Editor’s Note: This is a summary of the December episode of the President’s vodcast. We encourage you to watch the episode to see the full conversation.
This month’s column covers SPE’s governance, with a particular focus on the SPE Board of Directors and the way its members are selected. It revisits the 2022 controversy of the SPE-AAPG merger project and the Board petitions that followed. It is concluded with a proposed to-do list to improve our governance processes and increase membership communication and interaction.
I will start with an explanation of our current process: In early November 2024, SPE announced the opening of the nomination cycle for the SPE International Board of Directors. A third of the SPE Board positions are open this year with the 2027 President, two regional directors (RD), and three technical directors (TD) to be selected.
The process always starts with our members, who are expected to nominate the candidates. It may finish with members’ votes, but this is only in case of petition(s).
Candidates must be nominated before 25 January 2025. Explanations are given here: https://www.spe.org/en/about/nominate/. Nomination forms are available here:
https://www.spe.org/en/forms/bod/.
This year the Nominating Committee is chaired by the 2024 President Terry Palisch. The Nominating Committee will select from qualified candidates, and the new slate of recommended nominees will be approved by the Board and communicated to the membership in the April 2025 edition of JPT.
Members who object to any of these nominations will have 45 days to initiate a petition for an alternate candidate from at least 1% of the membership for the position of President and 2% of the concerned members for any other director position. Nominees who are not subject to a successful petition will be confirmed. Successful petitions, if any, will trigger a membership vote between the Board nominee and the petitioners’ nominee. Whatever the outcome, all new members will join the Board for 3 years, commencing at the 2025 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition (ATCE).
Petitions are rare, but we had a memorable set of three in 2022 in the wake of the (failed) attempt at an SPE-AAPG merger. Two TD and one RD nominations were challenged. All three petitions were successful, and three votes took place. The Board nominees (Hamad Al-Marri, Robert Martinez, and Robin Macmillan) were confirmed against petitioners’ nominees with scores ranging between 53% and 57%. Time flies, and this year they are outgoing Board directors and members of the new Nominating Committee.
I was an at-large member of the Nominating Committee in 2022 when the petitions were initiated, and I took an active part in the online debate that followed. It was heated at times, with occasional accusations of corruption, collusion, irreversible loss of credibility, a bit of ad hominem trolling, etc. It was tense but also (I confess) entertaining.
I was relieved to see our choices approved by the membership, but with an average score of 45% the petitioners turned out to be very relevant candidates. However, the low participation (15%) was a signal that neither side should celebrate: we were royally ignored by 85% of our membership, and with this level of participation, it could have gone either way. As an aside, this 15% turnout is consistent with other professional societies that elect their leadership directly by membership vote.
The dust has settled, and I guess most people involved would not use the same harsh words today. Beyond the controversial tone, the debate pointed to three perceptions, fair or unfair, shared by some of our members and which cannot be ignored.
1. The perception of top-down management by SPE leadership particularly felt at the time of the announcement of the proposed SPE-AAPG merger.
2. The perception that the current nomination process populates the SPE Board of Directors with a self-perpetuating pool of individuals, with the further perception (or at least possibility) of collusion in the nomination and selection process.
3. The perception that we lack transparency—specifically that we have too little communication with members and too few decisions taken by members.
For decades, nobody cared too much about SPE’s governance. When I was a young member, I assumed there was a leadership body, but like many, I had little or no interest in it. Every year a picture of the new SPE President would appear on the JPT cover, and that was that. SPE was serving its stated purposes of technical knowledge dissemination, providing services to its members, and serving as a place to network and interact. For most members, this was good enough.
Only when the 2015–2020 downturn and pandemic severely affected SPE’s operations was attention focused on our governance and, unsurprisingly, not in a good way.
Bringing up the issue of SPE’s governance and returning to our 2022 ‘melodrama’ seems counterintuitive. In a way, we had swept this episode under the carpet, and it may make sense to keep it where it is. So why, once again, open this can of worms? The answer is because this is needed (I think).
