II . Organisational Intelligence

Do you need to elaborate strategies in order to position and move your organisation in the market at local, national and transnational level?

• Positioning: Positioning is what your organization is in the customer’s mind. Positioning also defines the “comparative” evaluation we give of one organization compared to another in a given sector. For this reason, positioning is essential for the success of the organization. Positioning is one of the main aspects on which to base the organization’s strategies.
• Strategy: long-term action plan used to set up and coordinate actions aimed at achieving a predetermined purpose or objective. The concept applies to various fields in which a series of separate operations is required to achieve the objective, the choice of which is not unique and / or the outcome of which is uncertain.
• Business Plan: The Business Plan is a forecast document that includes the main aspects related to the development of an entrepreneurial activity. Generally it is drawn up by those who want to start an activity – for example commercial – in order to obtain financing or, in the case of business already started, it is periodically prepared by management to allocate available resources and focus on the future development of their business.
• Partnership: Collaborative relationship between two or more organizations, governed by a contractual agreement, in which the partners undertake to carry out common or complementary projects to obtain a competitive advantage.

The fundamental reason for the widespread use of partnerships lies in the fact that they can allow organizations to acquire the resources and skills of a technological, productive, commercial, financial and managerial nature necessary to operate in a rapidly changing environment.Within the framework of the agreements in question, vertical partnerships are distinguished, which operate at the same level of the supply chain, upstream or downstream of the same, and horizontal partnerships, which are set up between companies operating at the same level of the value chain, but competing in different areas, by virtue of synergies based on skills and / or on the target segments reached.

• Network: agreement between different entities or institutions to operate on the same market.
• Monitoring: we mean the control of the trend over time of one or more variable quantities, with application in various fields.
• Evaluation: The evaluation of the results concerns the measurement of the objectives achieved in the reference period (the what and the when); performance evaluation relates to the observation of organizational behaviors implemented to achieve the same objectives (the how).
• Break even point: In business economics the break-even point (break even point or break even, abbreviated to BEP) is a value that indicates the quantity, expressed in production volumes or turnover, of product sold necessary to cover the costs previously incurred, in order to close the reporting period without profit or loss.

A market / sector research is a marketing analysis conducted by an organization to better understand the market and the socio-economic context in which it operates, this includes competition, the development of the reference sector in a given market as well as the behavior of consumers / recipients.

Good market / sector research provides the organization with a decision-making base full of useful information to unveil the opportunities at hand, along with the risk factors that these could involve. The benefits offered by the analysis are multiple and support organizations in designing winning strategies.

The most used (and most useful) research methods involve the integration of qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. In other words, market / sector research is a prime example of how a multidisciplinary approach is the only one capable of providing an overview of the market / sector of reference.

This arises from the need to discover and collect data of an extremely varied and variable nature, such as the cause-effect connections of the choices of consumers / recipients, but also the nature of their needs, trends that influence demand as well as other characteristics such as direction and the intensity of the sales curve. All this cannot be explained by a single market research, but only by a mix of different surveys.

Given its multidisciplinary approach, market / sector research often uses a mix of different tools: databases and statistics, psychological and sociological analyzes, online opinion polls, telephone interviews, direct observations, etc.

The chosen tool is determined by the purpose of the research. Some of the more common search tools are:

• A / B Testing and experiments
• focus group
• Interviews (telephone or in person)
• Competitor analysis
• Joint analyzes
• Predictive analytics
• Direct observations
• Customer satisfaction
• Opinion polls
• Target segmentation
• Advertising test

To raise and find financial resources for your organisation, please, see Toolkit Section 5.

To achieve the goals of your organization it is essential to build the right team, the right mix of skills, knowledge and attitudes. Building a Team is not immediate and you have to know what to do and what to not do.

Tu build and manage a Team you have to take care of five dimensions:

Confidence

A team of individuals who trust each other works best, especially in competition or when negotiating with other groups.

It is important to understand that in a work group there may be a less reliable or disheartened individual: the problem lies in assessing how much the reliability of the work group can be questioned even by that individual alone.

Positivity

It has been found that people with a positive thinking style are inclined to humor and this produces an evaluation of greater reliability than others.

When group dynamics are strong, people start joking together and will tend to talk to each other about work even outside the office.

Humor makes a work group cohesive and helps to increase the pleasure of working with the staff.

Obviously it must be measured but in any case the positivity reduces stress over time, increases creativity, communication and team cohesion.

Have clear goals

One of the biggest obstacles encountered in forming a successful work team is defining the common goal to work on.

A study carried out on many managers and professionals from dozens of different companies found that many know what to work on, but at the same time do not know clearly what is why.

It is therefore essential to always define the objectives to be achieved to ensure that the solutions really involve everyone.

Defining the goal is essential but not enough.

Define the roles

The question to ask is: “Do everyone really know what they have to do to achieve the goal of teamwork?”

It seems simple but it is often unclear what tasks the individual team members must perform and what roles they should have therefore, the question of unclear roles becomes thorny, particularly when a work situation changes and the team is forced to adapt to the new situation.

If the roles are not clear then no one knows what to do and the chances of not reaching the goal increase.

Use communication that is clear and concise

One of the most common reasons why a team fails is that communication between the members is not effective.

