Egea Committees

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

If only EGEA knew what EGEA knows…

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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 action - fast!

Strategic Intuition

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

Strategic Intuition and EGEA

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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 ventures. To improve predictions, EGEA as intuitive organization must systematically resolve a handful of critical unknowns: 

Who is our member?

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What is the value we offer to our members?

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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.

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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 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:

VALUE

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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 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

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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.

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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

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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

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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 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.

Science & Technology Valorization and monetization of EGEA’s scientific value, incorporation of costeffective technologies, technological innovation and an aggressive fundraising strategy can be the prime determinants of EGEA’s cost evolution. Innovative jointventures 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

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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, and transform 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 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

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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

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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: “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 who would listen?

I could have told them it wouldn’t work.

There is nothing I can learn from them.

I tried it in our congress. 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.

Yes! But our activity is different.

I wish I could talk to someone who has done this before.

I know better what’s best for my entity!

I haven’t any time to learn. Our congress starts in weeks. Not interested in mistakes. I want to hear about successes.

None in my entity knows how to do this. If we ask, they will think we are stupid/incapable.

If I share my mistakes with them, they will all think our activity was a failure.

No time to share my experience/knowledge.

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

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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, activities’ manuals), 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 crossteam 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

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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

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Evaluation reports cannot act as lessons learned: they lack appropriate categorization, context, problem statement and solution found

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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

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Any EGEA forum repositories (e.g. forum sections, download section, manuals, etc) grow in size and themes and cannot offer relevant results

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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

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Store and Maintain Lessons

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Disseminate Lessons

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Incorporate Lessons into EGEA Association

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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.

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On the first variable, we recommend four categories of contributions: 

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

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Organizing teams should submit a final report identifying key issues and knowledge they acquired that could be replicated in another context

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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

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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

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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 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

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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 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