facilitation
facilitation
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
Monkey Business 4 Years!
Oct 5th
Yesterday and four years ago, on 4th of October 2007, was the day when me and Tatu wore the yellow jeans for the first time for a gig. We had just got freshly printed T-shirts from Cameleon Paino, and found the yellow jeans from JC. We took a car and drove to Rovaniemi to do a 1,5 hr workshop in the final seminar of one entrepreneurship project of a local vocational school. It went quite ok, and was fun. I remember we got feedback that we ate chewing gum during the panel discussion. More mistakes. More Learning. So no more chewing gum during public performances. Four years, it’s been quite a journey. A lot of fun, sometimes valleys, and sometimes the way is up. Thresholds and good times. Thanks a lot everyone we’ve met during the four years.
4th of October 2007, Rovaniemi.
I think we’ve learnt quite a lot. But what I know for sure, there’s so much more to learn. About monkeys. About business. And about life. Enjoy the Autumn everybody!
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 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 lead a network well? ideas from AoH Karlskrona
Feb 20th
Hey all,
here’s some online fruits from the Art of Hosting training I am happy to attend in Karlskrona. We have a unique opportunity to learn together with many Kaospilots, MSLS-students, Team Entrepreneurs and other inspiring people from different networks.
I hosted a session in Open Space, (which Tennessee one of our excellent hosts calls the best tool to get people into action fast) session at Art of Hosting training in Karlskrona with a calling question or topic: Networks / Tribes – How do we eliminate the limits of growth?
We started with Oliver from Kaospilots, and soon also Marco from MSLS (thanks for harvesting), Rovan one of our hosts and Vilma from TA/PArtus/SoL joined the dialogue. Thanks all for participating and supporting the thinking together.
Impact for me to host this session is that I am part of many networks (e.g. SoL, The Hub, TeamAcademy, PrecencingInstitute, WorldCafe, AoH, AppInquiry etc.) that are growing and somewhat aligned, but still I wonder how we could really leverage the power of these networks making the world better. Also a question in my head is that why there are so many of them? Could we combine or bring them together somehow? Furthermore I am really pondering what we can learn from the way Open Source communities are being organized?
So here is some of our thinking:
Potential bottle necks limiting the growth of a network are for example but not limited to following:
1. Hierarchy: It’s hard to fight to the top of the hierarchy in order to get your voice heard.
2. Exclusive Inner Circle that is hard to be part of.
3. No room for action of members, if you need to act permission it may be hard to get
4. Values and spirit are not attractive
5. Somebody is exploiting the network
6. Business Model is not sustainable and
7. Communication or the lack f it
So, how do we eliminate the limits of growth? And what is this growth we are looking for? (Money/Members/Impact/Practitioners/etc/etc?)
Or, thanks to Rovan, the new question emerged: What are characteristics of good, nourishing leadership for a network/tribe? Here are some ideas that we came up with:
1. Open and transparency of decision making process and “organizational” structure, even if it’s dynamic. No Taboos or un-written rule. The aim should be to make the system as visible as possible.
2. Empowers loads of action (systemically): What is the minimum structure needed to enable self-organizing and action?
3. Good communication culture (this is the real challenge I guess)
4. Clear process of creation and updating the leading thoughts
5. Low entrance step, it’s easy to join, accessible.
6. Inclusive, nobody is left out if they want to contribute and participate.
7. Purpose large enough but clear enough. People should feel that I want to be part of this. Purpose is container both for action and expansion. Case: 350.org brought together many networks, as did Survival Academy.
All right, I also participated in two other session of which fruits I may share online later. But I really would appreciate any comments on this so the space is still open.
Thesis about Team Academy by Esa Saarinen
Nov 26th
We still are squatting in the premises of Team Academy, and today when I came from the surprisingly close-by grocery store I thought once again: “Team Academy is great because in here it is ok and encouraged to be excited.” Why did I think that? Well, I had just seen one Teampreneur painting graffiti related to the 24hr birth-giving of Team Company Dilectio. He was enjoying and laughing while doing the painting. And then Kaisu of Dilectio saw the graffiti, and she clearly was very excited about that.
That reminded me of the 7 thesis our friend, the explosively insightful philosopher Esa Saarinen has coined about Team Academy. He introduced these in the Team Academy’s 15th anniversary seminar in January 2008 where me and Tatu were the MC’s. I thought I should post them here to remind people who have seen them before, and maybe there are some to whom these are new.
The Core Reasons to the Success of the Team Academy: Esa Saarinen, the Famed Finnish Philosopher speaking
- Thesis 1 In the Hall of Fame of Experience-Based Learning Team Academy is # 1
- Thesis 2 Some People Speak, Team Academy Acts.
- Thesis 3 Team Academy Brings Dreaming Back to Professional Education.
- Thesis 4 Team Academy Calls Out to Young People to Express their Sincerity and Joy, apparently as the Only
Educational Institution in Finland. - Thesis 5 In the Endless Fight Between Stick-Disciplinary-Narrow-Mindedness and Breaking Out from Barriers, Team Academy Chooses Excitement.
