Products
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!
Don’t Eat Yellow Snow! VillaWool Beanies available now
Feb 1st
Heyhou All friends of Monkey Business!
Do you remember our Beanie campaign from last year? Even though it was only two that were sold, and the other customer was myself, the beanie got into an English street fashion blog and the brand was also exhibited in NYC later on. Outo wear is doing well and kicking, I think.
We are proud to bring you new beanies to warm your precious heads this year. Sometime ago Janne came to our office smiling and clearly excited about something. He told us that he had found something explosively fantastic from shop yesterday. Well, he didn’t share us directly what is was but the next morning he walked into our office wearing a hat that had big letter writing on it: “Don’t Eat Yellow Snow!”
We were really excited about the new beanie not least because we found out that it was made by VillaWool, a 35-year old family company from Finland. We had been using their other hats for years already. And as the freezing weather doesn’t seem to get much warmer we thought it is time to contact the company for little co-operation. Also the trigger for the contact was that our friend Soren who bought the hat last year told me that his beanie got lost… So Soren et al. here is what Matti from VillaWool says about the hat:
deys (Don’t Eat Yellow Snow) slogan was originally used by the first and only original Helsinki based Ski-Store called SkiSystems somewhere in the early 70s. SkiSystems were our first customers in this beanie business. real tough guys back in the days.
We are proud to say that you can order your own DEYS beanie now. Price is 30€ including Finnish VAT and mailing all over the world. Let us know which color your prefer: white, gray (my favorite) or black (Janne’s beanie is black). You should make the order by tomorrow 12pm in order to catch the first round of orders. If you somehow missed this message do not worry but just make an inquiry for the beanie as we will order couple extra to be sold from our office directly.
Peace, Love and Bananas,
Ville
The Yellow Man and the Art of Hosting event
Jan 24th
The story of today happened last December in Copenhagen during the Survival Academy event. Every single morning, right after leaving my friend’s flat, I could see it there, standing, waiting for someone to give it a ride. Being myself still half sleep-half awake, while eating a banana as a breakfast, it always made me smile. A big smile. This sort of smile that you don’t want anyone to see you, because you think that others might think: “why is this guy laughing alone, is he going bananas?”
But there it was every morning, cheering me up and encouraging me to follow my heart, be myself and to be open to talk to the new people that I was about to meet. Let me introduce you to THE YELLOW MAN:
That’s him, yes. With a logo that seems to be taken from KaosPilot, he is concerned about what is happening in the world and is trying to offer more sustainable food delivering økologic food. He likes the yellow color too! So he is our Danish Monkey.
Maybe it was a sign, or maybe not, but I just know that what it was about to happen during one of those days in Copenhagen was something meaningful. During the Open Space session in SA, I got to know Benjamin Degenhart from KaosPilot and Kati Thomson from the MSLS crew, with whom I immediately clicked and after introducing ourselves we realized how much we and our schools had to learn from each other.
Where does the learning come from?Action, YES! That’s why we decided to start running a project together and after talking to few more people in the event we decided to organize an Art of Hosting training for our friends from our networks.
The initial idea was born about a month ago, and now with the concept more defined the event will happen in Karlskrona (Sweden) from February the 18th until the 21st. Idea is to gather up around 70-80 people from all around the world under the same roof (KP, MSLS, TA & others), connect with like minded young entrepreneurs and get an Art of Hosting training. It will be a 4 days hands on training, having conversations that matter as a great source for us to learn from the interdisciplinary teams, plus experience and learn to host circles, World Café, Open Space, Dialogue and other group processes. We, the young generations, need to start working together cross-disciplinary to tackle the complex challenges of our time. So this is the place to be!Bold, brave and caring for each other, YES!
Hosts will be Toke Moeller from Denmark, Tennesson Woolf from the US, Rowan Simonsen from UK, Simone Poutnik from Belgium, Valentine Giraud from Brazil and Jasmine Cargill from New Zealand, a truly Dream Team!
