Cool and Important
Superhero Profile Tool Available Now!
Feb 9th
Couple months back me and Tatu came up with a superhero profile tool. We used it in one workshop to get the group to know each other better. It’s a simple tool, and in a nutshell helps you to learn in a fun and interesting way more about the strengths and weaknesses of your team. I am experimenting with a tool called Pay With a Tweet! in order to spread the word about the tool. The content is a one page pdf licenced with a creative commons Attribution Share Alike license. So feel free to use and play around with it. If you want the source file made with Mac’s Pages let me know. Peace! Ville
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
Monkey See Monkey Do
Aug 31st
In this year at Pipefest I saw Adam Tensta live. (Thanks Anu of ZestMark and all who have done work to build up this phenomenon in Finland.) Adam got a cool set up on stage. Live Drums, DJ, and a guy behind a sampler. So beats were tight! I suppose the beat came from all three sources, and I can tell, the bass kicked nicely.
Adam Tensta got a song titled Monkey. That, quite obviously, caught my attention. What is he singing about? What does it mean – Monkey See. Monkey Do? I think I had heard these words before, but never got to study about the concept before. Wikipedia got a short article about it as well as usingenglish.com – I understand the idea that so that Monkey mimics and copies behavior, even if he doesn’t understand why he does it. Just seeing and doing. A great example of that is the story about the five monkeys experiment. Copying behavior, without asking why, that is.
One reason I got excited about this Monkey See Monkey Do concept is the just passed summer holidays. After the holidays I have asked myself many times this simple question, why?
Why am I doing what I am doing?
What is it that I should be doing? I am in the search of meaning, so that work is not only about seeing and doing. Tatu told me today when we were taking a bus to our Yellow Office that August has been hectic but he has managed to keep his own rhythm still. How about you? How is the Autumn and work looking like?
I love you Alex Castellarnau!
Aug 11th
Never met you, never heard about you. Instantly fell in love after receiving these principles freely translated by @Hennaism. Alex you ROCK! Original video here in spanish. These principles make me fly, cry and almost die. Really encouraging me about Monkeys being on the right track. THANKS!
Alex: After more than 5 years of experience in IDEO, we identified six principles to build environments that create innovation
1. “It’s about how we learn, not about how much we gain financially.” Not to do but to learn. The return should be learning, not economic performance.
2. Do not define a job desccription 100 % clearly. Employees come to explore and define what their job is.
3. Helping employees to explore fully their passions at work.
4. Each employee is its own brand. There are as many brands as there are people in organizations.
5. Our leaders must reflect, not direct, they have to be a mirror, no arrow. The CEO goes from executive to be explored and to be evangelist.
6. We have no destination but a good sense of direction. We have some knowledge and we have good tools for the road.
This empowering and explosive flying kiss goes to Alex and Henna, well to everybody who accepts to take it:
Tantourist – playful, everyellow and redcheeked acticboy really feeling alive. YEH!!!
A Monkey in Turku since 14th of May 2011
Jun 23rd
What can I say? As a graduate from Team Academy, I have the courage to act first and think later. As you all can see, I live in Turku now and haven’t regret it one bit. (At least for now)
To be honest, I had planned moving to Turku for a year before I finally did it. Luckily I did not have to move alone, my long-term boyfriend Pekka joined me and has been so supportive during these first months. I am also privileged to have some amazing friends here, and they have helped me to feel like home here.
This has been an overwhelmingly busy spring – I was travelling around the world with my team company Co-op unelMania form 23rd of January to 28th of March. After the trip I managed to finalize my studies and final thesis – all this in one month. In May it was time to move to Turku, set up my own company and join the yellow world of the Monkey Business. What will I be doing here in Turku as a Monkey? Well, stay tuned, I’ll keep you posted.. 
Now that I look back what have happened in April, May and early June – I still can’t really believe I managed to do all this. Yet here I am- fresh, new monkey-entrepreneur in new city, Turku, with graduation papers in my hand. Like my sister said it; “Now you are done with the University, it is time to head towards new challenges.” She had also cut a picture of a brave little mouse and taped it to the congratulation card – Mickey Mouse with a text; “See anything you do as an adventure” It feel like it is a good guideline for the near future with the Monkeys!
