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!

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.

We still are squatting in the premises of Team Academy, and today when I came from the surprisingly close-by grocery store I thought once again: “Team Academy is great because in here it is ok and encouraged to be excited.” Why did I think that? Well, I had just seen one Teampreneur painting graffiti related to the 24hr birth-giving of Team Company Dilectio. He was enjoying and laughing while doing the painting. And then Kaisu of Dilectio saw the graffiti, and she clearly was very excited about that.

That reminded me of the 7 thesis our friend, the explosively insightful philosopher Esa Saarinen has coined about Team Academy. He introduced these in the Team Academy’s 15th anniversary seminar in January 2008 where me and Tatu were the MC’s. I thought I should post them here to remind people who have seen them before, and maybe there are some to whom these are new.

The Core Reasons to the Success of the Team Academy: Esa Saarinen, the Famed Finnish Philosopher speaking

• Thesis 1 In the Hall of Fame of Experience-Based Learning Team Academy is # 1
• Thesis 2 Some People Speak, Team Academy Acts.
• Thesis 3 Team Academy Brings Dreaming Back to Professional Education.
• Thesis 4 Team Academy Calls Out to Young People to Express their Sincerity and Joy, apparently as the Only
  Educational Institution in Finland.
• Thesis 5 In the Endless Fight Between Stick-Disciplinary-Narrow-Mindedness and Breaking Out from Barriers, Team Academy Chooses Excitement.
• Thesis 6 The Core of Team Academy is Based on the Most Sustainable and Solid Foundation of Finnish Basic Values: Robust Pragmatism and the Spirit of Equality.
• Thesis 7 Team Academy is Based on the Power of Community and the Human In-Between, but behind it All is an Individual Who is Willing to Give Out His Everything for the Cause that Matters.

My favorite is maybe number 7 phrasing very nicely the connection and relationship between the individual teampreneur and the team/community. What are yours?

Ps. We are planning to organize an after party for all times Paphos-meeting in January together with Esa and the Paphos Alumni of  Design Factory.

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).

In the end, we were the work with the Northern Periphery (EU)-Projects, among which is NoCry that invited us there. They were our customers. We didn’t get to work directly with Icelandic industries as we had hoped for so for me personally it took a little time to motivate myself to work with the EU-projects. But I think we got out quite a good result in the end.

The LAVA09 was a 1.5-day seminar where people from different projects met. The Young Creative Entrepreneurs had initially a one hour slot in the program as the last thing between 5 and 6 pm. Well, the previous content ran overtime and then there was a coffee break so we had to distinguish our presentations (and drop one out) down to about 30 minutes. But I think it was a success nevertheless! So what happened during that 30-40 minutes?

1. Tatu jumps on the stage – he was kind of leader of the whole process and facilitated our part of the program. He said very few words and then the lights went off and Rasmus played some loops and music based on sounds he had recorded while in Iceland. He’s a sound architect. After that Elina started improvise with piano and sang a song she had written. I heard one of the participants say that his skin was on “chicken skin” when he listened to that. It was definitely touching.
2. Tatu asked people to shake hands and say hello to people next to them. I was watching this aside and realized the real systems intelligence behind that. Loads of positive energy was flying around from people and we could feel how they got even more excited about what’s coming up.
3. Daniel of Grus jumped on stage with his presentation about Social Media. He made a quick prototype of targeted ad on Facebook and also for Google Ads. One of his main arguments were that if you are not in Google, Youtube and Wikipedia you do not exist for many people. He also showed the new video about the fast change of the media called “Did you know?“. The title for this post is adapted from that video.
4. Then it was our turn. Me, Anette and Juha-Matti had prepared a presentation for the Pellet project. I think about all of us felt on the previous days meeting with the projects people that most of them had challenges in marketing and reaching out people. However, Tatu said later that customers managed to cheat him again, because he says that it is very easy to say that “it’s marketing that we need” even though  the real challenges may be in the fields of leadership or something else. Maybe the tool to use with the clients could be the one from Toyota Way, to ask persistently five times “why” from the client. We created quite a chaos in the previous day but that’s another story.
5. Back to our show. We picked the pellet project, well, somehow it seemed to be easy to grasp on. We couldn’t avoid the idea of taking totally unsexy and hard to market product such as a pellet and make a little provocative marketing campaign a create a story for the product. You can see the slides below. Juha-Matti from Intotalo made the drawings, he’s very good! Also, we worked very well as a team and it was a good fun. We were working hard but still didn’t take it too seriously, I guess you can see that from the result, too

