I decided to blog this reflection paper, since MINN is all about open innovation, and who could call it open if I just write for our MINNteam and for our coaches? So here’s to you, a reflection of the elements that made us grow into a team during the year of 11 meetings in 7 different places around the world.

The core elements of MINN evolving into a real team – my top 6 list

1. Finland session January 2011 – A takeoff for the roller coaster year & 1st challenging video together as a common challenge

We started our journey in Finland in January 2011 by visiting head of Nokia’s crowd sourcing, Pia Erkinheimo. Pia was a sharp lady talking about the worldwide markets and the meeting with her left us with a thought: could we possibly support Nokia with Open Innovation  & crowd sourcing while we go around the world with MINN? We even made a video proposal for that on the same day, and it was not easy. “What could we sell as a minnteam?”, we asked ourselves. The most memorable thing we got out of the session was Pia’s kind and firm handshake that was guiding our behavior in all the tough moments on the rest of the year! From Helsinki we continued to Jyväskylä, and there Taulun Kartano, sauna, jacuzzi & mortal jumps on snow made Finland a wonderful experience for all the MINNERS and created a base for our roller coaster year to start.

2. Orio session – team complete

March 2011 we met in Orio, Basque Country. There 3 new people: Ander, Santi & Jordi joined MINN and the team became complete. A session was weird, included for example biodance & meditation, as well as a lot of personal reflection, but it worked fine for teaming up. Finally we made a birth giving for the big Spanish retail shop chain Eroski at Eutokia and I still remember how we implemented all the things we had learned in Orio instead of implementing all the things we had learned in life before Orio. Maybe Orio touched us so deeply? 

3. Learning Journeys & shared experiences: Finland, San Francisco & Chindia 

Traveling together always helps team to team up. April 2011 we had a week-long Learning Journey in San Francisco & Silicon Valley, and the homework was to make a pitch of our own project and present it for investors at Hub SoMa. The pitching event made us see each other’s work clearly and strongly. I believe that very afternoon in San Francisco in front of the investors caused a big step in our teaming up. There we were real, vulnerable ourselves, maybe for the first time with MINNTEAM.

#minnteam BG @Aalto Design Factory at Tongi Uni, Shanghai.

October 2011 we made a two-weeks-long Chindia Learning Journey, and there the element of growing most as a team was Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta. It was a touching experience for the team. Everyone got to the uncomfort zone when seeing all those people with totally poor conditions that none of them had chosen but the life had given to them. Our job was to help feeding these people and to give them care and love. Personally I was inspired to caress the hair of all the ladies, and as soon as I got the brush I got shocked too: the hair of the lady I approached was full of bleaches. Same thing with the lady on her right, and on her left! At night we went to sleep at Paragon hostel, that seemed to be full of bleaches too, but luckily was not. Paragon has been in our minds ever since and after India we’ve been more a team than ever.

4. Birthgivings: Birthgiving is a process of creating and crystalizing new knowledge and it’s one of the main learning tools in Tiimiakatemia. We made birthgivings in the end of every session, and to summarize the TOP3 I refer to the ones at Hub Madrid, Shanghai Aalto DF and Mondragon University’s main campus Onãti.

February 2011 in Madrid our birthgiving under the theme of co-creating with customers was sensational! We created a great tool called cook-creation for enhancing the co-creation with customers. We invented an open client-relation barometer too. In the end we made money with this birth giving by asking who sees value in us and wants to invest on #minnteam. More than 20 people out of 40 wanted to! We succeeded as a team and created an innovative & easy tool around relationships & cooking & relationships in no time.

October 2011 in Shanghai we had spent a day with Peter Senge at Taihu Great Learning Center and we gave birth with the question: “Zhong young is MINN, what do we want to accomplish?” The result was a great China-inspired learning session with 60-80 students of Aalto Design Factory @Tongi University. A minner Inigo Blanco has made a great reflective post about the knowledge created in that BG in his blog whitekaos.

