Henna
When working with Henna you will be surprised. With her warmth and sincerity she will come to you, take your hand and throw an open inquiry that may drop your jaw. No matter how long we have known Henna she is still able to surprise us from day to day with her social and communication skills. There’s no situation where Henna would not feel at home, was it with Deans of various universities in an EFMD meeting or a vocational school in her hometown Iisalmi, she’ll be more than fine in both. Also building her character of a coach she’s the one us that wants to work with big corporations and surf.
Homepage: http://www.banana.fi
Posts by Henna
How 10 different people from Open Innovation & Intrapreneurship master’s program became a team in 1 year?
Jan 24th
I’ve been doing master’s on Open Innovation & Intrapreneurship in MINN of Mondragon Tiimiakatemia for the last year, and one of the methods used in it was that after each monthly session we make reflection paper of something. Now the task of it was this: “Write a reflection paper on MINNteam entrepreneurial team development, including crystallization on what elements made the MINNteam evolve to a real team during this year and how these learnings/elements/actions could be applied to the teams of our own intrapreneurial projects?”
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
Mental Models Game online
Sep 6th
Monkeys are back in business after holidays, right now on Strategy days, and it’s great! We spent extremely committed spring and thus managed to get a lot of meetings booked and gigs sold for this autumn. Now it’s time to do good jobs, get new ones, and innovate around the old and new services and products.
Mental Models Game design by Janne Palovuori.
Mental Models Game is living a process of rebirth. In July, during Finnish holiday season, Henna & Ville were active in Europe – Ville giving a speech about future organizations at Lift 2011 conference for a wide audience and Henna & Ville together organizing the first online session of Mental Models Game online. It was played from the social innovation center Eutokia in Bilbao with the dreamers of Imagine Creativity Center in Silicon Valley. Henna had met the Imagine program & the company behind it, Innovalley, while visiting San Francisco & Silicon Valley on a Learning Journey with MINN master’s program in April 2011.
The online game experiment encouraged us to believe that it’s possible to alter the game to fit into the web. We have been looking for partners to develop it with, and now it seems that the University of Lapland would have a research group ready for piloting and development collaboration of the online game. We documented the first experience in order to learn, collaborate and communicate our intentions with the game.
Here’s to you Imagine & co, our brief report of the learnings gained during that session.
Mental Models Game over the internet to Silicon Valley
What went well?
- We tried it! It’s important to do new things and take action to a new level.
- We had great facilities and internet connection at the Eutokia Social Innovation center. Our hosts were very nice, and all worked well. (Thanks Jordi Marti and Init for the idea of going to Eutokia!)
- Mic and sound. The Shure mic we bought worked very well over the Skype.
- Nice insights in the end: “I will listen more. I learned that my friend think leading is listening. I need to do more of that.”
- Etherpad as a tool works on simultanous typing with many users logged in at the same time.
- We got hints about what to do with Mental Model Game online in the future.
- We got to know this amazing group of Dreamers and doers, a great story of the first MMG online was co-created with Innovalley.
Open questions? Insights? Pondering?
- Typing vs. talking: Do we need to type if we can hear people talk, or do we need to talk if we can type. If we are in the same space usually there’s only one documentator. Now all the 4 teams kept typing their ideas into a shared Etherpad. I think the system we used would have been more fit for a more distributed team, not as a workshop tool.
- How much of the feeling you actually loose via video conference? You cannot touch over video. We forgot to do Tender Dynamic Greetings in the beginning.
- The beginning is crucial. What stories to start with? What are the first questions? How to balance between play and serious stuff? Does the serious come by itself if we just ask easy enough questions? Questions that do not have a right answer. Now the best talks came when we asked about the mental models of Yellow and Dreamers. My MM is that when the question is silly enough, people really start to share their mental models. If the question is serious, we stick to the information level of knowledge and won’t reach a good dialogue.
- While Etherpad & Skype work and are easy to use, we should discover more tools that enable similar functions and make the game experience more simple and less technology-focused.
- We need someone who has passion for the online worlds and willingness to work on the game development as a team entrepreneur within the Monkeys team.
More sessions are already ordered from Brazil, Germany & Turku. New way of life of the Mental Model Game is beginning – online!
What are the other new beginnings of this autumn? What about yours?
With yellow regards from Sao Paulo, Brazil..writing about his journey also soon,
Henna Monkey
Mental Model Game pitching #1
Apr 19th
Wednesday 13.4.2011 at Hub SoMa in San Francisco was a historic day. The first investor pitch of the Monkey Business Mental Model Game was held then. And the results? Lot of fun and learning, I’d say! Here I reflect the outcome and share the slides used & ideas generated from this session. I’m going to use a short “motorola” model answering the 4 questions below.
