Every generation has its crucible. For Britain in the 1940s, it was the Second World War. For us today, it is the intertwined crises of climate change and biodiversity collapse. At Bletchley Park, the challenge was breaking codes to safeguard lives and secure victory. At Oxygen Conservation, the challenge is breaking the entrenched codes of conservation, land ownership, economics and investment to secure a liveable future.
Both required, and still require, something radical in recruitment. Not hiring for known tasks, but for the unknown. Not for jobs neatly defined, but for problems not yet written down. At Bletchley, this meant recruiting linguists, mathematicians, classicists, and crossword champions – people with aptitude. Today, in building the natural capital economy, it means something strikingly similar!
The genius of Bletchley Park was that it recruited for potential. It valued aptitude over adherence and creativity over conformity. The same lesson applies now: in our mission to Scale Conservation. We must recruit and nurture people who can solve problems we haven’t yet imagined, in a world moving faster than ever before.
Talent over Titles
At the outbreak of the war, Commander Alastair Denniston and later Edward Travis knew they could not rely on the rigid hierarchies of the military or civil service. The codebreaking huts needed fresh thinking, rapid experimentation, and people who could rewire their brains in real-time. They hired chess champions, debutantes with a gift for pattern recognition, and young people who could see beyond the obvious.
This spirit is alive in Oxygen Conservation’s recruitment. Our People Strategy is intentional and direct: we hire for the ceiling, not the floor. We’re not looking for people who fit today’s job description; we’re looking for people who will outgrow it, who will make us better in ways we cannot yet predict. Just as the huts at Bletchley Park were full of brilliant misfits, we deliberately seek those who challenge us, who bring new perspectives from sport, finance, technology, media, agriculture, and art.
Conservation is no longer just about counting birds or planting trees — and it certainly isn’t about writing yet another report detailing how much worse things have become. It’s about innovation, thermal drone surveying, artificial intelligence, geographical information systems, financial models, land acquisitions, carbon pricing curves, biodiversity metrics, storytelling, and sensitive stakeholder negotiations. The game has changed, and so have the players.
Meritocracy of Minds
Denniston encouraged, and Travis preserved, a culture that was unlike the rigid commands of the services. A culture where hierarchy, though not absent, was relaxed. What mattered was not rank, but results. In Hut 8, if you had the idea that broke the Enigma, it didn’t matter whether you were a twenty-year-old Cambridge undergraduate or a senior officer.
That’s the atmosphere we cultivate, and where we thrive. At Oxygen Conservation, challenge is not just tolerated; it’s expected. Harmony, we argue, is overrated. Our greatest achievements are built on what we call respectful disagreement. In practice, this means questioning bad ideas, improving them through debate, and holding strong opinions loosely. The goal is not consensus; the goal is progress.
Like Bletchley, where innovation was born from intellectual sparring, our culture thrives on friction. In conservation, comfortable consensus leads to small, safe projects and little to no progresses. Respectful disagreement builds movement and momentum!
Rebel Rulebook
Gordon Welchman (in his book titled “The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes”) reflected on the lessons of Bletchley and suggested something radical: people with rare skills should not have to climb a managerial ladder to achieve prestige or pay. In fact, he argued, a brilliant mathematician should be able to earn more than the Director, without ever being forced into a managerial role.
We’ve borrowed heavily from this. Our reward system doesn’t just reward management. It rewards impact, ideas, and execution. We separate performance into tiers – Elite, High, and Elsewhere – not by title but by output. We’re unashamed in saying that if you’re world-class in your field, you should be rewarded like it, whether or not you manage a single person.
Though counter-cultural in most organisations, in Oxygen Conservation, it’s necessary. Forcing brilliant conservationists into management kills their brilliance and starves the system of innovation. We’d rather they stay brilliant, pushing the frontiers of natural capital, carbon pricing, or ecological restoration – and be rewarded accordingly.
Diversity as a Weapon
Another lesson from Bletchley is the sheer power of diversity. By recruiting women in large numbers – still revolutionary in the 1940s – and by drawing from classics, history, engineering, and languages, Bletchley created an unparalleled cognitive concoction. The result was not just more ideas, but better ones.
We take the same view. Excluding groups of people – by accident or by design – shrinks the talent pool. Worse, it shrinks the imagination of the organisation. Our conviction is that cognitive diversity matters more than technical similarity. A mathematician and an ecologist (or better still a pilot and a model) will approach a land valuation differently, and the collision of those perspectives is where progress lies.
