Design by Monkeys
Learning Journeys à la Monkey Business
Jul 22nd
July 2010 has been a great learning journey month with friends from TA around Europe. I felt like harvesting a bit of this concept of Learning Journey, because that’s becoming such a key element in Monkey Business’s business!
One significant day in the 3-weeks journey of mine was the day of attending the thesis presentation session of Liher at Mondragon University / MTA. Liher had done his thesis about Learning Journeys. In his presentation he reflected what he had learned in the journeys he did together with the TA network over the past 1,5 years, and how he will use his learnings in the future. The topic was really real and tangible, because due to the experience Liher had gathered, MTA had given him a challenge to organize all the learning journeys of LEINN and MINN University programs to Finland, US California and China during this and the next year. Quite a nice challenge, I thought! One significant interest factor at Liher’s story for me was that I had been with him in most of the learning journeys he described, and he had indentified that we could work on the journeys together in the future as well. Super! For me the Learning Journeys theme resonated well with the Travel Agency for Superheroes concept, that we have been developing in Monkey Business recently, so here I’ll share the ideas that popped up while enjoying the dialogue at Liher’s session.
The style of the event was open and full of inquiry, such as: What is a learning journey?, that Liher asked from us. I made a drawing of the success factors of my kind of learning journey and here it is:
Then the dialogue moved into the learning journeys with a meaning. What’s your meaning of taking a journey?, was the question. What’s the trigger? There must be many, ne could go to learn about people, surf, Art of Hosting, SoL, food, the Hub’s, sports, learning, Team Academy, Kaospilots, fun, sun, snow, hot, cold, history, personal discovery or cultures – you name it!
As organizers of multiple the learning journeys we then wondered: What’s the needed agenda / structure for a successful journey? Connections, networks and the first night booking were the obvious first thoughts. But the type of the journeys Monkey Business arranges is preferably with open agenda and created in dialogue with our guests. We try to avoid arranging trips with predictable results (referring to the slogan in our Banana card ”How would you feel if someone gave a you banana that had been chewed already?”). Cornerstones of our journeys are Monkey spirit, TA spirit and knowledge of the destination with local friends. Challenges are to network even better in the world of facility providers, such as accommodators and restaurants so that we could concentrate on our main strenght which is creating experiences rather than booking facilities. However, we gotta build the network of trusted facilities as well!
After talking about the facilities Maria, a professor of MU asked: How can we move people into a learning journey? Because for sure learning journey does good, but only if a person is ready to take it and jump in. Can we create a need? Creating the need might work out by talking about the content / calling questions / topics of the journey, but what if Learning Journey guests come with the fear of jumping in and opening up for anything that might come? Fear is the one that blocks the most. So how do we overcome the personal fear and closure? That was the final question posed in the session, and stayed unanswered.
Now in the case of LEINN journeys, Liher and Monkeys practice the way to create a journey that takes off the fear. The fact is that in the coming September there are 60 people to come for a Learning Journey to TA Finland, and soon after that in March 25 people going to California and on the next autumn double to California and 25 to China… Liher, Monkeys are there for you to help you and for sure this concept of Learning Journeys deserves some thinking / dialoguing work. Maybe it starts from creating the Leading Thoughts for our Travel Agency for Superheroes? Who’s up to that!?
With Yellow summer mood,
Henna Monkey
p.s. I’ve just finished reading a book Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie, hence the artsy illustration trial. Note the nailpolish that acted as a glue and marker!
How to become a superhero?
Jan 12th
Year 2010 and new decade has started rolling really fast. And it feels good. Monkey Business coreteam has had good dialogues around issue of each player role. Henna answered to question about responsibilities that she would like to be a superstar.
That ignited my thinking – how to became a superstar? We all have super powers, I am sure. But we need help to find them, to feel secured enough learning to use them. And that is where we need communities, loving and caring surroundings. And that is why I feel so good about being in Monkey Business.
What kind of history you want to create? What is your superpower?
