Dialogue
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!
Learnigs from the Jungle!
May 7th
Working together really shapes the partnership and cocreation. Last week Wed 28th of April till Sat 1st of May we had a learnig journey called Jungle Trip. It was first real cocreational project with CoMind. It took place in Helsinki, Jyväskylä and Taulun Kartano, Toivakka. Dialogues took place in plane, train, buss, smokesauna, pool, lake, walk… Thoughts were ignited by Esa Saarinen, SOL City, Team Academy and Design Factory. And we did learn a lot. Here is my short reflections about Jungle:
1.) Dialogue. Well obviously it´s the key element in cocreation. There can´t be shared undestanding without dialogue. And in Monkey Business we have learned to do “dialogue on the spot”. Short sessions between coaches- what´s happening and what do we want to happen next. Then we know what is the next move. When we know what we are aiming to – it´s easier to improvise. -> Goal!
2.) Culture. Or system. From the aspect of interaction. Someone has to lead in the beginning to make people interact. And then take care about culture througout the process. And this is something that separates TeamAcademy from many places. And this is something that will have a big role in DesignFactorys future. Team Academy is very down to earth and pragmatic, learning by doeing. Design Factorys comes to the same play-yard from different aspect, knowledge focused. And strongest tool in TeamAcademy are Leading Thoughts and yearly process of checking them.
3.)Braveness. We only become exellent by following our passion. We know who we are and how monkeys do things. We have to stand for our cornerstones. Our friend PAMPAM said it nicely:”The more serious someone is, the less I trust him/her”. So we need to remain the contact to our heart. Speak from it and to follow it.
What did you learn?
Thanks alot CoMind and all adventurers. “Unexpected is the spice of life.”
Tantourist, still alive.
Team Evolution & Dialogue – insights from TA@Uni Surrey
Apr 4th
At 18th-19th of March we had an honour to work with Uni of Surrey and SoL UK by hosting 2 days of TA workshops at UK. There’s a plan to implement TA to the educational field of UK, and therefore we are learning and working together. The workshops were hosted by Surrey Team Enterprise Project, STEP1 team. From TA the hosts were Petrus Piironen from 3rd year team company Cromita, Alexandra Tancula from the World Wide Team, myself from MB and Mikael Hirvi from Partus, the Team Academy adult education and brand managing company.
In the workshops one theme was rising up as essential part of TA, and here I want to reflect on it. There had been a thought of implementing TA in Surrey as short courses / summer programs with an intention of piloting it so. Before we even got into deeper discussion about the benefits and downsides of the short courses, Petrus got a system intelligent insight of showing this Team Evolution modelling made by a Monkey fellow Ville Hast.
We described this figure by sharing a fact that on the first year teams are less productive than members of the team as indivuals could be, but investing time for working as a team makes us exponentially productive by the 4th year. Then Arie de Geus took this figure in deeper analysis by sharing us a story and example of the power of dialogue from the Roayl Dutch Shell, where the management teams aimed to spend hours and hours dialoguing. Why so? Because due to the shared knowledege and understanding they gained by dialoguing their desicion making process improved remarkably making them fast at implementing desicions and committing people to work on changes. Dialogue simply brought competence for the company.
It was clear then, that short courses of TA are useful as pilots, but for making it really a successful learning program in the Uni no less than 3 years is the recommended lenght of a program, because team learning and dialogue need time. In Team Academy Finland team companies the first two years go for learning the dialogue with 8 hours / week basis and investing for learning, and the 3rd and 4th year as a team bring exponential growt in quality of the ideas and action of the team members and thus the revenues also grow. In adult learning programs 1 year time frame works well, because adult learners come with more experience and capabilities to think together than the BBA learners aged 18-30.
Summasummarum: dialogue is power and it’s wise to make effort for allowing time for it in any learning program and company. At this UK journey I started valuing our Mondays Are For Monkeys dialogue sessions especially! …we’ve got a chance to improve so much when we invest on dialogue.
With yellow Easter regards,
Henna Monkey
How to lead a network well? ideas from AoH Karlskrona
Feb 20th
Hey all,
here’s some online fruits from the Art of Hosting training I am happy to attend in Karlskrona. We have a unique opportunity to learn together with many Kaospilots, MSLS-students, Team Entrepreneurs and other inspiring people from different networks.
I hosted a session in Open Space, (which Tennessee one of our excellent hosts calls the best tool to get people into action fast) session at Art of Hosting training in Karlskrona with a calling question or topic: Networks / Tribes – How do we eliminate the limits of growth?
