egea committees
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Strategic Intuition
If only EGEA knew what EGEA knows Strategic Intuition: Strategic ideas at the center of strategy
In strategy, there are many methods to analyze your organization, your activities,
your position among other organizations, your competitors and current trends but
none of these methods tells you how to decide what strategy to adopt. There are
equally many techniques for strategic planning: how to lay out objectives, activities
and milestones to achieve your goals but none of these methods tells you how to seta goal in the first place. The missing link between strategic analysis and strategic
planning is the strategic idea.
There are three kinds of strategic ideas:
Strategic analysis: you study the situation you face Strategic intuition: you get a creative idea for what to do Strategic planning: you work out the details of how to do it
The distinction between doing a task and deciding which task to do consists the
notion of strategic intuition. Strategic intuition gives an idea for action, a strategy.
Strategic intuition seeks selectively past knowledge and experience, and lessons
learned to synthesize with new elements and new insights, in order to arrive to an
answer. Therefore, Strategic intuition relies on huge investments in lessons learned
and quick communication among all EGEA stakeholders.
Student-run organizations that truly want to build the capacity for strategicinnovation within the youth field cannot simply hope for a few good members to lead
the organization o their own initiative. They need to build an organizational intuition
systemthat can combine lessons learned and new information in creative and largely
qualitative ways and then produce forecasts for strategy formulation.
Many non-governmental organizations have attempted to change their organizational
structure to accelerate innovation and performance. But in doing so, they focused
mostly on generating new ideas and little on converting ideas to results. The result of
strategic intuition is always a synthesis of analysis and intuition that can be put intoaction - fast!
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Strategic Intuition and EGEA
In the field of student-run organizations, successful players are notnecessarily the organizations that start with the best plan, most resources orbiggest network. They are the ones that learn and adapt the quickest. Theessence of the learning challenge for EGEA is improving the organizationsability to predict the future performance and the performance of any newventures. To improve predictions, EGEA as intuitive organization mustsystematically resolve a handful of critical unknowns:
Who is our member? What is the value we offer to our members?
How do we deliver that value?
Strategic intuition entails seeking a set of rules that can reduce uncertainty,
risks and dysfunctions, sustain network growth, and lengthen the
organizations life span beyond that of average membership span. The
learning objective of organizational intuition is to refine the ability of
predicting organizational performance over time. Predictions always lie at the
heart of the learning process. The quality of predictions determines the
quality of strategies and strategic planning, and eventually determines the
quality of innovation and value added in EGEA.
Once produced, organizational predictions often fall victim of learning
misadventures: they are ignored, their significance is a matter of internal
manipulation, they are not updated with new information and they are not
properly and systematically analyzed together in order to identify meaningful
patterns and produce valuable insights for the organization.
The most original explanation of such learning incapacities is an
unwillingness to make a serious investment in (strategic) planning. MostBoards make plans hastily. The common arguments are either that short-term
and mid-term circumstances are generally manageable or that long-term
dynamic challenges are largely uncertain and unpredictable, so why bother
with planning? Another argument is that, due to Boards term limits,
executive time should be spent on doing rather than planning.
Such approaches overlook the significance of predictability and fail to realize
that planning leads to better predictions and performance. Predictions falling
short are not a performance failure but a valuable process of organizational
learning for EGEA, when testing new ideas and mechanisms. Current status
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Adaptation from Tim Powell, 1999 for EGEA
quo must not discourage us from experimenting with strategies and taking
risks. Also, planning can set the context for organizational learning. The
learning process in EGEA should be embedded into the planning process:
frequency in planning relates to frequency in learning.
For the context of EGEA, a student-run organization, short-term revisable
predictions can serve as an ongoing learning process for the Board and
Committees, and potential youth leaders (see the diagram on EGEAs
Organizational Intuition). By that, the learning cycle follows exactly the Boards
term and the planning cycle. Predictions, transformed into plans and thereby
into strategic experiments, are the essence of hands-on organizational
learning that EGEA can offer; activities organizing aside.