What is Monkey Business?
Apr 21st
Monkey Business creates interaction environments, which enable fluent flow of information and learning. I have been answering the question above since 2007 when I started monkeying around. Almost always I have answered the question with different kind of answer. Year 2010 I was studying in Australia doing my master degree. When I came back I noticed I could not answer the question what is Monkey Business at all. To make it easier for me I started to think what we were doing and what are things we are best at. I started to crystallize our core to make it easier to understand.
I started to go through the work that Monkey Business did during the year 2010 from seminars to the organizational change processes. I noticed that almost in every case the core thing what we did was to create an interaction environment, where participants could speak meaningful things about themselves and their organizations. The main thing is to create an atmosphere where people can speak from their hearth without the fear of being stupid or wrong. Antti Hannula the Chairman of the board of directors at Aldea Attorneys at Law Ltd. said it very well.
The function of Monkey Business is to remove the obstacles of natural interaction between human beings.
Around this core substance we have redesigned our services to make the collaboration with customers easier. Here is the first peek to our redesigned services for our readers.
I will explain the services with few bullet points to make them easier to understand.
Ezy Start
- To create common consensus about the project
- Familiarize oneself with others
- Ease communication
Happy Ending
- Wrap up the project
- Share learnings and new ideas
- Decide next steps
Travel Agency for Super Heroes
- Learning journey for companies and individuals to/from Finland
- Organize visits to interesting companies and places
- Designing learning process for participants
Kick Ass Events
- Planning the event in co-operation with orderer
- Designing interactive program
- Executing the event
Yellow Attitude Workshop
- Creating entrepreneurship
- Creating intrapreneurship for organisations
- Igniting the passions
Yellow Café
- Communality process for organisations
- Place for speaking, laughing and innovations inside the organisation
- Host by Monkey Business in the beginning
Sustainability Innovation Camp
- Learning process for sustainable innovations
- For companies or individuals
- Doing your share
Please feel free to give some feedback. Are you getting excited? I AM!!!
-Hugo- Back in (Monkey) Business
Visiting Patagonia @ Ventura
Apr 14th
There were 10 dreams that I wanted to make true in life, and one of them became reality last thursday. I got the chance to visit Patagonia and met Yvon together with 26 team entrepreneurs from Mondragon Team Academy and Team Coach Aitor Lizartza.
The visit started with a fully inspirational speech by Yvon Chouinard. Yvon started sharing that even if the Economic crisis is breaking down many companies, this has been the best year for Patagonia. He shared that people (consumers) become more conservative when the crisis hits and start buying what they really need. Actually the growth of Patagonia has been about 20% this year, but it could have been up to 30 or even 40%. It did not happen because of their own choice, since they want to create an organic and sustainable growth.
Yvon sees that the government or the corporations won´t change the world, but it´s now in the hands of the consumers to step up and to show the power by deciding what to buy and who to support. He mentioned as well that co-operation through Business is the only way to create solutions for the environmental crisis we´re going through. Leading by example, Patagonia and another 24 clothing brands have created a shared project with the aim to provide more information (about how a cloth has been produced) to the customers prior to their purchase. It will take some time till this really takes place, but idea behind is that customers with an iPhone will get the chance to find out when they visit a store what has been the process of creating the jacket: where, materials, transportation…
Patagonia´s business model is not based on selling more to the same customer, but they aim to sell to new customers. I got some ideas here. Patagonia has the commitment to donate 1% of their sales (4 million $ will be donated this year) to organizations that support environmental change and activism. From my perspective, this tribe has been created already, it does not grow and they are looking for tools to make change happen. So how can we do that? probably education is the only way to make that change happen. So how about Patagonia creating scholarships or grants for students from developing countries to attend schools that can create profound changes in behaviours through radical educational models? Team Academy could be a good partner probably for that
We got the chance to visit all the facilities and after that the teamsters had to work on a company challenge in 2 teams.
