Defining CEGA’s Strategic Ambition
We got a grant to advance CEGA’s organizational effectiveness: here’s what we’ve learned.
Written by Director of Operations Lauren Russell and Executive Director Carson Christiano.
A few years ago — about a decade after CEGA first launched — we began to recognize that our outward growth and success had in many ways outpaced our internal organizational development. While on one hand, we were seeing our work have positive, real-world impacts, on the other hand, we were experiencing several organizational “growing pains,” including bottlenecks and operational inefficiencies that threatened to stifle those impacts moving forward. This, along with a leadership transition, presented a natural opportunity for careful reflection and discussion. And so, with an organizational effectiveness (OE) grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, we embarked on an (ongoing) journey to bolster organizational performance and impact at CEGA. Here are some takeaways from our experience thus far:
Don’t underestimate the value of decision-making frameworks
How does an organization determine which activities to prioritize, which partnerships to pursue, and how to measure progress and impact without some kind of guiding framework? While CEGA’s mission — to improve the lives of people in poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence — has remained constant over the years, our thematic areas of focus and strategic priorities have evolved significantly. We lacked a clearly articulated set of principles, values, and governance structures to guide our decision-making.
Revisiting CEGA’s organizational vision, values, and theory of change was a foundational first step on our organizational effectiveness journey. We gathered insights from multiple stakeholders via dedicated events, surveys, and extensive conversations, ultimately developing core frameworks that now serve as a compass for CEGA.
But the challenges of operationalizing these new guideposts remained. To solve this problem, we created a center-wide decision-making framework that delineates core CEGA processes and indicates how various types of decisions are made, who is ultimately responsible for each, and which staff should contribute (and when). Since the launch of our RACI Chart in 2020 — along with enhanced transparency and communication around internal governance structures — we have seen a ten percentage point increase in staff understanding of the decisions they are empowered to make, and when they need to consult with or get approval from others. It’s not a panacea, but the clarity this decision-making framework provides has strengthened CEGA’s overall performance and staff morale — and we reference it constantly.
Create channels for sourcing feedback, “good ideas,” and opportunities
CEGA’s OE project incentivized us to fine-tune existing pipelines, and develop new ones, for eliciting high quality input from various stakeholders. These pipelines allow CEGA strategy and activities to be continuously informed by affiliated faculty, funders, policy partners, and staff, ensuring that CEGA is agile and innovative while remaining responsive to policy needs. One big lesson (and challenge!) for us has been thinking through the best ways to solicit meaningful input from stakeholders without overburdening them. We share a few of the channels we’ve found useful here:
- One example of an effective “idea pipeline” is our annual affiliate survey. With over 140 affiliated faculty in the CEGA network, this tool is an efficient way to learn about affiliates’ work, connect them to targeted research opportunities, and identify shifting research priorities. It’s also proved a useful mechanism for gauging the feasibility of new norms — such as research transparency policies and inclusion practices — that CEGA believes will improve the quality and credibility of our research.
- Another new approach to sourcing feedback and opportunities are retrospective analyses — or coordinated, periodic follow-ups with every CEGA-funded research team to regularly track how evidence is used by governments, NGOs, and other partners. Understanding this (and the nuanced, often circuitous pathways from evidence to impact) can help CEGA make better decisions about the research — and research partnerships — we prioritize.
- We’ve also revamped our annual staff climate surveys, which provide an (anonymous) space for staff to voice ideas and opinions with leadership. This simple tool helps to build morale and transparency by inviting staff to weigh in on key center-wide decisions. CEGA has implemented climate surveys since 2016, but we’ve refined our questions over the past few years and dedicated more time to putting the insights gained from the survey into practice. For example, our decision-making framework described above, as well as our updated theory of change and values, relied heavily on insights from the CEGA staff climate survey.
Fully committing to inclusion requires structural change
After updating CEGA’s theory of change and values, it became clear that fully aligning our work with our center-wide commitment to inclusion would require structural change. As such, we recently created a new Associate Director, Global Networks and Inclusion role, tasked with overseeing CEGA’s capacity building and inclusion programs, in addition to center-wide justice, equity, diversity, inclusion (JEDI) activities. With support from this position, CEGA will continue to implement and refine practices that promote JEDI among our affiliated faculty, fellows, staff and other stakeholders — as well as across our core activities — and to continuously measure our progress against related benchmarks.
It goes without saying that this work is ongoing. In the coming year, CEGA hopes to formally introduce new activities related to the inclusion of scholars from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) into our research programs, as well as women and others from underrepresented groups. Stay tuned for more on this work in a subsequent post.
Communications deserves its own vertical
Our OE work has inspired us to shake up CEGA’s organizational structure in other ways. For example, we created a new Communications and Policy Engagement vertical to better align our activities with the strategic ambitions outlined in our theory of change. For the first time in our twelve-year history, CEGA will hire a dedicated Associate Director, Communications and Policy Engagement — dramatically increasing our capacity to deliver clear and effective research outputs to the right people, in the right format, at the right time. Our OE work suggests that lifting up this function will help create more and better research, training, funding, and policy partnership opportunities, while bolstering CEGA’s influence and impact.
This is just the beginning of CEGA’s organizational effectiveness efforts. We hope the lessons we’ve learned so far will be helpful to other organizations looking to grow their influence and impact. Please reach out to us (or comment below) if you have questions or would like to share your own experiences with this kind of work.