Beyond our differences, we are in the same boat and have many challenges ahead of us, including important collective decisions in the not‑too-distant future. We need to reflect on our prior practices and decisions and use a better playbook when the time comes to make such hard decisions again. In addition, sufficient time has passed to have this conversation, not to replay the game but to prepare for future decisions.
1. On the SPE-AAPG story (and SPE’s alleged top‑down management)
The 2022 SPE-AAPG merger project was initiated by the leadership of both societies at the outset of the pandemic. SPE had catastrophic operational losses in the fiscal years 2021 and 2022. There was no certainty on the timing for a possible return to normal, nor what the ‘new normal’ might be. In such a state of uncertainty and with bleeding finances, it made absolute sense to explore mergers with sister technical societies before it might be too late to act.
The merger attempt failed, and the existential threat did not materialize. Both societies are still around, and the ‘new normal’ financially and in terms of membership is likely to stabilize at around 75% of pre-pandemic levels. We have survived without merging.
But this was not evident at the time of the proposal. Many opposed the project, but many more would have cursed the Board’s inaction if we had financially crashed a couple of years later without taking any preemptive action to ensure our survival. The rationale for exploring an SPE-AAPG merger made absolute sense.
On the initial secrecy: The project began with confidential negotiations between leadership teams. Once a notional agreement was reached, it was presented to the Board and then announced to the membership. An initial confidential exploration phase is common and quite acceptable in merger projects. It allows for exploring options, identifying dead ends, and getting a better picture before throwing everything into the public arena. I do not think that SPE leadership did anything wrong here. However, given what followed, initial secret negotiations will not be an option if we must revisit the issue in the future.
On the presentation to membership (necessity vs. desirability): I was not part of the process, and I watched it from the sidelines, but this is the only point where I disagreed with my predecessors and friends: rather than referring to the alarming situation of our finances, the chosen narrative was the desirability of the project. Even though the described benefits were real, this did not work for two reasons:
1. It made the decision look arbitrary. If there is no emergency, then why, and why now? If it had been presented as a necessity, with a transparent presentation of our financial situation, some may have objected to this necessity, but the discussion would have been about facts, not about emotion and a feeling of treason.
2. If there is a lesson to be learned about desirability, it is that nothing, absolutely nothing, is more desirable than a comfortable status quo if people believe that this can be sustained. Positives carried little weight compared to this, especially for our most senior members who were, and remain, emotionally attached to the DNA of their respective societies.
The merger might not have worked, anyway: To be fair, the organizations never considered imposing this decision on their members. A member vote would be required by both societies, so accusations of a ‘fait accompli’ were unfair. The project was stopped before the member votes took place, so we will never know, but the chances of rejection by at least one of the memberships, and maybe both, were very high.
I also had postmortem discussions which made me think that both societies might have had a very different view of what this merger would be, specifically related to the differences in the number of members in each society. The smaller partner would not want to be subsumed. It would expect to keep its DNA and operate as before under a larger economic umbrella. This would result in different organizations within the same merged entity. Such an option would not be acceptable to the larger partner, as it would create silos when there are none, ending up with some members being more equal than others. Such a potential deal-breaker would remain if we were ever to revisit such a project.
Beyond the merger story, how about our alleged top-down management?
The answer is more complicated than it looks.
Yes, the SPE Board of Directors makes decisions, and these decisions are top-down by definition. Membership votes are rare, because (1) there are many decisions to make, and (2) decisions are not always straightforward and require an investment of time and engagement that we cannot expect from our individual members.
However, matters for SPE Board decisions are most often derived from bottom-up feedback from geographic sections, technical sections, committees, workgroups, individual members, etc. We spend days reviewing and integrating requests from all of these. I can assure you that our Board does not decide anything in isolation.
But I would go further and state that the Board should not make any decision of an existential nature. This would be the case for another potential merger, a substantial redefinition of our mission in the context of the energy transition, or any discussion related to our name.