- Thesis 6 The Core of Team Academy is Based on the Most Sustainable and Solid Foundation of Finnish Basic Values: Robust Pragmatism and the Spirit of Equality.
- Thesis 7 Team Academy is Based on the Power of Community and the Human In-Between, but behind it All is an Individual Who is Willing to Give Out His Everything for the Cause that Matters.
My favorite is maybe number 7 phrasing very nicely the connection and relationship between the individual teampreneur and the team/community. What are yours?
Ps. We are planning to organize an after party for all times Paphos-meeting in January together with Esa and the Paphos Alumni of Design Factory.
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).
What happens in #LAVA09 Iceland stays in our Blog
Nov 17th
When we left for the #LAVA09 we were not exactly sure what was going to happen. We were asked to trust the process. We were facilitated by a Kaospilot and a Creative Agent. It was cool to be a participant in a process like this after a good while. I suppose we are not the easiest participants to work with but I believe there is also loads of potential in us.
In the end, we were the work with the Northern Periphery (EU)-Projects, among which is NoCry that invited us there. They were our customers. We didn’t get to work directly with Icelandic industries as we had hoped for so for me personally it took a little time to motivate myself to work with the EU-projects. But I think we got out quite a good result in the end.
The LAVA09 was a 1.5-day seminar where people from different projects met. The Young Creative Entrepreneurs had initially a one hour slot in the program as the last thing between 5 and 6 pm. Well, the previous content ran overtime and then there was a coffee break so we had to distinguish our presentations (and drop one out) down to about 30 minutes. But I think it was a success nevertheless! So what happened during that 30-40 minutes?
1. Tatu jumps on the stage – he was kind of leader of the whole process and facilitated our part of the program. He said very few words and then the lights went off and Rasmus played some loops and music based on sounds he had recorded while in Iceland. He’s a sound architect. After that Elina started improvise with piano and sang a song she had written. I heard one of the participants say that his skin was on “chicken skin” when he listened to that. It was definitely touching.
2. Tatu asked people to shake hands and say hello to people next to them. I was watching this aside and realized the real systems intelligence behind that. Loads of positive energy was flying around from people and we could feel how they got even more excited about what’s coming up.
3. Daniel of Grus jumped on stage with his presentation about Social Media. He made a quick prototype of targeted ad on Facebook and also for Google Ads. One of his main arguments were that if you are not in Google, Youtube and Wikipedia you do not exist for many people. He also showed the new video about the fast change of the media called “Did you know?“. The title for this post is adapted from that video.
4. Then it was our turn. Me, Anette and Juha-Matti had prepared a presentation for the Pellet project. I think about all of us felt on the previous days meeting with the projects people that most of them had challenges in marketing and reaching out people. However, Tatu said later that customers managed to cheat him again, because he says that it is very easy to say that “it’s marketing that we need” even though the real challenges may be in the fields of leadership or something else. Maybe the tool to use with the clients could be the one from Toyota Way, to ask persistently five times “why” from the client. We created quite a chaos in the previous day but that’s another story.
5. Back to our show. We picked the pellet project, well, somehow it seemed to be easy to grasp on. We couldn’t avoid the idea of taking totally unsexy and hard to market product such as a pellet and make a little provocative marketing campaign a create a story for the product. You can see the slides below. Juha-Matti from Intotalo made the drawings, he’s very good! Also, we worked very well as a team and it was a good fun. We were working hard but still didn’t take it too seriously, I guess you can see that from the result, too 
LAVA09 Final Presentation about Pelle Pellets
View more documents from Ville Monkey.
After our presentation we did a very quick energy discussion with the crowd. Right after that all the young creative entrepreneurs went to the front to show once again who we all are. And last, but not least, we heard excellent Icelandic inspired improvisational piece by Rasmus, Carro and Elina. Good stuff. Then it was time to head off for a dinner. That was an escapist experience as well…
Now I am starting to think that the two last posts in our blog have been about Marketing. We are ind of trying to get away from that – it’s not the ocean we want to sail in. We are more into igniting collectives and making the world more fun and yellow. Well, coaching for marketing is something we offer, too. That’s a way to ignite collectives, isn’t it?
Ps. The T-shirts with Techno-Pelle doing the moonwalking will be available soon.
Greetings from Iceland and LAVA09
Nov 13th
We are seated in a nice cozy not-for-profit cafe in the center of Reykjavik. Tatu just asks if we reached our goals for this trip. Why were we here? Did we make the Iceland and the LAVA09 more yellow and fun? Did we have fun all together?
This is a short postcard to all of you. More detailed reporting may come a little later. Have a good weekend you all!
Here is a 5 min video with a short interviews of our new friend Niklas (the secretary general of Nordic Periphery Projects), Tatu Tantourist and Ville Monkey. Here we reflect all together what was our role. It’s filmed two days ago just before our final dinner at the spinning restaurant.
Ps. Two Icelandic and real cool initiatives in the fields of clothing and music, respectively: Naked Ape and GoGoYoKo. Check them out.
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