Strategic intuition and strategic innovation can redefine potential new
members, can redefine the delivered value to our members or can redesign
EGEAs end-to-end knowledge value chain architecture:
VALUE
ACTION
DECISION-MAKING
INTELLIGENCE
KNOWLEDGE
INFORMATION
DATA
A C Q U I R E
P R O C E S S
A N A L Y Z E
D I S S E M I N A T E
A P P L Y
T A K E
C R E A T E
LESSONS LEARNED INNOVATION ORGANIZATIONAL INTUITION NEW STRATEGY FOR EGEA NEW KNOWLEDGE LEARNING CYCLE TEAM BUILDING
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EGEA CommitteesThe Building Blocks of EGEA Intuition
EGEA as Intuitive Organization
Every organizationstudent associations included - can become more intuitive.
For this to happen, the leadership and stakeholders of the organization must recognize
that intuition operates best when the creative people within the organization have a
chance to recognize patterns that others cannot see. The ability to see new patterns is
greatly enhanced when the collective intelligence and experience of the organization
are tapped.
HOW TO create intuition within EGEA? The solution is not to "hire" people to
produce intuition. This requires creating and consistently maintaining a block of
internal knowledge in a fashion that allows key people within the Association, from
different EGEA functional areas (BoE, committees, groups, Alumni, entities), to
understand what is evolving elsewhere in the Association. EGEA Committees should
be in place to produce a reasonable forecast of the evolution of entities network&
activities, value, costs and competitive advantage.
The Five Building Blocks: The Road to Intuition
The fact that EGEA is not sufficiently innovative means that creative energies are
spent in an inefficient and probably expensive fashion, relying totally on individual
rather than organizational intuition.
This section intends to communicate a paradigm shift from individual learning
processes into collaborative learning and knowledge building, and provide a processof organizational knowledge creation through the EGEA Committee work. So far,
little attention has been drawn upon how EGEA teams acquire and build knowledge
together. Actually, the very idea of collective knowledge has been very new to
Western culture itself, where the focus was on the individual learner, and such
paradigms could be traced in Cultural Geography and tribal cultures, where
knowledge is produced collaboratively.
While the whole environment of knowledge may seem very abstract and theoretical,
yet, the great challenge of running a European student association of 2000+ members
is much more than a skill-based game. New ideas are the life-blood of an
organization. Without understanding how knowledge works, we have no idea how to
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truly support creativity and innovation within EGEA. Therefore, the following
process of organizational knowledge creation suggests a new orientation, much less
on amassing, indexing and cataloguing knowledge, and mainly towards probing how
knowledge serves us and EGEA. Intuition should be regarded as responsiveness to
EGEAs environment: quickly acquire, adapt or renew expertise, quickly bring onnew innovative activities and enhance EGEAs competitive advantage.
STRATEGY: EGEA as intuitive organization encourages teams of people to
understand each of the five building blocks and share them across EGEAs functional
boundaries (BoE, Committees, Alumni, Entities, and Informal Groups). This can be
accomplished organizationally by combining teams of Committee-functional experts
from neighboring areas to produce valuable forecasts for policy measures, as
presented schematically below. When EGEA really invests in a process to produce
such predictions, the results themselves can be insightful.
REENGINEERING: The proposed committee reengineering creates an
organizational structure relying on five building blocks, through which organizational
intuition is built. Hence, this proposal is not simply a structural reshuffling of
committee structure; it is both a cross-functional process redesign and a strategic
investment in a support infrastructure for EGEAs intuition.
Placing the five new Committees as the building blocks of an inverted pyramid, a
knowledge base starts emerging. Committees combine data to create information.
Information amongst neighboring committees, in turn, is combined, recombined and
assessed by teams of Committee-experts (seediagram below) to produce intermediate
forecasts,predictions about key aspects of EGEA. Meaningful relationships between
these predictions are key in creating insightful clusters of knowledge; then the
building of a knowledge base has begun. Discovering relationships between clusters
of information provides the stage where knowledge is created. This knowledge can
latter be utilized into strategic planning, and can ultimately produce insightful results.