“God won´t ask me why I wasn´t Moses. He will ask me why I wasn´t Susya.” -Rabbie Susya-
Tantourist. In flames!
Nathaniel the Kaospilot taught us Graphic Facilitation
Nov 23rd
Finally on Friday last week we put the graphics on our offices wall but read below what happened before that.
Last week we got a great surprise guest to our office. He is a friend of a friend of a friend of ours and he was visiting Jyväskylä and then he popped up into our office. And now he is a friend of ours as well. His name is Nathaniel, and he is probably the first ever Kaospilot to actually visit Team Academy. Kaospilots are cool, they have a strong sustainability value to their education, and also they have eye for design. Besides, they do learn about process facilitation, team work and entrepreneurship. The goal is to educate social innovators, I think. Be sure to check them out if you didn’t know about them yet. I also wrote earlier about Kaospilot’s good marketing.
Anyways, we got along very well with Nathaniel, and he taught us some cool tricks about Graphic Facilitation. After having some coffee and talking about various things Nathaniel showed us a video he had done. And, you maybe guessed, we wanted to do the same kind of things about our own products. We picked up our new product called Kick Ass Event Facilitation and here are the results. First Nathaniel himself and third one is Tatu in Finnish. We also got a small making of/behind the scenes video on Youtube and we got pitches by Henna, Hugo, myself and Johanna waiting to be published shortly. Tatu kinds of comes to this video shooting from the bushes; he wasn’t told beforehands what product he was supposed to explain about. The idea was to keep the video presentations authentic and alive, kind of the jazzy style improvization. Any questions, ideas or similar? Please share them through comments or get in touch with us directly. We are ready to rock with you!
edit: Henna wasn’t happy with her video being online so I took it out. Sorry for that – both Henna (for putting it here in the first place) and the world (that it’s not online anymore).
Monkey Business Design Philosophy
Oct 30th
We are working on building a new lay out for our blog (and there’s a blog in Finnish coming up too!) and for that process I wrote out some of the design philosophy down. This is version 0.5 BETA but I thought I should still drop it out for you. Here’s the classic banana with classes drawn by Lady My of MyJok back in late 2007.
1. Our mission is to make the world more fun and yellow. Our design are also fun and colorful.
1. Things are as they look and feel to a person. Not as somebody intents them to be but as someone experiences them.
1. All yellow is good. Our graphics don’t need to follow one clearly defined pattern or a set of rules, but part of our brand is that the visuals change a lot.
2. A Banana drawn by Lady My is the banana for us. We will stick to that until something totally explosive comes to our way.
3. All monkeys and bananas are part of our design strategy.
4. Our graphics should be aligned with our style. That is yellow, playful and sincere. Our Graphics and Designs should enhance the same message.
6. We like skateboarders, clothing designers, surfers, musicians and other party people in general. The idea is to enjoy life and have fun. Our designs should also follow that ideology. We search for ideas and inspiration everywhere but nature and pop culture especially.
7. We like to promote a wide range of designs and designers. We work with people we like and think are cool. We want to have loads of different designs.
Have a yellow weekend everyone!
Ps. The book recommendation of this week is by Hugh MacLeod and is called “Ignore Everybody – and 39 other keys to creativity.” I read it over the summer and is a quick read and gave me quite a few insights. There loads of good quotes and even more insightful drawings. Some of the things he writes and draws seems a bit cynical to me but he cleared it all by saying this: “Anyone can be an idealist. Anyone can be a cynic. The hard part lies somewhere in the middle i.e. being human.” That’s the spirit I guess. You can read plenty of samples of the book at Hugh’s website.
Monkey Business – Story about our name
Oct 15th
Many people ask where does the name Monkey Business come from. Here is the story. Fresh from Angers where it all started, now written at Team Entrepreneur’s office. Team Mastery 1 participants Gilles, Laurent and Herve got a three year program launched here with 18 teampreneurs just two weeks ago! Sanna is coaching here with Gilles. Fantastic job, guys. Fantastic.