Such major top-down decisions should be excluded regardless of the circumstances or contingency, and this should be replaced by an informed membership vote. The SPE Board may have the right to make such decisions according to our bylaws, but it does not have the legitimacy to do so.
Despite appearances, this is what the Board did in 2022. Communication was not great, but the ultimate decision was planned from the outset to lie with the memberships of AAPG and SPE, not their leadership.
2. On the 2022 petition story (and our Board nomination process)
The 2022 petitioners and their supporters made it clear that the petitions were a reaction to the merger project. However, the main theme developed during the petition campaign was ‘democracy’ in the context of the Board nomination process.
The petitioners pushed for the election of all Board members in a process similar to a political election in a Western democracy. For the petitioners, the SPE-AAPG episode served as a revealing moment, exposing flaws in our governance rooted in the current approach to populating our Board.
Nominating committee vs. direct membership vote. The SPE is not a Western democracy but as noted in my October 2024 column, SPE is a US‑registered 501(c)(3) not-for-profit professional organization. All SPE processes, including the Board nominations, are defined in its bylaws and are compliant with US laws. Nothing constrains applying political election processes as a template for the selection of a professional organization’s leadership. This being stated, it would be fun to build an electoral college for the position of SPE President!
When founded in 1957, SPE decided to favor a Nominating Committee over direct elections. This does not make SPE an autocracy, and the process of the petitions, opening the possibility of an override by the membership of the nomination process, was precisely put in place as a check and balance.
As a side note, SPE has members from 145 countries, most of which are not Western countries. Although SPE members clearly share common values beyond cultural differences, we may not want to systematically impose templates on everything to such a diverse community, especially considering that SPE bylaws are already compliant with US laws.
Nevertheless, and to the petitioners’ point of view, a direct election process of Board members is indeed an option. We may decide one day to change our bylaws and move on to this. However, a direct membership election system is no panacea.
The best illustration is that AAPG has a direct membership election process in place, and it faced the same backlash and internal debates when the proposed merger was communicated to its membership. In other words, a Board election process is not a vaccine against this sort of disagreement.
At first sight, direct election by membership makes sense. An obvious advantage is that it establishes a direct and regular link between membership and governance. This is healthy, and it is much more appealing than the caricature of a closed, self-perpetuating board that could lose contact with reality and start acting against the will of its membership. But again, the petition process is in place to precisely avoid this.
Direct membership elections have limitations, three of which are well-known:
1. Board elections generally have very low participation. One can question the relevance of an election with 10–15% participation.
2. In a global society like SPE, there is a serious risk of a ‘tribal vote.’ What will happen if one day a major stakeholder is upset with SPE, massively finances its employees’ memberships, and pushes an election outcome? The stakeholders capable of taking such action today respect SPE and would never consider it. However, this doesn’t eliminate the possibility of it happening in the future.
3. A significant achievement of our Nominating Committees has been their commitment to fostering a diverse Board that truly represents our global membership. This balance would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve through a set of elections independent of each other.
4. The fourth limitation points to the 2022 petition debates, which focused primarily on broad democratic concepts rather than addressing specific challenges facing SPE. Both the Board nominees and petitioners were, and remain, committed SPE members; however, meaningful debate was hindered by the candidates’ limited prior exposure to SPE’s global landscape—a perspective I am now attempting to present in these lengthy columns.
The only election that could bring interesting debates is for the position of President. Candidates must be former Board members and for a good reason. The SPE President must be immediately operational and cannot afford a learning curve. I would also struggle with the state of mind of a member who would believe that he/she is too good for anything less than President and would not want to invest 3 years to learn the job in the time consuming and high responsibility position of Technical or Regional Director.
Being former Board members, the candidates for the position of President would have all the elements to debate on any aspect of SPE’s mission. Such a debate could bring real value to the process.
As the 2025 SPE President, I strongly recommend leaving the SPE Directors’ positions, at least for now, out of consideration for a direct membership election as I believe we are doing an appropriate job of selecting our RDs and TDs. Our current process ensures that Directors have the required experience and skills via the multiple layers of vetting that the nomination process entails.