We started with Oliver from Kaospilots, and soon also Marco from MSLS (thanks for harvesting), Rovan one of our hosts and Vilma from TA/PArtus/SoL joined the dialogue. Thanks all for participating and supporting the thinking together.
Impact for me to host this session is that I am part of many networks (e.g. SoL, The Hub, TeamAcademy, PrecencingInstitute, WorldCafe, AoH, AppInquiry etc.) that are growing and somewhat aligned, but still I wonder how we could really leverage the power of these networks making the world better. Also a question in my head is that why there are so many of them? Could we combine or bring them together somehow? Furthermore I am really pondering what we can learn from the way Open Source communities are being organized?
So here is some of our thinking:
Potential bottle necks limiting the growth of a network are for example but not limited to following:
1. Hierarchy: It’s hard to fight to the top of the hierarchy in order to get your voice heard.
2. Exclusive Inner Circle that is hard to be part of.
3. No room for action of members, if you need to act permission it may be hard to get
4. Values and spirit are not attractive
5. Somebody is exploiting the network
6. Business Model is not sustainable and
7. Communication or the lack f it
So, how do we eliminate the limits of growth? And what is this growth we are looking for? (Money/Members/Impact/Practitioners/etc/etc?)
Or, thanks to Rovan, the new question emerged: What are characteristics of good, nourishing leadership for a network/tribe? Here are some ideas that we came up with:
1. Open and transparency of decision making process and “organizational” structure, even if it’s dynamic. No Taboos or un-written rule. The aim should be to make the system as visible as possible.
2. Empowers loads of action (systemically): What is the minimum structure needed to enable self-organizing and action?
3. Good communication culture (this is the real challenge I guess)
4. Clear process of creation and updating the leading thoughts
5. Low entrance step, it’s easy to join, accessible.
6. Inclusive, nobody is left out if they want to contribute and participate.
7. Purpose large enough but clear enough. People should feel that I want to be part of this. Purpose is container both for action and expansion. Case: 350.org brought together many networks, as did Survival Academy.
All right, I also participated in two other session of which fruits I may share online later. But I really would appreciate any comments on this so the space is still open.
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).
Little more of LAVA09 – Motorola time!
Nov 18th
Just came across this video at Mikko’s NoCry blog. I embed it here. It’s a 30 second film about the presentation we did in the LAVA09 conference.
And here’s the motorola by Johanna about journey and works in Iceland!
Hey, here is for you mine post-motorola about Lava. I wanna share it with you fellows.
1. What went well?
- We had a chance to do co-creating together and a chance to get know each other at good way -working together.
- We had there a great punch of people, all different, different ages and different countries, different skills and knowledges.
- I was really excited about our task and it was great to work with a new people from different backgrounds.
- Everybody was really involved in our process.
- That time together was really important to us, Monkeys. We got new ideas and we got a lot of inspiration.
- It was great to met Juha-Matti, who has drawn our super monkey and also Tupsu-cartoons.
- It was great to spend time with Nic, because I didin´t know him before so well.
- Iceland was an awesome place, I have always wanted to travel in there.
- We were sleeping last two days in a home of one local family. It was really nice and we got touch the country whole different way.
- We met one Finish girl who study in Iceland and she told to us plenty stories about Iceland and Grönland.
- We spend too much cash – we bought and ate too much of banana candies, so we didin´t have enough money to go back to our Icelandic home by bus. So we had to hick-hike. It was new experience to me. And one new banana story to tell.
- We were in a great jazz bar, where was going on some great jazz jams.
2. What went poorly?
- We didin´t have time to close our process together. So I´m not sure of that did everybody understand the hole process and what happened and why.
- We didn´t have so much free time over there so we couldn´t go far away from Reykjavik. We need to go again over there.
- We had only short time to be House of Ideas, Design Central and other places.
3. What did I learn?
- I learn to know new peoples and working with them.
- Creative chaos is a good thing, you just have to know how to lead that.
- Be brave to challenge of process.
- It´s hard to get of the box what you have.
- To courageous of your heart it´s working.
- If you have too much of negative pressure, it locks you up.
- I learn more about my self and Monkeys.
4. What I gonna do next?
- I want to be in contact all those new people who I met in there and maybe we can do something together for future also.
- I wanna go sometimes back in there and maybe surf there.
- I got many of new handcraft ideas.
- I send post-motorola for everyone.
So here is something what I´m thinking of this process. It would be nice to here something for all of you also.
I hope we can see each others sometimes again. You are heartly welcome to Finland and visiting to us.
Have a great time and keep it yellow!
Loads of fun and huge hugs!
Johanna
Ps. We have Nathaniel from Kaospilots visiting us yestarday and today. We are about to cook something cool together!