First team had to work on a challenge related to Product Marketing, and Helena Barbour, the Business Director for Lifestyle product presented it:
1. Patagonia is a brand committed to both the climbing and surfing lifestyles. Surf culture is driven by brands that sell fashion forward styles at low price points to the youth market, with significant advertising investment. Since Patagonia doesn’t promote fashion, low
prices or advertising, how should the brand seek to be relevant to the surf customer?
2. Given the environmental and social compliance parameters we choose to work within, our retail prices tend to be higher. How do we appeal to the younger generation who want to pay less at Zara, H&M etc?
The second team had to work on a challenge presented by Lisa Pike, Director of Environmental Giving. She posed the following questions:
1) A lay of the land of the environmental movement in both Spain and Europe (if they are not just Spanish students). What are the driving environmental topics and issues that are resonating with citizens and customers currently?
2) How best can we communicate and execute our environmental giving in Spain/Europe. Each year Patagonia gives away 1% of sales to grassroots environmental organizations. Is this the right model for Spain? If so, how can we better brand this core company mission and execute it in Spain/Europe. If not, what other approaches might we consider?
The students had 2 hours to work on the challenge and then present the solutions, which were really good.
Yvon is definetely a truly inspiring master, whose business is based on the Zen philosophy. “Don´t focus your effort on shooting the animal correctly, but focus your energy on making the right move when shooting the arrow” – said him.
I wanted to dedicate this post to Tatu and the boys, to Hugo and his upcoming baby and to Ville, who lent me the book written by Yvon “Let my people go surfing” in November 2008.
Liher
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
Games and Learning with Crazy Feedback
Mar 28th
Greetings from Paris. I came here for the Intrapreneurship Circus, and most of all the final session of Team Mastery 3 process. And while in Central Europe I used the chance to meet up with Charles and also a new friend Daniel from Fing/Lift. I’ll give a talk at the Lift Conference coming summer in Marseille, which is super exciting. Good times! Paris is sunny and warm.
I wanted to share with you shortly about what’s been on my mind lately. Gaming and learning, that is. Games seem to be a hot thing right now, Finland is hot spot of games because of Angry Birds, Shadow Cities etc. I am a casual gamer myself. And we have been developing the Mental Models Game with Monkey Business. And yes, we are using Deal Machine to help our sales process.
But what really stroke me where these three blog articles. First I read about how Finnish cultural heritage is being saved with the help of games. Then I read Guardian’s article about SXSW titled The Internet is Over. And finally I found article by Ville Miettinen from Microtask titled Play the Game of Life. Here’s my favorite quote:
Like children, game designers take fun seriously. In his book The Theory of Fun For Game Design, gaming expert Raph Koster defines fun as: “the feedback the brain gives us when we are absorbing patterns for learning purposes.” -Ville Miettinen
All these inputs in few days get my mind running and fast. Some of the questions I am wondering are: What are games? What is learning? Why Mental Models game work and get people talk? How about Senge’s et co Learning Loops? What about delays? What about crazy feedback that games provide? And what did Einstein say about Madness? What all this got to do with Monkeys and scaling up our business?
I need to think more and I will get back to you later about more ideas. Please, meanwhile, share if you got experiences of games and learning or anything related.
Graphic Facilitation Training 13.1.2011 by Nanna Frank
Jan 16th
Above is a slideshow with images I draw last Thursday in graphic facilitation training by Nanna Frank. It was good fun to participate in training with Team Academy’s Creativite Intelligence and Flexibility Program, LÄN, which I did maybe 5 years ago myself. Key learnings for me where that a single word can be expressed in many images. Thus images are not far from telling more than thousand words. Also, an interesting idea was that in science where we seek the truth images are hardly used in the scientific articles I have read. Images leave room for creativity. They ask us to participate in creating the meaning.
Lately I have been excited to know more about Design Thinking. That was one of the motivators for me to join the training. One of the cornerstones of Design is to see the big picture, to have the holistic view. For that it is good to draw a big paper, kind of poster, with key concepts about the case. We did such posters or templates as the final task of the training. I did mine about the Yellow Office 1st Anniversary that will be on the 25th. It helped me to see it from a new light, and for sure will help me to explain the idea to others. Thanks a lot Nanna for the training!
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