What went well?
In my master’s program all individuals of our #minnteam had a challenge to pitch a project. I picked Mental Model Game since we had just recently been talking about it with Tekes and found out that there might be potential to invest on this idea and the development of it. So the pitching chance came with a perfect timing!
Mental Model Game game board & spin wheel originals.
Thanks to deciding the topic well in advance I was able to develop my pitch by talking it thru for many people before the actual show. Hugo & Ville Monkeys, Aleksi Hasu and #minnteam mates helped by giving a lot of open critics & additions beforehand. (Thanks guys!) Just before the show I also established a relationship with the investors by chatting a bit with them before going to the stage. It helped to relax and enjoy the moment, and finally the presentation went better than any of the test pitches. It was a good experience and for sure I felt that I want to do it again and again and again!
What went poorly?
The presentation was quite well handled but in the questions and answers part I was not sharp anymore – it was the selling point and I went on talking not focused. First question was: What kind of customers buy this game now and have you asked them woud they like to pay for an online game or mobile app? That was easy to
answer: individuals & consultancies have already showed interest for buying a training for facilitating the game, and also for buying the web / mobile version of the game. The next question I received was harder: Why companies buy exactly this product? I answered that it’s bought for the team-up-day purposes or for eg. the sales teams motivational purposes. But that’s not really a good answer. Mental Model Game is not just any dynamic for the team-up-day. Instead, it’s a deep and simple tool for improving the team dynamics and performance inside a company, and you don’t need to wait for a development day to play the game. It can be used for thinking challenges in real time, even urgetly. For the next pitch I will go deeper in thinking about the real value of the Mental Model Game with the Monkeys team and with the academics who have launched the theory originally.
What did I learn?
Mental Model Game session in Helsinki, Finland - March 2011.What did I learn?
I learned that it’s important to mention numbers, and for example answer to the question “How much are you investing on it yourself?” and of course I forgot to tell that. We have been investing on the brochyre texts about the game, on the rights for the name and websites, and on the Mental Model Game tour. Our total investment is about 2000 € + 2000 working hours up to date as a team. We are now facing a bigger investment need for getting the online game development going on and the board game design done.
I also learned that: “Investors never invest on a service company, but if you had a developer in your team who owns this project it would be an attractive project to invest in.” Second positive comment from StepOne José was: “I want to see you making it happen, it’s a good idea and you’ve got the basis ready – it will be a good learning experience for Monkey Business to check how far you can go with the Mental Model Game - make it happen!”
What will I do differently next time / take to practice?
I would practice still more before presenting. Maybe 30 times is minimum for practice, now I had 10. Goal would be to get to give 300 pitches at least! And that’s why we are launching a “Pitching Evening” concept to Jyväskylä region, for getting a stage to learn this lovely skill, and for waking up the start-up culture in our city. Would yu be up to participate? Is there someone wrking on it in Jyväskylä already? Who should we team up with?
We will keep on developing the game with our new designer Janne, and keep on talking with Tekes about the possibilities for idea development funding.
Summa summarum: I used to be critical towards pitching because my mental model of a pitch was that it’s boring to have one head talking for a crowd as fast as possible to get the idea sold. Now, after experinecing the role of the presenter, I can just say that this was the most learningful experience I’ve recently had. Being seriously vulnerable and honest with the project in front of 30 or more people makes you feel, think, act and love it!
Today our USA Learning Journey continues in Boston with Liher Monkey. We’re visiting MIT Lab, Babson College with Endeavor course running there, and also Harward & some local enterprises. Do you have more ideas for what might we do here? We’re around until Friday 22nd of April.
With Yellow regards,
Henna Monkey
Learning Journey to San Francisco is made of…
Apr 12th
First day behind in this unique 1st Learning Journey to San Francisco we’ve been co-creating together with the Learning Journeys crew Liher, Kaisu and Bego Maite, and the Mondragon Team Academy community.
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
Cornerstones of Arranging a Learningful Event
Mar 24th
Tatu Monkey once listed the cornerstones of arranging a good event. The list of cornerstones has been in use of plenty of event organizers since then, mostly in Finland. Now it’s time to develope the thought further and make it in English, since Monkey Business acts more and more outside of Finland. Next week Ville & Henna will go to Kramfors, Sweden, to work with NoCry2 –project Kick Off event. We are building that experience now and thus the cornerstones list is a timely thing. It’s here, have a look! Maybe you find inspiration or new points of view into your own work as event organizer!