As Ben said, having those ingredients plus some extra spices from other networks together… uhja, i wanna taste that soup 
Price will be 150€ for the team entrepreneurs/students and 250€ for alumni/staff, VAT included. For registration and further info you can check this web and/or write me at liher@banana.fi
I believe that the Yellow Man knew what was about to happen, but he just showed us the way. He encouraged me to be open to meet and spend time talking to new people. Plus,I happened to be in the right place at the right moment. Rest I had to do was to trust the process.
ROCK!
Lihis
BarCamp inspired Open Space in Tiimimestarit Areenalla
Jan 16th
Tatu and myself got a change to host an open space today at Tiimimestarit Areenalla (Team Mastery Arena) inspired by the BarCamp Alsace6 I participated in Strasbourg Project Factory. This is just quick post to share the ideas from Johannes about the BarCamp /Open Space and moreover about the new Prahalad book, The New Age of Innovation. This video is in Finnish, sorry for the non-Finnish speaking folks.
And below is picture of a very couragious Penquin (in reality 2nd year) Anssi and the program grid of today’s OpenSpace that the participants created.
Tonight is the 17th Anniversary of Team Academy. Should be massive! Maybe I will be doing live reporting through Twitter and Qik Live of ours. Keep it yellow! Ville
“Laugh, play and fart!”
Oct 20th
One of the best things in life are friends who support you by little things. Like Heikkis father Antti who has original Monkey Business sticker on back of his phone. And it´s worn out badly, so he ordered me a new one when we last time met. Antti is a carpenter, he teaches it also in vocational school, appreciates real hand work & traditions. And we have had many adventures together. Maybe someday we´ll do miracles together. And I am proud Godfather of Anttis first son. This is my first letter to four month old Heikki. “…And don´t believe everything what that old dude tells you.” Thanks Antti for supporting me! Maybe there is something for you in the letter also.
With Love: Tatu, Godfather
Ps. Last week I wanted to write a letter to Dee Hock. But I couldn´t found his home address. Can you help me?
GAZE International Workshop in San Sebastian
Oct 7th
There I was, in an international workshop organized by GAZE, a project dedicated to drive entrepreneurship in Gipuzkoa, maybe?
I am very grateful to GAZE for inviting me there for the International Workshop on the 23rd-24th of September. I really appreciate that. Thus I feel a little anxious about writing this post. However, my recent thinking has been about what do I stand for and I guess I should say aloud what I think.
Coming here to this event has opened my eyes to how well Team Academy events are organized.
Or maybe I am just too brainwashed to listen long lectures. Or maybe we just come from totally different realities. I loose my attention span very quickly if the speaker doesn’t show interest towards the audience but only for his/her own work, and if the speech is only given on the intellectual level and does not involve the emotions of the audience nor the speaker. Make love or hate (preferrably love), but please, do not bore me. Is it the responsibility of a lecturer or the listener to enable learning about the topic? What is learning? I think it’s changing your behaviour. Did this event make me change my own behaviour? Yes, but it was my own speech that I gave that made me learn. Learning by doing.
I felt quite some anxiety before I started, I felt sad, even a little angry. Why I felt that was because the speeches before me were longer than they were supposed, we were running late, not enough coffee breaks to socialize, no check-in or introductions in the beginning. But I didn’t tell that to the audience. That was my mistake. Ville Hast taught me that when you speak from heart it is always right. And maybe because I didn’t tell people honestly how I felt my presentation was rather serious. I think that serious Monkey Business presentation have not been given before. Well, there’s time for everything, I think.
Team Academy Presentation for GAZE #Giw 09
View more documents from Ville Monkey.
Here are the slides that I used to give a 20 minute speech. The questions were pondered upon in the audience for 3-5 minutes. I was the second last speaker of the day and the first one to make the audience work together. Interesting. I want more dialogue into the seminars. More show, less talk.