December 2011 the birth giving happened with our intrapreneurial project teams that came to work with minners from each participating company: NRG, Init, The Hub Gipuzkoa, Danobat, Gaia, Monkey Business, Eroski, Tiimiakatemia and the question was: Why? Why? Why? – Why I’m doing this? – Why are we doing it / why this team exists? Why this project / company exists? And second question: What are the results this project is going to present by July 2012? All teams were making effort to present these fundamental things for the community of all the 60 MINN-intrapreneurs in Mondragon Tiimiakatemia’s main campus at Onãti. Our MINN team coach Jose Mari cried in the end, so touching it was to see the teams working for the cause that matters: our intrapreneurial projects. Of course his work as a team coach together with Anita had a strong effect on our team development: no team develops as fast as a coached team.

5. Twitter & box & informal meetings, parties and phone calls

#minnteam has been our reference in twitter, and anytime I wanted to see what’s up with our team or when I wanted to announce something for our team I did it there.

The.box has been our tool for sharing for essays & reflection papers. Useful for reading my teammates reflections, but we should blog them more openly. However I thin that the box has to improve in openess, and maybe  for example an open blog would have been a better option for our sharing.

In Madrid we partied together, and in Jyväskylä too. Parties always do good for team spirit!

6. Dialogue: We discovered dialogue really just in India after 9 months of the journey together. Dialogue between us and projects between our fascinating participating companies would take MINNTEAM to totally new level! Now we are on the way there as we have realized this. We had quite good dialogue in Barcelona around the 360 team feedback  session already, but it really demands more practice, with a team like ours 800 hours would take us to good skills, according to the practical study made over 19 years in Tiimiakatemia. In MINN1 we did not really practice freely flowing dialogue more than 36 hours maybe. That we should practice more and also we should spend more time together as a team just talking about whatever where ever.

How these learnings/elements/actions could be applied to the teams of our own intrapreneurship projects?

Now Tatu and Ville from Monkey Business are participating to MINN with about 20 others – MINN is growing!

I think in our company we are implementing a lot of MINN / Tiimiakatemia tools and actions already. It’s natural for us because we are a Tiimiakatemia-born company. We are using dialogue, sharing everything online in our blog & dropbox & twitter & Facebook, and sometimes doing birthgivings too and of course tracking customer visits and sales.

Here’s my opinion on how we do with Monkeys in my 6-point checklist of elements and what we should improve:

1. Videos together – we started this by filming & editing a documentary: Monkeys Year 2011 and Insights About the Future.

2. Team complete – we should search for the skills we are missing and acknowledge the team we are, like Janne did well in his blog post about Monkey Business team for 2012 (post in Finnish here).

3. Learning Journeys – we should do more of Learning Journeys with Monkey Business as participants: Paphos seminar with a very influential Finnish philosopher Esa Saarinen in summer 2012 maybe!

4. Birtgivings: why not doing more of birthgivings with/for our clients and for ourselves?

5. Sharing knowledge in online environments we handle ok in my opinion – we just need to keep exploring new tools and maybe start using Karmacracy too!

6. Dialogue - we are learning this every week 4 hours, we still need to learn to speak more directly and maybe change the setting of this dialogue session now that Monkey has grown from 6 to 8 people and sharing with 8 takes more time than sharing with 6.

Hopefully in 2012 this list will grow and MINN2 will rock and roll for totally new levels! In fact I’m sure about that. Let’s go!

With Yellow regards,

Henna Monkey

Who’s on board in here? It’s 2 Uni programs, BBA and Master from Mondragon Team Academy, and 4 pioneer participants of the 1st Learning Journey to SFO with their 2 coaches. All together we are about 40 experimenting the contemporary business context here thiw week.

Yesterday was an inspirational day and it already contained two or more chances to pitch the projects in front of the audience. First we landed in the Hub SoMa, where 10 Hub entrepreneurs were joining us talking their stories of playing in the US market. It was  Adam Archer from GamesThatGive, wh said that a young company crew needs to have only 2 roles: “you just need people who are building and selling”.  Then there was Javier Ideami, who shared that possibility lurks around every corner, and you need t keep listening to the market carefully and adapt to it a bit, because if you don’t do so you will be forgotten. Also I remember Santiago from softonic.com talking about the importance of having the right people on board in the beginning. “It’s a strategic esicion with whom you

work, and hiring great people needs great investment.” Later on, we had a session with Victoria Hale from medicines360.com, who had created a non-profit drug company and said that in the medical sciences field there are multiple areas where help is needed, but not given, due to the market powers. For example in USA 50 % of the pregnancies are unplanned, and contraceptive pills are not sold without meeting a doctor. There lurks a great change possibility, for example. Her rule of thumb was that business lurks in fields where no one else wants to go. And to go there, she has always been a serius person who came to do serious things. There were also more entrepreneurs from the Hub Ventures program wh were purifying water and building better sanitary solutions to India…quite inspirational in deed! In the evening we headed to the Summit Café, where MTA had invited some local entrepreneurs, and I met for exapmle Espen, an ex Kaospilot Team Leader, who now lives in San Francisco and builds interactive toys for facilitation purposes.