Herve Explains the name of the game called Experience Economy to the teamsters.
The name of Monkey Business has a strong connection to Angers, a city in the Western France. Me and Tatu started in Team Mastery’s 1st promotion back in Dec 2006 in Finland, and then the second session with the theme of Leadership was held in Angers. Team Mastery is an international coaching program for people who want to learn team coaching Team Academy style.
So the second session was about Leadership. And as all the weekend/adult/entrepreneurs programs coached by the Team Academy / Partus there is a birth giving of new knowledge in the Friday evening. (The sessions are from Thursday 12pm to Saturday 12pm =48hrs of intensive dialogue and team work). I remember that this particular session was not so easy for me. It was confusing – maybe it was about the difference between a coach and a leader, and also I remember one member of our team was not comfortable with the atmosphere, as it seemed very business oriented with the aim of creating more and more entrepreneurs – Where is the idealistic part and saving the world? Well, I remember that in our birth giving we asked everyone that what is their mission in this world or what they dream about. I think almost everyone dreamed of a better world in a way or another.
Then, the second birth giving was about Fertile Emptiness. I remember Sari, Emmanuel and Javier R. (in the picture above on the right taken at the Team Academy Euskadi’s 3rd Anniversary) was in that group. But what was really the ignition for our name was the third team’s birth giving about the Evolution of Leadership. It was a theatre play and it took place in the gardens of our agriturismo place. 1st scene was from the jungle were monkeys were leading one another by running around and making loads of noises. That was a key. Laurent from CoMind and Tatu could really make some cool (and loud) monkey noises and movements. Another interesting and hard-to-forget scene of that birth giving was the 3rd scene were Claude from Strasbourg and TA Alsace had climbed in the tree, and repeated the word “Awareness”. (Tatu confirms this story and say that it was harder to actually get him safely down but we managed.) It was the Guru-model of Leadership. Then there was a still 3rd level, but I cannot recall what that was. (Tatu says it was working and learning together). Here’s a picture of Claude whom I was happy to meet this Sunday.
So it was in Angers that the seeds for our name Monkey Business was sowed but the name came up in the third session of Team Mastery in London. Our friend Javier Ruiz of Labein and TA Euskadi brought with him a game that went like this: “If you were an animal, what animal were you?” Tatu said Monkey, I think I said Puma (because I used to play Ice Hockey in a team called Pumas). But then Sanna said that I would be Sloth, which is a kind of Monkey, too.
Well this game wasn’t quite enough to make the name yet. There were some people talking about the book by Ridderstråle and Nordström called Funky Business. It was Tatu who was around in another conversation where he heard Monkey Business, and a bulb lit in his head: “That’s it! That should be the name!” And the good thing was that we were going to go and do in our first coaching project outside Finland with Labein right after the session in London so we got to develop our idea of Monkey Business a bit further. On that trip we also met with folks of Funky Projects, and the artist called Lady My who eventually draw the famous Banana for us. But that is another story that deserves a post of it’s own.
New Design Coming Up for Monkey Business
Sep 21st
We’ve made a deal with Jaakko from Kuvituskonttori to design a new image for Monkey Business. But he is not the only one visually talented friend of ours. Also, there’s a very promising young designer working currently at Intotalo who has a skill hard to match when drawing monkeys and other illustrations. Juha-Matti has drawn for example a great comic strip about Tupsu the Monkey and a superman Monkey.
This is our latest Design by the Tiimiakatemia bookshop host Esa. He gave it to us in the first page of a small notebook at the Team Mastery Arena (which was quite a success, by the way!) I think it’s rather cool and maybe this will be the design for our next T-shirt. And yes, the point of this post was to say that if there are some eager designers and or people with some eye for the visual candy please let us know. We are building a roster of artists, and we need loads of graphics in the future. My inspiration has come for this kind of organization and style initially from Mambo from Australia and and more recently also from Control Clothing from Finland. Cool stuff indeed by both of them, I think. Story by Ville Monkey
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