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Re-engineering EGEA’s COMMITTEES  EGEA as Intuitive Organization


If only EGEA knew what EGEA knows…

1 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 set
a 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 strategic
innovation 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
system that 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 into
Strategic Intuition
action - fast!

Re-engineering EGEA’s COMMITTEES  EGEA as Intuitive Organization


Strategic Intuition and EGEA
In the field of student-run organizations, successful players are not
necessarily the organizations that start with the best plan, most resources or
biggest network. They are the ones that learn and adapt the quickest. The
essence of the learning challenge for EGEA is improving the organization’s
ability to predict the future performance and the performance of any new

2 ventures. To improve predictions, EGEA as intuitive organization must


systematically 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
organization’s 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. Most
Boards 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 Board’s 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

Re-engineering EGEA’s COMMITTEES  EGEA as Intuitive Organization


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

3 Committees, and potential youth leaders (see the diagram on EGEA’s


Organizational Intuition). By that, the learning cycle follows exactly the Board’s
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
EGEA’s end-to-end knowledge value chain architecture:

 LE SSO NS L EAR NE D
 I NNOV ATI O N
 O RG ANIZ ATIO NAL I NT UI TIO N
 NEW ST R ATE GY FO R EGEA
VALUE  NEW K NO WLE DGE
 LE AR NI NG CYC LE
 T E AM B UIL D I NG
CREATE

AC TION
TAKE

DECISION -MAKING
APPLY

INTELLIGENCE
DISSEMINATE

KNOWLEDGE
ANALYZE

INFORMATION
PROCESS

DATA
ACQUIRE

Adaptation from Tim Powell, 1999 for EGEA

Re-engineering EGEA’s COMMITTEES  EGEA as Intuitive Organization


EGEA Committees
The Building Blocks of EGEA Intuition

4 EGEA as Intuitive Organization


Every organization – student 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 process
of 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

Re-engineering EGEA’s COMMITTEES  EGEA as Intuitive Organization


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
EGEA’s environment: quickly acquire, adapt or renew expertise, quickly bring on
new innovative activities and enhance EGEA’s competitive advantage.

5 STRATEGY: EGEA as intuitive organization encourages teams of people to


understand each of the five building blocks and share them across EGEA’s 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 EGEA’s 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 (see diagram 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.

Re-engineering EGEA’s COMMITTEES  EGEA as Intuitive Organization


6

Adaptation from Boston Consulting Group, 2006.

Network Mapping
The goal of combining the mapping of EGEA’s network & activities with a good
description of EGEA’s various member profiles (Human Resources) should be to
get a much better idea of how EGEA’s network and EGEA’s 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 EGEA’s 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 capabilities
and expectations and those who know about the potential for scientific value and

Re-engineering EGEA’s COMMITTEES  EGEA as Intuitive Organization


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 databases – although 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 can
also require significant investments in the infrastructure of members’ services and
support.

7 Science & Technology


Valorization and monetization of EGEA’s scientific value, incorporation of cost-
effective technologies, technological innovation and an aggressive fundraising
strategy can be the prime determinants of EGEA’s 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 EGEA’s Fundraising Strategy, EGEA’s financial
management, effective budgeting and analysis of financial condition and financial
forecasting. Within the scope of this group fall EGEA’s 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 of
scale 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

Re-engineering EGEA’s COMMITTEES  EGEA as Intuitive Organization


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, and
transform their processes to strengthen their competitive advantage. Competitor
focus and creation and exploitation of own low-cost, competitive advantage to the

8 fullest must be seen as an obligation to all EGEA stakeholders by EGEA’s


leadership.

A virtuous cycle of activity can be fully described with the farther mapping of
EGEA’s 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 EGEA’s publications, building of an
external communication strategy and lobbying, synthesize the portfolio of EGEA’s
External Relations.

Re-engineering EGEA’s COMMITTEES  EGEA as Intuitive Organization


Lessons Learned in EGEA
Fueling 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?

Re-engineering EGEA’s COMMITTEES  EGEA as Intuitive Organization


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

10 member and organizers would be more satisfied and organizational intuition


would lead to better strategies and superior performance.

Instead, we often hear in EGEA:

“Didn’t we have this problem last year in the X congress?”


“I know Brian had encountered this problem on his project. I don’t remember
any details.”
“I thought X entity solved this problem long ago!”
“I really wish I have talked with you before I started this!”

And some untold thoughts:


I would like to share
what I know but
I could have told them it who would listen?
wouldn’t work.
There is nothing I can
I know better
I tried it in our congress. learn from them.
what’s best None in my
for my entity! entity knows
I will send them how to do this. If
a u2u and then I haven’t any we ask, they will
they will know time to think we are
how to do it. learn. Our stupid/incapable.
congress
Yes! But starts in
If I tell them weeks.
our activity If I share my mistakes
what I know,
is different. with them, they will
their activity will Not interested in all think our activity
be better than mistakes. I want to
was a failure.
ours was. hear about successes.
I wish I could talk
to someone who No time to share my
has done this experience/knowledge.
before.

Re-engineering EGEA’s COMMITTEES  EGEA as Intuitive Organization


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, activities’
manuals), open culture with the forum tools and technology and
communication through regional meetings and congress reports. But these

11 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 EGEA’s 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 improvement


plans
 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 learned
were not collected in the first place, there are very few capabilities to
do so retrospectively

Re-engineering EGEA’s COMMITTEES  EGEA as Intuitive Organization


 EGEA Committees do not collect and document systematically and in
standardized 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 appropriate


categorization, context, problem statement and solution found

12  Lessons learned contained at the EGEA forum are not centralized, lack
easy 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 capturing


lessons learned within EGEA’s 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.

Re-engineering EGEA’s COMMITTEES  EGEA as Intuitive Organization


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:

13  Every major activity that uses EGEA’s brand should isolate


organizational 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 issues


and knowledge they acquired that could be replicated in another
context

 The EGEA Board (and possibly local entity boards) and the EGEA
Committees 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.

Re-engineering EGEA’s COMMITTEES  EGEA as Intuitive Organization


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 to
topic/thematic maps. The online repository should enable customizable user
profiles, so that members can create their personal EGEA library with

14 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 and
application, 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.

Re-engineering EGEA’s COMMITTEES  EGEA as Intuitive Organization


Incorporate Lessons into EGEA Association

The Board of Executives and the Committees should identify internal or


external lessons that can be incorporated in EGEA’s organizational processes.
Problems that appear on entity-level or activities-level could be traced
association-wide and relevant solutions can be proposed. Influential lessons
can serve as pilot programs for EGEA’s new ventures. Such lessons deliver a

15 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 EGEA’s 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 EGEA’s 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.

Re-engineering EGEA’s COMMITTEES  EGEA as Intuitive Organization

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