old wisdom to potentially find strategies to move forward.
And that assumption causes a lot of friction with the systematic strategic world that we try to operate in. And I don't have answers for it, but more of just aware that these dynamics exist and then we need to pay attention to them.
David J Bland (40:16.546)
Yeah, it's all about the questions, as you said in the start of this episode, you know, being like science is part of it, but it's not the only lens to look through everything. I want to thank you so much for.
joining us, you went through this really interesting journey of how you're blending your knowledge of habitat design and animals and conservation with design thinking and strategy. It's just amazing the blend that you have taken to get just put together and applied to have an impact in the world. If people want to reach out to you, what's the best way for them to get involved in your efforts or to get in contact with you?
Mike (40:44.100)
Yeah.
Mike (40:53.784)
Yeah, absolutely. Best way is through my email, michael.clifford at reverse the red.org. Email me. We have partners in all different sectors and types and corporations and everything. So it's, it really takes all of us to do this kind of work. So open to talking to anybody who's interested.
David J Bland (41:10.134)
Alright, so if you're listening, you want to get involved, we'll post that email as well on the detailed page. Thanks so much, Michael, for joining us. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation of how the environment interplays with science and design thinking and all the challenges we have. I really appreciate your time, your busy, busy schedule to share some of your stories with us. So thank you so much.
Mike (41:30.533)
Absolutely. Thank you so much. Appreciate everything you do.