Team Academy International Network
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!
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
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
Greetings from Basque Country
Sep 29th
Yellow greetings from Basque Country. Here I have visited Gaze workshop (thanks for invitation!), Manahmana and today at Mondragon Team Academy. I wanted shortly share a little marketing idea from the first Team Company of TAE Manahmana. See the picture below. Make one for yourself, and spread into appropriate places! Also see Maialen and Aitor of Manahmana in the other picture.
Team Mastery 2 last session starts today
Sep 16th
I am so excited. And I just can’t hide it. I ‘m about to loose control and I think I like it.
The Team Mastery 2 (TM2) process’ last session starts today here in Jyväskylä. We got friends coming from Basque Country and Madrid, plus Strasbourg and Angers as cross-fertilizers. We have had a great process that started 16 months ago in May 2008. Then we had first session with this team that is nowadays known as the Power Rangers. (Partypeoplesayyeah!)
I participated in the Team Mastery 1 (TM1) process together with Tatu between December 2006 and January 2008. It was great and that is were the foundations of Monkey Business were born. For those of you who haven’t heard Team Mastery, I should tell you that it is a coaching program for people who want to learn team learning coaching the Team Academy way aka with Partus methods. It’s organized by Partus and coached by the legendary Johannes “Partus” Partanen along with Hanna Heikkinen, and myself (Ville) now in the second process.
This TM2 process has been quite special. Ever since the second session in Markina, Basque Country where our theme was customers and marketing there have been external customers / partners involved in our sessions and at least in the birth givings. Also in Markina we came up with a concept “Tribe Fiesta”.
The third session about leadership and leading thoughts was in Strasbourg hosted by TM1 participants Pascal and Claude. In there we had many cross-fertilizers from the TM1 and also we celebrated the 1st anniversary of the Team Academy in Alsace (TAA). It was phenomenal, and the challenge the Power Rangers faced with the birth-giving was for the entire tribe of TAA.
In the fourth session about Innovation we were in Haarlem, and worked intensively with the local Team Academy. Yet again the Power Rangers found themselves in a challenge bigger than before, this time with the teamsters and the dynamic situation of the Team Academy in Haarlem (TAH). There we got to see the real power of this Power Rangers team, and they did amazing job coaching and empowering the teamentrepreneurs of the TAH.
For the fifth session we travelled back to Basque Country and were hosted by Mondragon University Team Academy team, Sain, Sari, Jose-Mari and Aitor and all. First celebrations in San Sebastian and official launch of LEINN, the Teampreneur program in Mondragon University, which got awesome press coverage (11 or so articles published in Basque and Spanish media). The session was about brand management and offerings, and we made it simultaneously with the new teams of Team Academy Euskadi. Whuh. “How do you coach brand?” was the question and I think the new teams got to see what the Team Academy brand is all about.
So here is a little diagram about the levels of challenge the Power Rangers have faced. And this time it’s even bigger. The rumours tell that it’s going to be about 150 people in the Team Mastery Arena event where we have our Team Mastery 2 process going on within it. Hmm Very exciting indeed. This challenge include coaching the Partus Learning Network coaches and the SoL Network’s leaders and Academics. I mean, now the friend leaders coaching skills are being tested. “Intervene when you feel like you shouldn’t and do not when you feel like you should.” That’s the rule number one of team coaching by Johannes. Maybe that one is something to remember now? Maybe not? Maybe we need to abandon all old theories and come up with something completely new by standing on the shoulders of the giant. I am curious. Also our Monkey Man Tatu is MC’ing the whole event!
Power Rangers, I am proud of you. I am sure this won’t be the last time we meet and we are about to engage into a new journey. Thank you!
Ps. Here are some more pictures about our process.
Ps2. I have been taking notes throughout the process, and made some notebooks on the go, so after putting them all together and maybe some further co-creation it will be published as a book or pamflet of some kind. That’s exciting, too.
Ps3. I will also ask Henna to write some’s reflections about this journey from a participant’s point of view.
Monkey Business in Equador Part 1
May 20th
Henna from Monkey Business with a teamentrepreneur from Takomo (?) Valtteri Melkko are right now working in Equador in the Village of Salinas. Here are the first greetings from them from the May 14th:
Ecuadorians are entrepreneurial by nature, and in Salinas they have done nationally appreciated great work in forming co-operatives to help local farmers to export their goods to the local and international markets. Salinas is a very beautiful, mountainish (altitude 3500 meters) village of just 1200 people, but around it there are 10 000 people living in the area. Those who don´t live in the village are extremely poor, just survive but need support to live fine.
Organizations that we work with in Salinas are taking this situation into account by trying to offer education, access to the knowledge and microloans for the local families to grow out of the poverty.
This is why Salinas School of Entrepreneurship was formed here in June 2008 with the help of Finnish coaches and Finnish Ministry of Foreign affairs. In Salinas people have skills as people in Finland do. We can only offer encouragement and knowledge about how to transform skills and will into action and results. This is what we are doing here now with Valtteri from Team Academy and Timo from Finland and from the founding team of Salinas School of Entrepreneurship.
Our goal here is to try to create a sustainable basis for the project since it is so new. In order to do this, we will establish a facilitator team to work on the project and coach this team. This team will then hopefully be able to secure the diverse content of the project as well as the continuity here.
A lot of work is to be done in here still, and the main improvement to do would be improving the education. For example people in normal school in Salinas have studied English for 3-4 years, and when you ask them “How are you?”, they can answer just “¿Que?”, “What?”. Education styles are like they were in Finland 50 years or more ago, based on learning by heart and listening to the teacher giving the knowledge. Team work, interactive learning and own responsibility for learning are very new things in here. What a great field to work – we´re ignited!
After travelling for about 84 hours from Finland through London, New York, Miami and Panama city, sleeping a bit here and there, also spending an evening in New York, we finally arrived to Salinas on Wednesday evening.
Our first impression about Salinas School of entrepreneurship was: what a marvellous work they have done already! On the first night we were welcomed by the whole team of 30 learners and 4 coaches and organizators. They had prepared a program for the night for us to get to know what is going on with the school. I (Henna) also had to speak Spanish for the whole group right away, and it was okay despite the mistakes make all the time. Valtteri and Timo are fluent in Spanish already, and as a team we can manage.
Pictures from Team Mastery
Mar 17th
A New Learning Expedition starts tonight as our guests arrive to Jyväskylä. Tomorrow morning a Check-in (Everybody gets to speak, say their name, little background, feelings and why they are here) and on we go. This time we will have a group around 6-7 people but with loads of interaction with Teampreneurs of Team Academy. I am excited. We’ll update Twitter and hopefully blog too during the Expedition so even if not you are in Jyväskylä you can follow and maybe even participate in some way or another.
I also finished the Team Mastery report I was working on earlier and for that I went through my pictures of the previous session in Haarlem. I should post more about it at some point but let us get started with pictures. I like blogs with pictures and try to be the change in the world by posting some on my own.
Hanna, Patrick and Pauline
Manu and a local Teampreneur
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
Team Mastery in Strasbourg Photos
Feb 9th
First of all, sorry for the silence with the blog. Many of the Monkeys are travelling and I am working on figuring out the way in the jungle. Good news are that I’ve updated the system behind our blog which means I can add new plugins and staff. And what this means that I am experimenting with photos. Here’s the first post with a new kind of gallery. Check out the photos from the second last session Team Mastery 2 held in Strasbourg. I already wrote about the anniversary of TA Alsace.
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