Espen comes to work with a cost of costs, and takes a persentage of sales and a patent of of a new creation, and so he’s affordable for all small and medium size businesses too. Shall we buy him in Monkey Business for a week or two? This banana-surfing monkey is his gift for us. Maybe it’s he himself?

Right now I have to go because MINN, my Master’s team, is about to start brainstorming and preparations for today’s meetings with BitTorrent, IDEO and Innvalley. I have to say that this program is an eye-opening, and brain-nurturing experience in many ways!! Yesterday we tried concreticizing what is MINN, and we are still around here:

MINN is a lively, constantly evolving executive learning journey at the service of creative processes, participatory and open environments.

It was set up to research and experience the interaction between the individual, company and community on a contemporary business context.

The value of MINN lies on a unique team for experimentation and promoting new cross-disciplinary formulae.

What do you think?

See you tonight with some new insights….

Yellow regards,

Henna

One crucial tool we used was Monkey Business’ the Mental Model Game. It supports the process of recognizing one’s own and other people’s ways of seeing the world, and helps appreciate the different viewpoints.

Really interesting to see how the form of a game impacts people’s conversations. Maybe Marc Prensky provides some good thoughts on this phenomenon in “why games engage us”:

Now what happened during the Mental Model Game? Put simply, the participants shared their views about open inquiries, so questions like “what’s the difference between craziness and genius?” or “are we alone in the universe?” They talked in various constellations, for example large groups, smaller groups or individually, and they captured key insights. Initially, questions were given by the hosts, later the participants generated their own. Here are some juicy bits that people in Hamburg reflected:

Everything can be questioned what I had thought I knew
Don´t think just with your own head
Think crazy
Everything is changeable
Ideas are formed in the “connecting room” – don´t create any borders for yourself
Perspectives, perspectives, perspectives
People see things even more differently than I thought
It is important to have fun in life!
Again I learned quite a bit about myself
There is no limit for human creativity

The dialogue in the group reached a good level, and when one of the participants brought up the question: “What is the core of a human being”, it arose so much interest that it became the basis for the birthgiving phase of the workshop (conversion). This was guided by the question „if the inner core of the human being is so important, how will I incorporate it into my business?“

Participants’ creativity did not even stop at biblical quotations when Jesus, surrounded by his apostles, did a headstand, and remained in that position for the rest of the Last Supper. A really good way of shaking one’s mental models, isn’t it?

Thank you Monkey Business for playing the Mental Model Game with us in Germany, let’s continue this good cooperation in the future.

Writer is a friend of Monkey Business and enthusiastic of Team Academy

Theresia Warwitz

About next week: First, we have the board of Maalaiskunnan Yrittäjät meeting at our office on Tuesday evening. Chairman of the board is our neighbour and friend Jouko aka Musti from Seripiste. Little birds are saying we may get a seat on the board, too. Also, a little after that there’ll be a group of people interested in Organizational Development coming all way from France and Canada to see where we dwell. In fact, the visit to our place is part of their learning expedition to Team Academy organized by SoL France. I heard from my friend that one of the participants have a blog called La nature d’une nouvelle entreprise. It seems to be all in French but Pascal said it’s good and I believe him so if you understand, check it out!

This past week our office has been occupied by people from Team Academy taking intense course of marketing coached by Heikki Toivanen. See the picture above. We are very happy to have people at our place, for a meeting in a creative environment or to experience the sauna.

Furthermore, Samuli Karjalainen dropped by for the first time in our office few weeks ago, and with him we explored the idea of a business sauna. It would be an event for local people interested in learning and meeting new people. First start with a short story or a presentation by someone followed by dialogue and sauna. Who is in for that?

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!

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

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

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

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.