Cornerstones of Arranging a LearningFULL Event
1.) GOAL What’s the goal of the event? What are the different points of view that the participants have related to the goal? What gathers people together in the event and inspires them to co-create? We need to work on defining the goal as long as we agree on the important thing to achieve with the event. Fun supports learning, so goal needs to be inspiring!
2.) PROCESS How do we reach the goal? Less is more! Process serves the goal, gives space for the participants and leads doing. There are many ways to reach to the goal. Monkeys always offer a variety of proposals for guiding the process, and choosing the ones to use happens in co-creation with the customer.
3.) LEADERSHIP Systems intelligence? What kind of interaction environment is created? Who “owns” the process? There must be a leader, even though people are facilitated to self-organize, and actively co-create & take ownership in the situation. Leader can be one of the Monkey facilitators, or an event organizer.
4.) START How soon the participants are activated to co-create? What kind of interactin environment is created? How do we orientate the participants? How to get people hooked and inspired already before the event – marketing?
5.) TIME Less is more. Master picks one theme and goes deep in it from different points of view. Time serves the process. Long breaks are needed for informal, meaningful conversations. Ending can happen even before the agreed time frame. What’s your mental model of efficiency?
6.) PROFESSIONALISM Team is always smarter than any individual. How can one give up the power and empower others to act? How does the facilitation support that?
7.) LEARNING What learning methods are used? How is the wrap-up of the event done? How is the knowledge crystallized? How do we take into account different learners?
8.) TECHNICAL EQUIPMENT If something special is needed, it has to be organized beforehand, and, if needed, by technical professionals.
9.) MARKETING Even if the event was just a normal development day, it has to be marketed. We must create an inspiring vision about the future that follows after the event day! The meaning of contributing has to be clear.
10.) PLACE What kind of place we have in use? Environment supports learning, and the most important thing in it is that people feel comfortable being in the place.
Plenty of questions in this list! That does not mean that these all should be literally answered before doing anything. Anyway it’s good to check this and take into account all the parallel processes related to the event. This is one way for organizing success!
With Yellow regards,
Henna Monkey
P.S. Are there things that belong to the list but were forgotten to mention until now?
Master international of Intrapreneurship and Open Innovation
Feb 9th
Just as Hugo Monkey returned from the Master program of Communication and Business from the Bond ”Secret Agent” University of Australia, me, Henna Monkey, started in Mondragon University’s international Master program in Intrapreneurship, Team Leadership and Open Innovation. It’s going on from now until Jan 2012 and it’s going on around the world!
My goal for 2011 is to check out if it’s possible, and to prove that it is possible, to be a Monkey even if living and working most of the year outside of Finland.
This program is run by Mondragon Corporative University. Mondragon is the largest cooperative group in the world with more than 85.000 employees and it’s University is a partner of Team Academy Finland.
Participants of the program are all from businesses and the learning touch is very practical. We are forming a company as a team, too. Here there’s a short bio of all of us, so you will know who are in my extended team for this year, and what kind of knowledge Monkey Business (or your company?) can reach out to thru this program.
Eneko Izquierdo, Business background. He has been past 8 years in Eroski group, the 2nd largest retail company in Spain in the strategic management department. He has been the leader of the implementation of self-managed teams, in the whole company (50000 employees, over 1000 retail stores)
Aitzol Garmendia, Service unit manager for the group Danobat, which is the largest machine tool company in Spain. His role in the company is finding full solutions for the customers worldwide related with tools & services. Their main international market is in China.
Cristina Murillo, project manager in Gaia, which is an Association of Industries for Electronic and Information Technologies in the Basque country (North of Spain). She has been there for 5 years, working in many projects such as: Online communication for digital support in urgency situations for handicapped people, Recycling project for computer and electronic appliances in India and Implementing a management model for Corporate Social Responsibility in companies locally and internationally.
Iñaki Egitegi, background in engineering. Has been working the past years in the world of culture music and arts developing social media in that field. For example running websites for music events in San Sebastian ( www.nimu.tv). He is active event and concert organizer and working at the moment in an entrepreneurial project of setting a cultural hub in San Sebastian.
Iñigo Blanco,has environmental science background. He has been working for last 3 years in environmental science in UK, the HUB Berlin project and Funky Project innovation agency in Bilbao. Nowadays he is starting to lead in developing the HUB project in San Sebastian-Donostia.