After our presentation we did a very quick energy discussion with the crowd.  Right after that all the young creative entrepreneurs went to the front to show once again who we all are. And last, but not least, we heard excellent Icelandic inspired improvisational piece by Rasmus, Carro and Elina. Good stuff. Then it was time to head off for a dinner. That was an escapist experience as well…

Now I am starting to think that the two last posts in our blog have been about Marketing. We are ind of trying to get away from that – it’s not the ocean we want to sail in. We are more into igniting collectives and making the world more fun and yellow. Well, coaching for marketing is something we offer, too. That’s a way to ignite collectives, isn’t it?

Ps. The T-shirts with Techno-Pelle doing the moonwalking will be available soon.

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.

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

I have been rolling with the lottery ball and here are three happy winners on their way to icy & bubling land with recomments:
* Tatu – ofcourse born with golden spoon in the ass and founder of Monkey Business – good action ignitioner, stubborn but human, learning is passion
* Ville – founder of Monkey Business and grown up in periphery, nowadays happy owner of Liikenne Keränen, deep thinker, philosofist, theory mixer
* Johanna – lady to keep things on track and boys in leash, good organizer, power maker, humble leader

I copied some websites (from the event page) that our mixed team are involved with:

EVENT CREATION  www.insomniafestival.no
FREE CULTURAL PAPER GRUS www.grus.as
MONKEY BUSINESS www.banana.fi
VOCAL DEVOTION www.vocaldevotion.com
HEAVY METAL BAND SABATON  www.sabaton.net
CINEMATOGRAPHY http://www.tero-saikkonen.com/
PAIZANO DESIGN http://www.paizano.se/
STILETT DESIGN & COMMUNICATION http://www.designlabland.se/dlab/designlabland-group/
KRAMFORS STUDIO NOCRY www.studionocry.se
BOOMTOWN MUSIC BUSINESS COLLEGE www.boomtown.nu
CARTOON ARTIST http://www.incubiz.eu/page/story-4-blastwave-sfx-business-finland/
SOUND & PERFORMANCE ARTIST http://www.myspace.com/smulton
THE NOCRY VIRTUAL BUSINESS INCUBATOR www.incubiz.eu

You can download a pdf with profiles of the people coming and some other extra materials. Also, see a program draft pdf in here. Good graphics by Nic, again!

I will keep you posted about our trip through Social Media such as this blog, my Twitter, our new MonkeyTV, thru pictures via our new Flickr group and Facebook’s Monkey Business Page.

Anyways, before our show we had a key note by Sami Salmenkivi from N2 Laundry. More about all this later, but in our table talk I got encouraged to push more content to our blog. With the philosophy of bringing value (hopefully), but more experiments rather than pursuit of perfection. So here we go, a post written about month ago. Idea has been around for 1 year or so. Keep it yellow!

We have been thinking about making a volunteeringly a top limit to the salaries in our company which would equal to the average Finnish salary that currently is about 2870 euros.

I think this one way to be a sustainable company. Firstly, we don’t pay ourselves out of the market. Secondly, I think often the ones who earn most also consume more than those with less resources.

It is said that we need to dramatically decrease the amount of the Greenhouse gases. Still I am writing this post at the Airport in Paris on my way to Bilbao. Peter Senge says we need to innovate new ways of living, nobody planned the industrial revolution and it was not centrally governed. It was more like thousands of small initiatives that made it happen. And that is going to be same with the new sustainable lifestyle revolution. It is not centrally governed and it will not be televised, although YouTube and Twitter and other social media will surely play a big role. World is flat and a member of The Hub here in Jyvaskyla can easily go and work in The Hub in Madrid, Sao Paulo or London, just to mention few. We will start with little monkeys a sustainable coffee house here in Jyväskylä and it is going to be a great success!

It is also maybe related to the transparency of our business. We want to make the world better by making it more fun and yellow. We are in the business of encouraging people. We work only with nice customers (our friends) but we are ready to take on joyful challenges. We work on projects that make the world better. We work with people who share this mission. Because the drove towards your dream is the biggest driver in this world.

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.