If we really want to try an election, I recommend considering direct election by SPE membership for the SPE President, with the remaining prerequisite that candidates must have previously served on the SPE Board. A proof of concept could be tried as early as next year for the 2028 position.
3. Transparency, Communication, and Member Decisions
On Transparency and Communication
Contrary to popular belief, the communication of SPE’s leadership has never been deliberately opaque, and I can testify that SPE processes are straightforward.
As with any society involving tens of thousands of members, more than 200 employees, and hundreds of corporate stakeholders, there are exchanges of a confidential nature, but there is nothing unreasonable. Conspiracy theorists would be very disappointed if they had access to my inbox.
Transparency is subjective, and each of us may define it differently. However, one thing is certain: SPE members should have a clearer understanding of our actions, particularly if we intend to seek their input (see below).
Two years ago, I was heavily involved in the merger and petition discussions, and some friends contacted me for guidance under the following terms: “I don’t understand what is happening. I know you, so I rely on you to tell me what to do.” This confidence was very flattering, but it was also frustrating because these friends, and SPE members in general, should have open access to sufficient information to draw their own conclusions.
These columns are a small attempt on my part to increase transparency and communication. They are long, to the despair of JPT staff who wonder how many members have the interest and the attention span to read them in their totality, but they are also reasonably exhaustive.
For example, if read in its entirety, my November 2024 column on SPE’s finances can bring any member to the same qualitative level of understanding of our finances as any Board member (give or take access to boringly detailed Excel spreadsheets). Conversely, many members will not read these columns, nor watch the vodcast, and that inaction is fine with me if they do not then complain about our alleged lack of communication.
And this is just a start. If we see that very few SPE members read or watch, if the SPE Connect page that we launched does not take off, then it will have been much ado about nothing. I will stop, and my successors may try something else. Conversely, if we see that our members are eager to read, watch, and give feedback, we will increase and diversify this communication.
On Member Decisions
We are planning a global member online consultation around June 2025, and this could become an annual process if it is successful. As it is also expensive, we will select a date compatible with membership votes in case of another set of petitions.
Questions to members will be related to topics presented in these columns and potentially other items initiated by the Board. This may include but would not be limited to:
- The validation (or not) of a formal SPE position on energy transition
- The acceptance (or not) of SPE’s extended perimeter in this context
- The confirmation (or not) of the current Board nomination process
- The approval (or not) of a Proof of Concept of election for the position of 2028 SPE President
- What to do to improve the quality of SPE deliverables (to be discussed in my January column)
- The sunsetting or preservation of some challenged SPE programs
- A general call for suggestions from membership, etc.
We will probably start these consultations as surveys, and not as formal votes. We still have doubts about membership interest and participation. However, the larger the participation, the more the response will be considered as a mandate. If this experiment is successful, we may continue it and have annual votes on important topics.
Conclusion
Reflecting on the 2022 events, I still think that the question of a merger between sister societies was very relevant at the time. The playbook turned out to be wrong, which is easy to say after the fact. If the idea of a merger is ever revisited, it will have to be under duress, either for financial reasons, or by a message from our stakeholders that ‘the party is over’ and that we must rationalize. Either way, we need to learn from our mistakes and be prepared for that contingency.
The SPE Board selection process is imperfect, but it has its merits, and to my knowledge, there is no magic recipe for governance. Direct membership-based elections also have their drawbacks, and our ‘ancestors’ clearly were thinking this when they prepared and enacted our current SPE Board selection process. But our bylaws can be changed if a majority of members wish. An interesting test, and relatively low-hanging fruit, could be an attempt to select the 2028 President by a direct membership-based election.
Improving transparency is an evident need, and we must have open, regular, and inclusive communication. We are working on this. Consulting membership on an annual basis on important topics is very high on my 2025 to-do list. More to come on this topic.
My next month’s column will be on the quality of SPE deliverables.
Visit my SPE Connect channel, “President JPT Column–Discussion Page,”to share your thoughts and insights.