Sanna Tossavainen BBA and graduated from Team Academy Finland & from Team Mastery international coaching program. She has wide experience of working in international field from Disneyland to a company called Entrepart located in France combining arts and business. Sanna has also been working in organizing Learning journeys to Finland bringing high level bankers from France. Right now working on exporting Finnish education in France.
And me, Henna Kääriäinen, business background and graduated from Team Academy Finland & from Team Mastery international coaching program. Past two years I’ve been working as entrepreneur in Monkey Business. Right now I’m working my way in the international sales of Finnish education. It’s my passion and competence too, as we monkeys are all products of Finnish education and are living examples of what it enables for people. My most ambitious project is happening between Team Academy and Senac Sao Paulo exporting the Finnish educational model to Brazil. Other main project during 2011 is about creating learning journeys for various audiences to various countries.
Coaches/Coordinators
Anita Seidler (German/Russian), master in European Management. Graduated also from the Team Mastery international coaching program. Has 3 years working experience in Mc Kinsey now working as a president of SoL Spain. Anita is also entrepreneur and founder of HUB Madrid aswell as an entrepreneur and consultant in Creative Society.
Jose Mari Luzarraga, business backround, BBA, PHD in Mondragon multilocalization strategy innovating human-centered globalization. 5 years experience in consultancy in KPMG, Icon media lab as Portugal Country manager. He has been working the past 5 years as researcher/ lecturer at Mondragon University and currently also an entrepreneur in Mondragon Team Academy.
Here we are co-creating the follow-up for Nokia's crowdsourcing unit that we visited in Finland in Jan 2011.
Our next session will be in the Hub Madrid starting from tomorrow! (10th-13th of Feb) Theme is Co-creating and Learning with Customers. You’re invited to enjoy our learnings presentation show on Saturday night in the Hub Madrid. It starts at 9pm.
Hope to see you there!
Cheers,
Henna Monkey, the world researcher
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!
Seriously Yellow.
Jun 26th
Monkey Business keeps getting critics from the people who doubt our possibilities to be a ”real company” as we are. One day it’s about the unpromising name, the other day it’s about the seemingly small amount of work we do. One critical friend shared his opinion about the color, too: no serious company has a yellow brand! Yellow is associated with fun, joy, play, holiday…but not with serious business. ”Name me a serious company having yellow as a brand color?”, he challenged. Not that I’d be obsessed with a question, it just turned out that looking for serious yellow companies became a fun habit 
Now, in the sunny yellow lightness of one of these Finland’s midsummer nights, I want to share some of these yellow findings, for example:
SOL Palvelut, a big grown Finnish service business offering laundry, clean-up and staff leasing services, employing 9000 people in 4 different countries and having made a turnover of 157 million euros in 2009. In SOL yellow means the sunny positivity and the culture of freedom and responsibility. Employees can decide how they want to work and what kind of working environment they like. They were in charge of the decoration in the headquarters, too, and therefore SOL City, the uniquely and wildly designed headquarters of the company, is one of the most desired visiting destinations for the international business groups visiting Helsinki. In the past I worked for SOL Palvelut, and still remember the very positive working culture in there. I felt like part of the team and responsible, but free from the 8am to 4pm routines and having all the power to improve my work and be in direct contact with our partners every day. It was seriously yellow.
DHL Express, a German transportation company offering tailored, customer-focused solutions for managing and transporting letters, goods and information. This company made it to this list for two recent reasons. Firstly because we spotted it’s yellow transporter at our yellow office parking place, delivering goods for one of the companies we are neighboring, and secondly because it offered us a smooth solution for serving our superheroe guest when she left to Paris forgetting her iPhone in Finland. DHL delivered it to her to Paris overnight, taking a service time of 10 hours with a price of 155,55 euros. 7 hours delivery would have also been available. Why DHL is recommendable for anyone in need of express delivery? 1) It transports phone batteries, unlike the express delivery operator recommended by the Finnish main post service Itella, for example. 2) Even being a German company, has it’s web pages nicely in Finnish unlike it’s US competitor FedEx, for example. These primary reasons made us to choose for DHL, and surely we supported the yellow color, too.
Eniro with yellow Pages. Not so long ago I received a phonecall from Eniro, the leading contact search company in the Nordic media market listed in Swedish stock. Eniro was renewing it’s Yellow Pages direct search media, and asked if Monkey Business wanted to be found from there. It could have been a traditional sales call, but the first line, a question of Eniro’s agent, changed the system radically. She asked: What is this Monkey Business doing? I went: We make the world more yellow by improving supportive communication systems. She replied: Hhmmm…ahhaa, sounding like trying to construct a thought in her head before voicing it out: “Then we are in the same business! Eniro Yellow Pages is trying to make the world more yellow by improving the communication systems by creating the connections between people.” It was a good talk with the senior sales agent of Eniro who made me think that in fact it would be cool to do one joint project with Eniro. As a company, Eniro plays in another league, but we share the yellow!
