Workshop
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
Mexican Exemplar Meeting Harvest: Poem
Mar 26th
Recently I have come across people who express themselves through poems and poetry. First in the Art of Hosting training in Karlskrona and then now in the Exemplar meeting in Mexico. That’s something I have hardly experienced at all in the past few years. So I feel lucky this new art form is starting to enter my life. Here’s a poem written by Manish Srivastava of Presencing Institute but as he puts it: Its ‘our’ poem as we (all the exemplars) inspired it. So here we go! Manish is the young gentleman with red T-shirt on the right hand side of myself, Ville.
Between,
Those heartfelt laughter,
Breath-giving winds and chirping birds,
Moist soil and tamarind seeds,
Between,
The rocks that spoke,
The wells that nurtured,
The depths that connected,
The pyramids that centered,
The communities that flourished…
In midst of,
This rich flow of life,
Streams of timeless energy,
And our inspiring stories…
I am falling in love…
With a new possibility,
A new community
A new depth,
A new horizon…
Oh here I am,
A moment when it all becomes one,
The living and the emerging,
Across our hearts, lives and work…
The new is emerging…
I am so full of life… full of hope!
And here are many pictures by Sue Sweitzer from the Sustainable Food Lab.
Day 4 – for meetings with people you know but don’t expect to see on the places you go – magic of networks
Dec 4th
Have you ever found a bunch of old friends when participating in an event with an interesting topic but unfamiliar organization? Or going to visit a place from where you know only one person, but while being there meet many other old friends too?
This kind of coincidences happen more and more in this small earth! And I think it’s an uplifting issue because “intelligently accidental” human meetings bring extra joy in life. It just happened to me when I googled Survival Academy, an event I decided to participate to because the topic calls me to go, even though I don’t know the organization. However, by discovering better this http://survivalacademy.ning.com/ I got to know that +15 of my friends are connected in that event and we’ll potentially meet up in there. Today the same phenomenon came when I met a friend called Oliver Saarinen with whom we participated http://www.tulenkantajat.com/, and while visiting his school http://www.hse.fi/en/mikkeli I randomly met there a friend called Joonas Kallankari who was my team mate at http://www.emaxnordic.com/ in 2007. Long time, no see, but it’s definetely good to follow the curious path and choose to go in places where these good old friends can be found.
Try it today: google an event you are interested in, for example this: http://survivalacademy.ning.com/events?page=4 and see who you know out of the participants even though you might not know the organizers. Or make a date with a person you know for some cool reason but haven’t seen for a while, and see how many common friends / actions you have now. You will be surprised!
Thesis about Team Academy by Esa Saarinen
Nov 26th
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.
What happens in #LAVA09 Iceland stays in our Blog
Nov 17th
When we left for the #LAVA09 we were not exactly sure what was going to happen. We were asked to trust the process. We were facilitated by a Kaospilot and a Creative Agent. It was cool to be a participant in a process like this after a good while. I suppose we are not the easiest participants to work with but I believe there is also loads of potential in us.
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 
LAVA09 Final Presentation about Pelle Pellets
View more documents from Ville Monkey.
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.
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
Monkeys and Iceland – LAVA09
Nov 6th
So this Sunday Me, Tatu and Johanna will take a plane and fly to Iceland. We got three monkeys into an exciting and creative crew of about 15 entrepreneurs. I am not exactly sure what our mission over there will be but I can say that we are very excited. Somehow probably we work with this ad hoc team of ours to shake and bake with the local companies. Maybe? This is what Tatu wrote couple weeks back to Nic, who organized the team of entrepreneurs:
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.
Monkey Business Top Salary Limit
Nov 3rd
Greetings from Tulimyrsky. Me and Tatu are here on stage today. Very exciting experiment coming up in less than two hours: Dialogue with Keränen. It’s a talkshow Conan O’Brien style with four guests: Antti Kettunen from Solidi, Juha Kauppinen from SiteFactory, Karoliina Luoto from Sitra and The Office Nomad, Janne Saarikko.
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.
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