Georg Engeli

4. Civil society

 

This section outlines the responsibilities in an international foundation in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula in the area of sustainable development - identifying and associating with independent leaders:

1. Group services
2. Knowledge and Learning
3. Risk and crisis management
4. Special subject matters
5. Personal note

Group services

Georg Engeli was the responsible director for the foundation's group services and led the central team assigned to design and to provide these services:

• Human resources
• Finance
• Due diligence and social investment assurance
• Communication
• Institutional development
• Legal

Knowledge and Learning

He was responsible to design and establish the group's knowledge and learning functions, including:

• A knowledge sharing and learning 'system' whose characteristics would reflect and capitalize on the particular culture of the international staff
• Fostering emotional intelligence
• Integrating experiences and practices from other sectors outside the technical 'product import' approach vis-à-vis best practices that are developed under different parameters and mental frameworks
• Initiating and guiding a group-wide learning initiative to integrate knowledge with institutional development and experiences with strategic growth

Risk and crisis management

He was responsible for introducing risk and crisis management considerations to the group and its local offices, including:

• Developing a notion of 'risk' beyond technical and operational dimensions
• Designing risk-related processes that would reflect the specific nature of the group's mission, empower local autonomy, and increase an understanding of 'risks' beneficial also for the group's external associates
• Capture, analyze and share the dynamics of external developments in the different social, political, economical and cultural contexts
• Enable local offices to consider risks on the basis of scenarios and values themselves and to understand potential escalations in relation to the interests of the institution and its external networks.

Special subject matters

As everyone in the organization, he was involved in reflections on and the design of novel ways to foster and guide transversal matters, for instance:

• Organizational transformation from providing financial services to non-financial services in the framework of lasting relations with external associates
• Thrust, purposes and dynamics of building cross-sector networks
• Bridge building between the private and the social sector
• Civil society positioning vis-à-vis other sectors, namely the public sector, including the consequential dynamics of different approaches

Personal note

Leading and learning go hand in hand - I had plenty opportunity to experience both and to benefit from a wise mentoring by elder colleagues and leaders of the organization, who also had traveled between different worlds. Civil society in general - and this organization in particular - is a learning endeavor whose most radical challenge is that the learning can (and often does) swing both ways: society benefits from growing experience of civil society organizations, and it pays the price for sustained ignorance.

Entering the world of civil society - coming from the global village of business - has been a most challenging and rewarding undertaking. The challenge was to abstain from importing known and proven practices and to become aware of the internalized and thus unconscious parameters under which such practices had been developed. I suspect the same would have to be true for a social leader sticking the head through the door to business. If we are not willing to submit our concealed beliefs to conscious scrutiny - and it is far more comfortable not to do it -, learning and relating with others are just buzz-words.