This coming Friday we will do a workshop together with Anita of Creative Impact here in Madrid. It’s exciting. Something I will do in the beginning is to start by telling how I feel, who I am and what do I believe in and what I think is important now. That’s a good starting point. Then we can get to know one another more.
Monkey Business Hope-Myrsky
May 20th
As mentioned in previous message about Mental Models Monkey Business was in the last week in Hope-Myrsky. Here’s an about 2min video of it. How many times do you see a monkey there?
Henna’s first story from Equador is already in my inbox so it’ll be online soon as well. Yellow regards from Paris, meeting with Charles and Laurent of CoMind and Yann from Novalis tomorrow. Looking forward to that! Ville
Ps. The SoL Evolution meeting was good one. Frustration, many questions, chaos. I think that all are keys to learning and progress. Also the essence of SoL for me which is meeting new people and learning from them and getting new ideas was there. Thanks for all and I hope to see you soon again.
Mental Models Game Workshop – Mielenmallipeli
May 14th
We did experimental two hour workshop at Hope-Myrsky this Tuesday. Tatu was the MC (and did excellent job!) in the two day event, and me and Johanna were the Monkey Business workshop facilitators. Hanne read the story about mice and cheese and change inspired by Spencer Johnson’s book “Who Moved My Cheese?”.
Mielenmallit Hope Myrsky 12.5.09
View more presentations from Ville Keranen.
Above are the slides, and they can be also downloaded from here as a pdf. Most of the theory is from Peter Senge’s book Fifth Discipline. Slides are mostly in Finnish, I had prepared them three years ago when the game was invented. The theory part didn’t go so well, it was teaching not coaching. I talked and others listened. Not so good. Tatu gave me a good advice, as he was observing our workshop from the back of the room: “How about asking people what are Mental Models, and then just adding something by yourself if needed?” Yes, this is what we shall do next time, but before that we have to make more mistakes in order to learn more.
Just before my theory we had done good action by re-organizing the space together: “Let’s take the tables away!” and did Bar-Camp inspired three word introduction, although people were going around and meeting others and just saying their names and tree words. So not necessarily everybody met everyone else, but there was again good action and talking and meeting new people.
We got plenty of new questions, and they will be available for you with a creative commons license as soon as we get them on to digital form. Also we are working on making the whole game to be available with some kind of open license for you to use as well.
Pictures featured in this article are courtesy of the HOPE project PR Lady Jenni Ahlstedt. Thanks a lot and nice to meet you! Yellow regards, Ville
Learning Expedition to Team Academy
Feb 15th
Ever since I started at Team Academy back in 2004 I have been actively taking part into Learning Expeditions as a representative of Team Academy. I remember my first one in October 2004 when for example Etienne Collignon, Javier Ruiz and Claude Zauber came to see Team Academy. Now, about 4,5 years later I am organizing a yet another Learning Expedition to Team Academy with these same people who actually have by now all started their own Team Academy initiatives. And n fact, Etienne and Laurent wrote an article for the SoL Reflections about their first Learning Expedition. I thought you may find that one interesting as well if you haven’t seen it yet.
So there is a new Learning Expedition coming up and we are expecting an interesting week with plenty of dialogue and good thinking together. This time, besides the normal program, there’s a real speciality as we get to see the birth-giving of the Young Leader Special Training program and enjoy the dinner and Finnish sauna with them on Friday night. Promotional slides are here below. You can also download them here. Inquiries and any questions can be sent to me to ville@banana.fi
Ps. All the Finns and especially ones around Jyväskylä. Next Wednesday you have a chance to see something special as the first international team of Team Academy IPOTA gives birth about their learning from being a team at Team Academy. It starts at 9am at Team Academy. I can also organize a Skype so that people from abroad could follow it through a video call. Drop me a line if you are interested in that.
Written by Ville Monkey
Recent Comments