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Network Mapping
The goal of combining the mapping of EGEAs network & activities with a good
description of EGEAs various member profiles (Human Resources) should be to
get a much better idea of how EGEAs network and EGEAs activities will evolve.
This new process should be assumed as something more than a growth forecast. At
its core must be a profile description of the segmentation of EGEAs membership,
a description of the logic that supports the scheme of segmentation, and a
prediction of how basic variables, within and outside EGEA, that determine each
segment size, will influence the growth of each segment over time.
Human Resources Value
The purpose of combining people who understand human resources capabilitiesand expectations and those who know about the potential for scientific value and
Adaptation from Boston Consulting Group, 2006.
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supportive enabling technologies (internet, geoinformatics, databases, etc) is to
forecast how human resources value will evolve. A successful fusion of those two
involves more than experiments with new methodological tools, scientific sessions
and databasesalthough these can be first steps. It requires a broad rethinking of
the values EGEA provides to its members and the way it approaches them. It canalso require significant investments in the infrastructure of members services and
support.
Science & Technology
Valorization and monetization of EGEAs scientific value, incorporation of cost-
effective technologies, technological innovation and an aggressive fundraising
strategy can be the prime determinants of EGEAs cost evolution. Innovative joint-
ventures of Geographic science and education, and Information Technology,
coordinated by EGEA Europe and partner organizations (e.g. Herodot), can
increase public awareness of Geography, especially when targeted to specific
audiences (primary/secondary/higher education). Such EGEA-endorsed projects
may deliver added scientific value and new financial resources for the Association.
EGEA can capitalize on the wealth of expertise scattered across the Association
through the creation and management of a centralized knowledge base, further
enhanced by horizontal value-creating knowledge sharing.
Fundraising
The Fundraising Committee can attain a key steering-committee role within EGEA
by being assigned with EGEAs Fundraising Strategy, EGEAs financial
management, effective budgeting and analysis of financial condition and financial
forecasting. Within the scope of this group fall EGEAs networking with the
corporate world, lobbying with prospective private sponsors, foundations and
fundraising partners, establishing student-corporate relations with leading
companies in the Geographic field, attract public funding, achieving economies ofscale by partnerships with other student organizations and negotiating financial
agreements. An aggressive fundraising strategy must be led by a dynamic
corporate identity and an EGEA branding, along with dexterity in legal
organizational issues.
Competitor Focus & External Relations
Within an increasingly competitive environment in European student associations,
the winners of the student associative business will be those that play hard. Youth
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organizations that play hard employ all of their resources and strategy to gain
advantage over other competing organizations. When they achieve competitive
advantage, they attract more members, boost their finances and reward their
members. Then they reinvest their gains into improving organizational
performance, enhance quality, expand their offerings to their members, andtransform their processes to strengthen their competitive advantage. Competitor
focus and creation and exploitation of own low-cost, competitive advantage to the
fullest must be seen as an obligation to all EGEA stakeholders by EGEAs
leadership.
A virtuous cycle of activity can be fully described with the farther mapping of
EGEAs external environment. Public relations with relevant actors in the
Geographic and youth field, press visibility, EGEA-Alumni relations, Alumni
mentoring, strategic alliances, partnership and project-based collaborations with
other youth organizations, effective use of EGEAs publications, building of anexternal communication strategy and lobbying, synthesize the portfolio of EGEAs
External Relations.
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Lessons Learned in EGEAFueling Committees with Data
Were they learned indeed?
Our EGEA experiences teach us important lessons. These lessons can benefit
us in understanding the variables of success and failure of our EGEA projects.
Do they?
Individually, do we really learn from these lessons?
Even if we learn some of these lessons, do we always share our key
lessons with others?
Even if we share our lessons with our entity members, are they shared
with the EGEA Association?
Even if some of these lessons are shared at higher level, does EGEA
Association and do most entities and projects really learn and apply
them?