In complex environments, information often comes from many different sources: nowadays we are flooded with useful and useless information and the worker risks being overwhelmed with the risk of losing the most relevant information that is needed to work at their best.

Communication within the team must not be dispersed in order not to create misunderstandings.

The goal of communicating within the company is to distribute information effectively, make it available to those who use it for the work to be done, avoiding the dissemination of information that is not needed.

Your organisation and your teams doesn’t work under empty. Both work in an environment where other organisations and teams work. You will find hostile organisations, and organisations to which is possible to collaborate.

The organisations with you could collaborate in order to achieve your objectives should be your partners. The whole group of your partners is your network. On the basis of the geographical dimension of your activities you should need local, national or transnational partners and local, national or transnational networks.

Partnership is the integrated management of a process by two different parties, who act as if they belonged to a single entity.

A partnership takes place, for example, when an exchange actor absorbs a cost or an activity of the other in his work process, or makes available knowledge and working methods that are not accessible to the other, to help him to do better. his job. It does this because it gets a return in its value creation process. More value for the other becomes more value for oneself too.

Partnership is therefore not just a generic form of collaboration, nor is it a simple relationship of trust. It is a long-term business relationship based on reciprocity requirements. In the definitions of “formal” partnerships, what is often missing is the reference and attention to the skills and behaviors that are needed to build a true partnership. We can compare it to a relationship of love based on reciprocity where we can identify:

1.  A common desire, which in business is the value objective or shared purpose that motivates the creation of the partnership.
2. The ability to listen, to pay attention, to focus on the needs of the other, to really understand what creates value for the partner. In order not to stop at one’s own perception of value and a unilateral criterion for evaluating the result to be achieved; methods that often take over in business, transforming the partnership process into continuous negotiation, without any win-win criteria to support it.
3. Initiative and, at the same time, respect for defined and shared rules. In business, talking about partnership means knowing how to identify new or different solutions for the other partner and investing to help create greater value. So planning, problem solving, new ideas and, why not, generosity in the development of intervention solutions, are important requirements. To work in a profitable way, in a logic of reciprocity and exchange, however, the rules of the game between the parties must be explicit and clear, and must be respected.

Perhaps this last point is the reason why partnerships in companies and in business are so difficult to activate and maintain. In the business world it is really difficult to combine rules, boundaries, rights and duties with aspects of initiative and generosity. The fear that opening actions are mistaken for naivety and badly used, shifts the attention of the actors to the rules, rights and duties and to the “contractual” aspects of the partnership. A part of free initiative, of openness and credit to the other, outside the rules, must always be present in partnerships. Because otherwise, if everything is regulated only on the basis of the exchange, there is a risk of spending time doing the “calculation of reciprocity” in detail: every action I do with you must correspond to a return for me and vice versa. Forgetting the initial purpose of the partnership created.

So the partnership, both in life and in business, doesn’t hold up very long. We must be able to dare and be courageous and confident in the ability of the other to restore value to the value received. It is not easy but it can be done.

A good supplier deals with the real problems of his customers and understands that the success of the latter will be his success. This is a way that goes beyond the calculation of individual reciprocities and a concrete way of starting a partnership.

Now you are ready to put in practise your strategy by doing the activities you wrote in the “Activities” section of your Business Model Canvas.

In order to monitor your activities, please refer to Toolkit Section 7.

In order to monitor your activities, please refer to Toolkit Section 7.

By monitoring and evaluating your activities and your results you will realize that what you have designed through the tools we have indicated, starting from the Business Model Canvas, when it is created must be somehow adapted to reality and the environment. external and changes in the time span between planning and implementation. This can be done intuitively as long as the complexity of your organization’s activities allows it. When that complexity becomes too much to be managed through common sense, you will need to use project cycle management techniques. What we suggest you use is the “Goal Oriented Project Planning”.

The GOPP is a method that facilitates the planning and coordination of projects through a clear definition of objectives and is part of an integrated approach called PCM (Project Cycle Management) and released in 1993 by the European Commission as a quality standard in the phases of planning, management and evaluation of complex interventions.

During the life cycle of a project, the GOPP can be used:

• in the identification and definition phase, to analyze problems, establish possible solutions, objectives, results, activities and monitoring and evaluation indicators (construction of the problem tree and the tree of solutions);
• in the activation and executive planning phase, to clarify the division of tasks between the various actors involved and to make any adjustments (construction of the logical framework);
• in the phase of evaluation and verification of the project in progress, to share any adaptations if problems or new opportunities have emerged
• in the final evaluation phase, to verify the achievement of the objectives and identify any suggestions for subsequent improvements and future projects.

From an organizational point of view, a GOPP workshop foresees the involvement of a limited number of people, identified among the key-actors who have a crucial role in the success of a project, and of a facilitator, and can have a duration of one or more. more days. It is a methodology that makes extensive use of visualization techniques: large sheets of adhesive paper are used side by side on a wall and the participants, seated in a semicircle, work, from analyzing problems to proposing solutions, with colored cards in which they can write their suggestions according to the stages of the methodology. These ideas, once inserted on the adhesive wall, can be viewed by the whole group who can move or aggregate them as needed.

It is clear that the use of this technique can lead to strengthening communication and the convergence of working groups, and is particularly effective for analyzing problems, suggesting proposals highlight risks, and develop solutions in a relatively short time.