Cognitive diversity doesn’t just come from biology. It comes from upbringing, culture, failures, experiences and adventure. That’s why we deliberately recruit from outside the environment sector. We’re building a team that thinks differently, because conservation at scale is a puzzle too complex for one discipline to solve.
Cryptography and Conservation
Cryptography is a paradoxical science. Its value is maximised by secrecy, yet its rigour depends on professional exchange. The codebreakers work in closed communities, publishing their research and learnings only decades later.
Conservation shares this paradox. Transparency is vital, not only for investor trust, for community support, for market credibility. Yet this is not always the case, some of our work requires strategic opacity. We don’t share every acquisition in the moment; we protect sensitive negotiations. We don’t disclose every economic model – we ensure robustness before release. This balance, between openness and secrecy, is one we walk carefully, just as Bletchley did.
But there is another link: both cryptography and conservation are fields where speed suddenly matters. A code broken too late is useless. A peatland restored too late might be equally useless. At Bletchley, signals travelled to London at increased scale and speed. Today, in the natural capital economy, we need an even greater increase in scale and speed.
Building a Talent Pipeline
If Bletchley Park was the talent factory of the 1940s, we want Oxygen Conservation to be the academy of the 2020s. Our intern programme is explicitly designed as an academy system. We don’t just hire for today; we train for tomorrow. We rotate people across estates, projects, and disciplines. We expose them to finance, ecology, and operations. And we set the bar high — deliberately so.
This is not elitism. It’s urgency. Conservation can no longer be the domain of volunteers and retirees. We need business athletes — people capable of operating at investment pace, capable of working across disciplines, and capable of delivering scale.
Just as Bletchley recruited crossword champions and chess players, we recruit weightlifters, coders, musicians, and farmers — because excellence in one domain often signals the mindset we need in another.
Respectful Disagreement as Culture
We’ve coined a phrase that mirrors the “challenge culture” of Bletchley: Respectfully Disagree. Harmony feels nice, but it rarely moves the needle. The work of conservation is too urgent, too complex, to be left to groupthink.
Our culture insists on questioning. We expect everyone — interns included — to challenge decisions, to ask awkward questions, to find flaws. It’s not always comfortable, but it is always productive. When someone says “I respectfully disagree,” we lean in. Because the alternative — comfortable silence — is the death of progress.
Lessons for Scaling Conservation
Bletchley Park shows us that the future is solved not by following rules but by breaking them. By recruiting differently. By managing differently. By rewarding differently. And by daring to create environments where innovation trumps hierarchy, aptitude trumps pedigree, and diversity trumps conformity.
For conservation to scale, we must adopt the same mindset. The natural capital economy is moving fast. We cannot afford recruitment processes that select for compliance. We cannot afford cultures that prize harmony over challenge. And we cannot afford progression models that force brilliance into bureaucracy.
At Oxygen Conservation, we are trying to build our own Bletchley Park — not in huts with ciphers and bombs, but across estates with peatlands, woodlands, and rivers. Where Bletchley’s victory saved a nation, our ambition must be to help save a planet.
Conclusion
Recruiting for jobs not yet created to solve problems not yet defined, was Bletchley Park’s genius. It must be ours too. The people we are bringing in today will be solving crises tomorrow that we cannot yet see.
As Welchman argued, brilliance must be rewarded on its own terms. As Denniston proved, hierarchy must bend to innovation. And as Bletchley’s culture of cognitive diversity showed, the best ideas often come from the most unexpected places.
Scaling Conservation is not just a technical challenge. It is a human one. The code to be broken is not just ecological but organisational. And if we can recruit, nurture, and unleash the next generation of misfits, rebels, and innovators, then just as Bletchley Park rewrote history, perhaps we can too.
Acknowledgements
This article draws inspiration from Counter-Intelligence by Robert Hannigan and the extraordinary history it documents. My thanks go to Bletchley Park itself — and to Alan Turing and his fellow codebreakers — for the enduring lessons they left us in innovation, diversity, and courage under pressure.
Finally, a personal note of gratitude to my wife, Helen, who first introduced me to the story of Bletchley Park during her dissertation. Without that spark, these reflections, and perhaps our entire approach to people and culture at Oxygen Conservation, would be very different.