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Lessons learned are an important set of information for youth organizations.
If EGEA exploited fully such lessons, the mistakes of one EGEA activity
usually would not be repeated by another, process improvement of EGEA
Association and its activities (planning, implementation, evaluation,fundraising, communication, etc) would be lean, EGEA activities would
usually be on time, within budget and would deliver quality outcomes. EGEA
member and organizers would be more satisfied and organizational intuition
would lead to better strategies and superior performance.
Instead, we often hear in EGEA:
Didnt we have this problem last year in the X congress?
I know Brian had encountered this problem on his project. I dont remember
any details.
I thought Xentity solved this problem long ago!
I really wish I have talked with you before I started this!
And some untold thoughts:
I could have told them it
wouldnt work.
I tried it in our congress.
There is nothing I can
learn from them.
I would like to share
what I know butwho would listen?
I know better
whats best
for my entity!
I will send them
a u2u and then
they will know
how to do it.
If I tell them
what I know,
their activity will
be better than
ours was.
If I share my mistakes
with them, they will
all think our activity
was a failure.
I wish I could talk
to someone who
has done this
before.
I havent any
time to
learn. Ourcongress
starts in
weeks.
Yes! But
our activity
is different.
No time to share myexperience/knowledge.
None in my
entity knows
how to do this. If
we ask, they will
think we are
stupid/incapable.
Not interested in
mistakes. I want to
hear about successes.
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The truth is that we often reflect on our individual experiences and usually
apply the lessons learned in our own EGEA projects. Some cohesive teams of
organizers share and incorporate their past experiences into their future
activities. Also, EGEA has attempted to facilitate cross-learning from various
organizers (training sessions, e-meetings of congress organizers, activitiesmanuals), open culture with the forum tools and technology and
communication through regional meetings and congress reports. But these
are exceptions!
Current EGEA culture is not inspiring for effective communication and cross-
team learning. The current EGEA forum capabilities and the absence of an
official Training Platform that can capitalize on lessons learned leads us
missing many organizational intuition opportunities. The current purpose
and structure of EGEA Committees cannot support and serve an
organizational intuition system that would enable lessons learned and best
practices to become the building blocks of EGEAs organizational knowledge.
Finally, EGEA Association and EGEA entities pay a high price for repeating
same mistakes and missing opportunities over time.
Current Practices
Committees discuss past projects experiences, propose improvementplans
Evaluation reports for regional congresses Manuals on organizing regional congress, exchange and small-scale
event
Meetings of regional congress organizers EGEA Forum & Forum feedback enabled for communication EGEA Board periodically makes some process improvements for
persistent problems (Fees, Waiting Lists, Funding, etc)
Problems with Current Practices
The significant invariability in current practices cannot provide valuable
information and consistent results for lessons learned:
For past EGEA activities and activity organizers that lessons learnedwere not collected in the first place, there are very few capabilities todo so retrospectively
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EGEA Committees do not collect and document systematically and instandardized form lessons learned, do not process case studies and do
not communicate them across the organization
Evaluation reports cannot act as lessons learned: they lack appropriatecategorization, context, problem statement and solution found
Lessons learned contained at the EGEA forum are not centralized, lackeasy access and navigation, cannot be always retrieved in useful form,
and lack sophisticated search capabilities
Any EGEA forum repositories (e.g. forum sections, download section,manuals, etc) grow in size and themes and cannot offer relevant results
Retrieving relevant information is time-consuming and not appealing,thus EGEA members resort to practices they are accustomed to so far
Recommendations for Leveraging EGEA knowledge
The following approach attempts to provide an action plan for capturinglessons learned within EGEAs context and transforming them into valuable
organizational knowledge for the benefit of the Association and its members:
Capture Lessons Store and Maintain Lessons Disseminate Lessons Incorporate Lessons into EGEA Association Use Lessons for Training Purposes
Key ideas adapted from Anil Midha, 2005.
In the following analysis, the key agent for translating lessons learned into
best practices and valuable insights are EGEA Committees.