These were just some examples of the yellow and serious brands. What we as Monkey Business mean and want to communicate with the yellow color is that we are all about serious fun, positivity and good vibes in communication. Yellow is the mood of action that produces good feeling and good results by empowering people.
Can you name and describe more examples of the serious yellow companies?
With all my yellow (as Johanna would say!),
Henna Monkey
P.S. Bananas are yellow, too. And very serious business, too.
Travel Agency for Superheroes acts again!
Jun 1st
1 year ago in Quito, Ecuador, while working at local entrepreneurship school and after having coached about the Team Academy in Sao Paulo, Brazil, for University Senac Sao Pauolo & Bank Grupo Santander Brazil, I made a Learning Contract defining that I want to work more with international big companies and surf. This is a post about how the wishes come true. It presents the learnings from a Creative Expedition we did for a group of 20 Marketing & Sales executives of a big French bank Crédit Agricole of in Finland in partnership with Entrepart.
Our relationship with Entrepart and Crédit Agricole dates back to 2007, when I was a teampreneur in Team Academy and we were invited to give a taster of Team Academy for a Crédit Agricole group in Helsinki. I went, together with 3 more teampreneurs, and apparently we succeeded to pitch the case well, because this time CA decided to start their week-long Finnish expedition from Team Academy of Jyväskylä and I had a chance to organize the program for the week as Entrepartner in Finland.
The idea of CA spending a week here in Finland was to do a Translation Nomade, a kind of creative expedition that takes people out of their normal living & experience cycles, and opens up new ways of thinking business. Topic of the week for marketing executives was HR management. We met companies with curious HR aspects, such as Nokia with challenges related to the aim of transforming the engineering business into service business, Docrates Clinique combining Socrates philosophy and doctors, being a unique private cancer Clinique in Nordic Countries and Fujitsu with long cooperation with the National Theatre (meeting took place at the National Theatre). As bankers, our guests were very curious about Finnish banks, and we learned about OP-Pohjola and Sampo, which were both rock’n’roll learning moments with highly interesting peer practice-exchange.
We also discovered the buzzing places of the entrepreneurial wave of Finland in places, such as Team Academy, Design Factory and Korjaamo. Just to give an overview, we were with Demos Helsinki with Manifest of Good Work, Monkey Business as a product of Team Academy joined with Carola Wictorsson and Kaisa Oksanen from the research group of Antti Hautamäki, contributing for creating innovation environments, regionally, Ellun Kanat with a study of Y-generation, STARA with age management program, Outi Ugas from Hahmo presenting the Helsinki World Design Capital 2012 project, Teemu Arina from Dicole talking about the Homo Connectus online, Sulake with Habbos around the globe and Ramine Darabiha with MySites and Aalto Entrepreneurship Society going to Shanghai World Expo on Tracks. In Jyväskylä we also met Stafix with static stickers and most importantly, a 7-nationality team founded by an Ecuadorian, working in Vaajakoski, Jyväskylä, and crushing it worldwide.
Whoah! Lots of meetings! We really had a week full of action and the program covered the Finnish society and landscape pretty comprehensively. “Participants come back with many insights.” said Christian Mayeur, founder of Entrepart on the way back home.
At the last night dinner in Kappeli we dialogued (time for it comes afterwards) and concluded that: In Finland a lot of trust and space is given for the youth, and that creates interesting companies & projects. And what about this well-being, every company promises a package of it for the employee, but what’s the individual responsibility of each own well-being, isn’t there any? Also the area of exact information was thought: in France and especially in the bank numbers & measuring the facts are appreciated, but it seems that in Finland the process and feeling the move and having dialogue is more important. Maybe this feeling resonates with the people we met on the way?
Personally, I was honoured to meet with all these people and companies that are highly intersting for Monkeys. Now it’s time to start discovering the seeds this learning journey has planted. Thank you for your commitment and presence, all who contributed and joined the journey! My next goal, other one written in the same Learning Contract in Quito, is to make 100 % of the turnover from outside of Finland. Maybe this week with CA was a step towards that too.
Cheers and love,
Henna Monkey
Ps. Special thank you for Christian Mayeur and Sanna Tossavainen for creating this and giving us a chance to be part of this and work with you. It’s been quite a trip!
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
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