Design by Monkeys
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
5 Ideas to Improve Internal Communication
Jan 25th
This post is about improving communication within organizations, but maybe surprisingly, without the use of computers or smart phones. My friend shared with me his challenge, to improve communication of his organization with about 80 people divided into few separate units. I thought for a while, and proposed following.
Let people write on the toilet walls.
1. Pay attention to coffee room and kitchen of the office. Get rid of automatic coffee machines, get some real good coffee and encourage people to spend time drinking good coffee. This may sound crazy, but I believe we are more effective drinking coffee than on our computers by ourselves.
2. Use toilets’ walls creatively as a notice and pin boards with various internal advertisements about on going projects, strategy etc. Use cartoons, illustrations and other easy to understand elements.
3. Organize “No Agenda” dialogue meetings every second week. These are voluntary and could last about 3-4 hrs each, start with a check-in and finish with some kind of check out. Learning dialogue takes time, but if you keep doing this for 3 months I guarantee surprising results.
4. Organize a monthly seminar for the whole unit. This is compulsory for everyone in the organization and should last no more than 2 hours. Program could include music, theater and other more entertaining elements mixed together with presentations about important issues eg. projects and focus points for the next month. Program should be co-created with participants, and you may want to promote tools for creativity such as pecha kucha.
5. Twice a year you could take your people out. Whether it’s just before holidays like we do it, or in the middle of the season, provide everyone opportunity to join this informal gathering. Maybe rent a cabin, or a rural hotel, organize a little seminar to justify the participation, but the main thing really is party together with your colleagues. These are moments where people can cross-pollinate ideas intensively and have fun.
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
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?
Tape with thousand euros!
Feb 1st
I strongly believe that memories are the only possessions we should collect during our lives. Yesterday Ville talked about blog writing and refered it a bit: “are we happy with sharp drill bits in our rack or happy cos´ borrowed them to a friend”. So in Monkey Business we are sometimes taking it to – Do The Never! Or how could you explain to friend or customer that we are using about same amount Euros monthly to tapes, pins, t-shirts, coffee, ext. than we get salary? Or sometimes even more…
And we try explain it to ourselves that it´s marketing, tribe marketing. And same time happily admitting that we get very exited about these “side track purchaces”. It just feels good! And as you can see – last diktator of Finland, U.K.K – Urkki – Kekkonen, clearly shares the message. Year 2011 theme for Monkeys is U.K.K – stubborness and relentless. Thanks to Sanna for these ultimate kool coasters. And thanks to Asier and Funky Projects for giving us tape back in May 2007. It took allmost four years to implement it in MB…
You get what you measure – they say. So we have started to measure quality and free thinking time spent in hammock. Every 15 minuts gives you a credit. Hammock is electicity free zone, no lab tops etc. According Jussi T. Koski we should spent weekly two times two hours only focusing on thinking, slowing down. If you want to be creative. If you want to follow task list given by your boss – just keep on performing. So how do you explain this Hang Loose – measure to a logical engineer? Luckily I don´t have to. And results after 21st days in Hammock are that first podium place is shared between Johanna, Ville and Tatu. With only four credits/pp, only one hour in 21st days. How mutch is that? What is it? What are doeing? Are we thinking? Are we monkeys?
Human energy is the thing we need to increase. Sun really gives it at this time of year. And hammock. And all the little things I manage to live present. Those are the only things I can remember.
Activboy Tatu learning Zen Riding
ps. Want some tape? Come and get it.
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!
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!
How to become a superhero?
Jan 12th
Year 2010 and new decade has started rolling really fast. And it feels good. Monkey Business coreteam has had good dialogues around issue of each player role. Henna answered to question about responsibilities that she would like to be a superstar.
That ignited my thinking – how to became a superstar? We all have super powers, I am sure. But we need help to find them, to feel secured enough learning to use them. And that is where we need communities, loving and caring surroundings. And that is why I feel so good about being in Monkey Business.
What kind of history you want to create? What is your superpower?
“God won´t ask me why I wasn´t Moses. He will ask me why I wasn´t Susya.” -Rabbie Susya-
Tantourist. In flames!
Nathaniel the Kaospilot taught us Graphic Facilitation
Nov 23rd
Finally on Friday last week we put the graphics on our offices wall but read below what happened before that.
Last week we got a great surprise guest to our office. He is a friend of a friend of a friend of ours and he was visiting Jyväskylä and then he popped up into our office. And now he is a friend of ours as well. His name is Nathaniel, and he is probably the first ever Kaospilot to actually visit Team Academy. Kaospilots are cool, they have a strong sustainability value to their education, and also they have eye for design. Besides, they do learn about process facilitation, team work and entrepreneurship. The goal is to educate social innovators, I think. Be sure to check them out if you didn’t know about them yet. I also wrote earlier about Kaospilot’s good marketing.
Anyways, we got along very well with Nathaniel, and he taught us some cool tricks about Graphic Facilitation. After having some coffee and talking about various things Nathaniel showed us a video he had done. And, you maybe guessed, we wanted to do the same kind of things about our own products. We picked up our new product called Kick Ass Event Facilitation and here are the results. First Nathaniel himself and third one is Tatu in Finnish. We also got a small making of/behind the scenes video on Youtube and we got pitches by Henna, Hugo, myself and Johanna waiting to be published shortly. Tatu kinds of comes to this video shooting from the bushes; he wasn’t told beforehands what product he was supposed to explain about. The idea was to keep the video presentations authentic and alive, kind of the jazzy style improvization. Any questions, ideas or similar? Please share them through comments or get in touch with us directly. We are ready to rock with you!
edit: Henna wasn’t happy with her video being online so I took it out. Sorry for that – both Henna (for putting it here in the first place) and the world (that it’s not online anymore).
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