Finance Lives In The Zoo

You may or may not have heard this metaphor before but it’s one of my favourites…..

Finance lives in the zoo, while the rest of the business lives in the jungle.

Sounds insulting, it’s not.

What it does do is tell us a little bit about how non finance might view finance and how finance professionals can become better business partners?

Firstly let’s talk about life in the zoo.

Life in the finance zoo is comfortable. It’s predictable. It’s Safe. We know when the month ends. We know when the numbers are due. We know who’s signing off on what. We have systems, processes, and controls designed to keep things orderly. It’s not always easy—but it is structured.

In the zoo, every animal is in the right enclosure, fed on time, and accounted for. If a cost doesn’t reconcile, alarms go off. If there’s a variance, we investigate. And if there’s a budget overspend, someone, somewhere, is getting an email they are likely to ignore.

We like order in finance. We like rules. We live by them. It’s why so many of us are drawn to finance in the first place. There’s a sense of control, precision, and even comfort in working with things that can be reconciled to the cent.

But here’s the problem…

The rest of the business isn’t living in a zoo.

They are living in the jungle

What is life like in the Jungle?

Sales, marketing, operations—they’re all in the jungle. A fast-moving, unpredictable, ever-changing environment where the rules are made up and often rewritten mid-game.

In the jungle, no one cares about your month-end close. They’re too busy trying to hit revenue targets, juggle resource constraints, and survive another day of shifting priorities. There’s no zoo keeper coming with food.

If you don’t hunt, you don’t eat.

While we in finance worry about accruals and audit trails, our commercial colleagues are navigating customer demands, competitor moves, and crises that don’t fit neatly into Excel.

The jungle is chaotic, uncertain, and driven by outcomes, not processes. It rewards speed, agility, and instinct. And this, right here, is where the finance business partnering challenge lies.

What works in the textbooks and spreadsheets of finance (the zoo) doesn’t translate perfectly to the commercial world (the jungle).

There are other factors and pressures going on that impact decisions and options.

In the zoo, we report what happened. In the jungle, they need to understand what to do next.

Finance business partnering is about bridging the gap between these two worlds. And if we want to partner effectively, we need to learn how to operate in the jungle—without losing the discipline of the zoo.

Finance still needs to keep the books clean, the controls tight, and the forecasts flowing. But to partner effectively, we need to develop a second skillset—one that helps us survive and thrive in the jungle.

Because if we take you out of the boring comforting zoo and put you into the crazy wild jungle, you are going to need to behave slightly differently if you expect to survive and/or thrive.