KEA & Cphbusiness – merging with culture at the center

On July 1, KEA and Cphbusiness will merge to become Business Academy Copenhagen – a new unified business academy for practice-oriented higher education. The goal is to create a stronger and more cohesive academy – academically, organizationally and culturally.
An important part of the merger is the work with culture and values: How do you ensure that students, employees and management can reflect themselves in the new community and take ownership of the change?

We Do Democracy was invited to design and facilitate a process to strengthen the common cultural foundation. The task was to create insight into the existing cultures, ensure involvement across the organization and support a merger that is perceived as meaningful and inclusive for the entire organization.

We conducted a cultural analysis with focus group interviews, observations and photo registration to map similarities, differences and opportunities between the two academies’ existing cultures. The insights were used as a starting point for three large-scale workshops that brought together up to 900 students, employees and managers. The participants worked with values, visions and concrete prototypes of new common practices.

At the same time, in close collaboration with the project group, we have ensured links to other tracks in the merger process and helped ensure that the cultural work was linked to the overall development of the new Academy.

Involvement is rarely just one target group – that’s why the three large-scale workshops were organized with different starting points to accommodate different perspectives and approaches.

• The first workshop was based on an external view: Employers from both academies contributed their views on how the academies are perceived from the outside.
• The second workshop provided insights from the inside: here the results of the cultural analysis were presented and discussed among students and employees.
• The third workshop focused on how values and culture can be translated into concrete practice. Almost 200 participants built prototypes in modeling clay, storyboards, LEGO, podcasts and much more – based on the story of the culture they wanted to create and strengthen together.

The process has strengthened the understanding and mutual knowledge between KEA and Cphbusiness. Students and employees have had a real opportunity to be heard and have actively contributed to shaping the new community.

Concrete benchmarks and ideas for further cultural work have been developed – including proposals for common values and everyday practices in the new Copenhagen Business Academy. At the same time, the process has opened up important conversations about what the new academy should be able to do in the future and how it should be experienced and function for those who will be a part of it.