When too much planning for your site’s future can damage opportunities for future external funding
A contrarian’s view I know, but often when we are asked to help find major transformational funding for zoos, botanic sites, museums and similar sites, we find that an existing master plan that is too prescriptive and inflexible can be a major hindrance.
Of course planning is essential; not least for the purposes for external funding itself. However funding is very much the ‘art of the possible’. The funding potential is unlikely to always arrive tailor made to just happen to perfectly fit your beautifully detailed internal blueprint.
Funding success is to be found in an intelligent, imaginative dialogue with external agenda. This does not have to mean betraying your organisation’s values, but rather a willingness to deliver these in new and ever more creative ways.
Do zoo decision makers sometime become obsessed with the planning process and the elaborate documents that it produces? Do physical plans, drawings, statements, models actually become fetishized? Are we in danger of confusing ends and means? After all, if we take towns and cities as an analogy for zoos, do you want your future site to resemble the disastrously systematized Bucharest of Ceauşescu, or the blandly regimented Milton Keynes, or the organically developed Rome or Paris…?
Of course, a framework for future development is absolutely essential, but too much imposed neatness blocks serendipity, creativity and organic growth. Read “A Perfect Mess: the Hidden Benefits of Disorder” by Professor Eric Abrahamson, Professor of Management at Columbia University, New York. Or for another kind of authority, consult Von Clausewitz’ classic “On War”, on which a later Prussian general, Moltke based his famous saying: “No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy”
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