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Capture Lessons
The value of a Lessons Learned Program within EGEA is a function of how
much experience the members are willing to contribute and how well Lessons
are documented.
On the first variable, we recommend four categories of contributions:
Every major activity that uses EGEAs brand should isolateorganizational problems and note key issues and observations, and
provide them to Committees in the form of report
Organizing teams should submit a final report identifying key issuesand knowledge they acquired that could be replicated in another
context
The EGEA Board (and possibly local entity boards) and the EGEACommittees should collect and analyze key organizational issues and
problems into an annual report that could serve as knowledge transfer
to successors
EGEA members participating in related non-EGEA activities,congresses or training events can provide an activity report with
valuable insights for contemplation
Capturing lessons in valuable ways demands consistency. Each report
submitted should record particularly what worked well and what did not.
With regards to indexing those reports, a proper template can be decided and
created by a cross-Committee task force. Some possible fields could be: project
name, project size, type (congress, exchange, training, BoE report etc), project
environment, issues and problems identified, methods for resolution,
solutions given, possible scenarios for future users and some keywords for
optimizing search.
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Store and Maintain Lessons
EGEA should own a single centralized password-protected web-based
Knowledge Repository, where a XML relational or object-oriented database, a
wiki or an online library will organize and save lessons according totopic/thematic maps. The online repository should enable customizable user
profiles, so that members can create their personal EGEA library with
bookmarked or saved Lessons and can share them with other members.
The online repository should also include a user-friendly authoring interface,
so that registered members can add or modify entries of lessons easily like
blogging, without any XML programming knowledge. The portal should also
be equipped with a sophisticated advanced search engine based on queries
and filters.
Disseminate Lessons
The Lessons Learned Program should be supported by an association-wide
Communication strategy. Insights prepared by Committees should be
disseminated across the organization through the EGEA forum, u2u tool andapplication, as well as through the European Geographer magazine. Special
editions should be forwarded to prospective Congress organizers or potential
organizing teams, and entity boards or contact persons. A cross-Committee
newsletter could communicate organizational knowledge.
Additionally, Lessons Learned presentations or discussions should become a
routine in (face-to-face or virtual) meetings and occupy a regular timeslot
therein. Congress reports should include them by default and all major EGEA
conferences should offer airtime to members interested in sharing their case
studies.
Communication of elaborated insights out of Lessons Learned brings valuable
information to potential organizers. It also increases the chance that a member
of the organizing team will actually apply a relevant lesson. Proper
dissemination can encourage past organizers to reflect on their experiences
and contribute to the knowledge pool. Lessons can form valuable discussion
points for the organizers hidden forums and can permit improvisation and
innovation in current knowledge.
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Incorporate Lessons into EGEA Association
The Board of Executives and the Committees should identify internal or
external lessons that can be incorporated in EGEAs organizational processes.
Problems that appear on entity-level or activities-level could be tracedassociation-wide and relevant solutions can be proposed. Influential lessons
can serve as pilot programs for EGEAs new ventures. Such lessons deliver a
valuable know-how and can contain uncertainty and risks when attempting
to lead new changes within EGEA.
Lessons learned could be used as positive feedback for the Association.
Lessons analysis could offer valuable insights on how various activities are
organized, how effectual project planning is, additional activities could add
up to EGEAs current, new workshop tools or methods or new technologies
can be suggested for further use, additional review on congresses quality can
be introduced, they can spark a new policy or official guidelines/rules of
conduct, our focus over various activities could change due to lessons effect,
and additional evaluation criteria could be considered.
Use Lessons for Training Purposes
As intuition is learning from experience, lessons learned and best practices
can be a valuable resource for EGEAs Training Platform. Lessons learned
sharing provides content for training sessions, invites group interaction and
can enable the use of various learning methods (individual or team learning,
case studies presentation, lectures, discussions). Informal peer scrutiny of
various case studies can augment the value of the learning process and can
offer real-life examples, instead of resorting to paradigms and metaphors.