Planning — Defining Your Aims. This is the first of a series of…
By: Gerry Coney
Tags: African Wildlife, Anti Poaching, Conservation, Wildlife, Planning

This is the first of a series of articles that examine the planning process for Conservation Law Enforcement.

The importance of a good plan cannot be overstated. The best organisation in the world cannot hope to achieve its goals if it is running a bad plan. No amount of effort or resources will put that right. On the other hand, having a great plan will not guarantee success of itself. But it will at least make success a possibility.

One of the defining features of almost any organisation is a shortage of resources. That could be people, money, communications equipment, fence-poles. To make the best use of limited resources it is necessary to be efficient. To be effective, those resources must be applied to the correct aims.

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

One of the first steps to developing an effective plan for any organisation is to determine clear aims. Next, given that resources are unlikely to match needs, these aims must be prioritised. Lastly, you should stick to those aims over time.

I am not going to discuss the actual planning process here. That’s a complex topic and there are a number of systems and tools that can be employed so it deserves a dedicated article. I just want to clarify what I think are the absolutely basic foundations of successful planning.

Aims and Direction

One of the most frustrating things for any employee is to not know exactly what is required of him or her. Often sub-managers are given vague direction and the process of trying to meet the senior manager’s intentions becomes something of a guessing game. This was known in the US Marine Corps as ‘Bring me food’. The idea is that someone goes into a restaurant and is approached by a waiter. The waiter asks the customer what he would like to eat. The customer replies he doesn’t really know. ‘Just bring me food’. Then, if the customer doesn’t like the food he gets, he will ask the waiter to bring different food until eventually the customer gets what he wants. This is a very ineffective way of ordering a meal and a poor system for running an organisation. Sadly, as anyone who has been in the military will probably agree, it is a surprisingly common approach.

Practical Constraints

Often a Protected Area (PA) manager will feel they do not have a great deal of flexibility in determining the aims for his or her PA. The PA may be of long standing and the aims of the PA may be very clear in either the founding concept or from higher HQ, if there is one. Other PA managers may have more freedom of action: The PA may be new or under a new management regime. In either case, there is always merit in clearly defining your aims unless they really are crystal clear already.

Who Defines the Aims?

While most of my posts are about Law Enforcement (LE), defining the aims of the PA is the job of conservationists. I am absolutely adamant that LE is a supporting function; it is the job of the LE manager to meet the aims of the conservationists. Personally, I think there is a good case for not involving the LE department in the developing the aims of PA at all, unless your LE manager is double-hatted and has a specialist conservation qualification. If LE becomes involved in defining the aims of the PA, there is a real risk that the tail will start to wag the dog. Asking the head of LE what you should protect is like asking the coach driver to choose your holiday destination for you.

There is a counter-argument that, in the real world, there are going to be limits on what LE can practically achieve. This is obviously true. But this should not really affect your aspiration. Achieving your aims is a question of management. Limiting your aims to match your resources is in my opinion, illogical.

Clarity

Your aims should be clear. Too often managers will be told to ‘protect the park’ or ‘secure the landscape’. These sound like clear aims but they aren’t. ‘Prevent all human access to area xyz’ is better. ‘Protect the population of White Rhino’ is a clear aim. A planner can work from these statements. Don’t be too prescriptive and don’t be tempted to hand out direction at the micro-level. For example — ‘Prevent poisoning of the waterhole at GR 123 456’ is not an aim. Step back. Concentrate on the big picture.

A good test of an aim is to see if you can express it in a single sentence, without more than one comma. Ask yourself if you could put it on a t-shirt or a coffee cup. There has been a mushrooming of Mission Statements in the corporate world over the last couple of decades. Sometimes these are worthwhile, pithy expressions of intent. In other cases, they are reverse-engineered gibberish that attempts to describe what the organisation is already doing, cobbled together because someone has told them they need to have a Mission Statement. Going too far the other way and plunging into meaningless generics is not helpful either. Einstein said that ‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler’. Which is good advice.

How a PA manager identifies and defines their aims will vary according to the PA. If you are struggling, try to frame the question as ‘what would disappear from the Earth / region / country if this PA failed?’. This sometimes gives an interesting result. I know of an enormous park where the most important ecological feature turned out to be a river, on the boundary. This river contained a globally unique type of fish. Most of the rest of the park was indistinguishable, ecologically, from the landscape around it. However, the bulk of the LE effort was devoted to attempting to protect swathes of empty savannah because no-one qualified had every really defined the aims of the PA in ecological terms.

Priorities

Prioritisation is almost always going to be necessary. As I keep mentioning, no NGO or even government conservation department will ever have all the resources they need. Because of this, the PA manager must decide what their priorities are.

Personally, I would limit this to no more than 3 or 4. If, as I recently saw, the PA comes up with a list of 14 priorities for protection I would respectfully suggest they go through the process again. You simply cannot have 14 priorities. And, even if you could, having that many is not going to help the planning process later. Think big and bold. Really distil what is critical.

Note also, we are not discussing Priorities for Action, which are slightly different things. Priorities for Action will fall out of the operational planning process. Priorities in the sense that we are discussing them here are the order of importance in which you place your aims. Again, do not obsess over practicalities of protection at this point. Just because, for example, protecting your White Rhino population is going to be very difficult does that mean that you delist them from your priorities and decide protecting Mopani trees is more important because that’s easier.

Consistency

This is a difficult subject. In the ideal world you would define aims, set priorities and manage to them. In the real world, the situation changes all the time. Your time horizon might be decades if you are talking about the impact of climatic change on your PA or it might be days if a new poaching team arrives in your area.

However, as I have written above, your aims should not really change if you have thought them through properly. Maybe if there is a sudden breakthrough in White Rhino fertility treatments and the world suddenly faces a plague of these animals your White Rhino protection aim might alter, either absolutely or as a priority. But this sort of thing is unlikely in the medium term, by which I mean out to 5 years or so.

As threats of whatever sort evolve and change your plans will have to alter. Not your aims. This is very important. Too often, in the military and in conservation, I have seen senior managers suddenly order an immediate change in direction based on a single incident or a small cluster of incidents. In almost no cases was this justified; it was a knee-jerk reaction to a temporary set of circumstances that was by no means fatal to the project at hand. The damage that is done to the long-term activities of the PA by constantly altering course is serious, though.

Sudden and constant changes of direction are extremely demotivating and wasteful of resources, not least the time spent in replanning. One of the reasons I believe defining aims clearly is so important is that they influence everything else you do, from policy to staffing to equipment. Making sudden, strategic-level changes is, in my opinion, sheer bad management. Any plan will encounter bumps along the way. The mark of a good manager is that his plans are flexible while his aims remain constant. This is why it is absolutely critical to take the time to determine those aims properly in the first instance. Which is where we came in.

Conclusion

This has been a fairly theoretical post. I would say that in all my experience, both in civilian life and as a soldier, the single commonest management failure I have encountered is the failure by authority to clearly enunciate the aims of an operation. This has been true from individual patrols up to campaign planning in the military or the development a new product. Taking the time and exercising the intellectual rigour to clearly distil your aims as an organisation is the single most critical step you can undertake. Everything else you do flows from this.