Greetings from Iceland and LAVA09
Nov 13th
We are seated in a nice cozy not-for-profit cafe in the center of Reykjavik. Tatu just asks if we reached our goals for this trip. Why were we here? Did we make the Iceland and the LAVA09 more yellow and fun? Did we have fun all together?
This is a short postcard to all of you. More detailed reporting may come a little later. Have a good weekend you all!
Here is a 5 min video with a short interviews of our new friend Niklas (the secretary general of Nordic Periphery Projects), Tatu Tantourist and Ville Monkey. Here we reflect all together what was our role. It’s filmed two days ago just before our final dinner at the spinning restaurant.
Ps. Two Icelandic and real cool initiatives in the fields of clothing and music, respectively: Naked Ape and GoGoYoKo. Check them out.
Book of the week in Nordic / Scandinavian spirit!
Nov 6th
H0op! On Sunday 3 Monkeys will go to Iceland to the magnific LAVA09 event presented below, and that makes me feel like happy to be Nordic! Also I feel like fostering our roots and culture here in the north of Europe, and thus, the book recommendation for this week comes from Sweden. Unlike the normal business reading, it’s a novel…bestseller of the Swedish novels in 2005! The book is named Små citroner gula… and in English: A restaurant of yellow lemons.
It’s a sory of young Lady who opens up her own restaurant…and meets the reality of life as a young business owner. Agnes with her partners is giving it all for the initiave, but they face a variety of challenges starting from the customers that write critics into the media and drunken chef as an employee… All could be real, but it’s just a novel…excellent weekend book!
Next week after this relaxing weekend is holding another big journey for Monkeys too. First TA invites 8 people coming from Brazil, England and Barcelona for a Learning Expedition to Team Academy, and Monkeys are hosting the funnily serious evening program B-) Then after LE Henna Monkey and Sari and Liher from Mondragon Team Academy will go to Brazil to work for opening the Team Academy in there together with a University Senac Sao Paulo. Cool! We are turned on by that challenge and humbly dialoguing for gathering the best knowledge for leading that journey into a success!
Keep it yellow!
Henna Monkey
P.S. Writer of this blog entry is often seriously oriented hard worker, who needs novels to let the brains rest sometimes! If you recognise yourself from this description it’s propably time for you to read a novel too 
Open Space in The Hub in Madrid
Oct 10th
This past Thursday I experienced best facilitated Open Space ever. It was in the Hub Madrid and facilitated by Lotfi. I think I have taken part in few and at least facilitated partly two of them. But this time I kind of started to understand what open space can be. I am a fan of fluctuative and flowing programs in meetings, thus I dig open space.
Why this time the open space was a success? Let me try to analyze it a bit.
1. A clear calling question: This open space had a theme and it was “How can I help you?” so it was not as open as universe but still left plenty of room for the participants.
2. Also the question was personal enough to make meaning for the participants. Everyone was asked to write their challenge on A4 paper. Where do I need help from these people. I wrote: How can I lead myself? When the theme was this personal everybody who wanted could either give or get value for sure
3. Then as we were about 30 in the space, there were 6 spaces and 2 rounds of 20 minutes each. So 12 people were chosen based on their eagerness to host a space. 2 persons voluntarily combined their sessions. And I think here was the key. No public combinations of sessions. First come first serve. And because the law of two feet was in place people could go where ever they wanted based on their interest. In the first round I joined a small talk about Sustainable Clothing industry.
4. Good facilitation of time. “When it ends, it ends.” Lotfi informed the people in conversations about the time when 10 minutes were left, and also at the point of 5 minutes left. He went around to every circle and said the time left plus showed a little sign with the time that was available. The sign was good as I am a visual thinker, or seeing helps me to understand. Also having seen the paper we could without bigger interruption to keep our intense talks going on.
5. System with the stand. See the picture. People when presenting their case were standing on a little box. This reminded ms about the story of London marketplace where anyone can go and give a talk. It greated that image to my head.
6. Harvesting. Nobody was forced to share about their insights or stories but it was voluntary. It worked very well again. Some hosts shared with passion what they had got, and I am sure others walked home with good insights too.
7. Lotfi as a host and facilitator had very inviting energy and drive. I have found him to be a very positive and enriching in his interaction with others. No sarcasm that deminishes security and kills energy from him, but good open questions and encouragement.
What is exciting is that today I get to experience another type of Open Space, the BarCamp here in Strasbourg Project Factory. It’s organized by my friend Yann of Novelys. He participated in Learning Expedition in March and I also met him at the Team Academy Alsace Anniversary party last November. So very excited how this my first ever BarCamp will go.
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