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

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!

Myself and Tatu were in Lahti 6 weeks ago hosting a Yellow Cafe / Open Space in Innovations for Knowledge Management seminar. They had a similar problem on their second day. Keynote had cancelled. Then as we came to the event on the second day we heard of that but the situation was solved already. However, that got us thinking – if Keynote cancels people that organize events should call us. And we would love to help. We need time to get to the event but nothing more than that. That’s enough to prepare.

Tatu with brand new Mental Models Game graphics.

We are ready to host a Keynote session at any size of an event. Anytime. On any theme. Now you may wonder: “That’s crazy. How can they be experts on any theme?” And you are right, we are not. But the audience attending any seminar is probably smarter together than any Keynote that was supposed to talk there. And we can make the people talk with each other. They will create knowledge together.

If it’s an opening/middle session of the event, our keynote would be the Mental Models game. If it’s by the end, we would host a massive Design Thinking workshop. Both are tools to make people talk and create their own meaning. Mental Models game helps to diverge thinking, and Design Thinking workshop will help to converge the ideas explored in the seminar. And the tools scale up. We can start from groups of 5. And go up to hundreds, thousands or ten thousands of people. It would be cool to do a workshop in a rock festival. Maybe one day?

What do you think? Does this make sense? How could we market this kind of service? And who’s the first client and when? If you are an event organizer, we would love to develop this further with you. Best yellow week to all! Ville

The second website (first under domain banana.fi) was published in April 2008 just two days after launching our company in Oman. Soon after that we got our third version online, which was the basic wordpress blog with added yellow+banana background.

Now the fourth version of MB’s website has been up since March 2010. It was designed by Jaakko from Kuvituskonttori Kynä & Kumi. And here are statistics about the visitors. About 80% are on the Finnish site and rest here on English. We are very humbled by the amount of visitors and visits. Thanks a lot, we are looking forward to more advetures with you on our mission to make the world more fun and yellow.

Ps. Here’s a link for a great Drum’n'Bass track – It’s a remix by Featurecast for Calvin Harris’ song I’m Not Alone. I think it’s a perfect song for the summer. -Ville

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 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?

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.

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.

1. Think about the purpose of being in the different Social Media.
2. Broadcasting vs. Social Participation
3. For the Likeminds the hashtag is the platform.

This event and ideas came in a right time because I was just about to help our superhero friend Claudia with their Social Media tools and systems. I was about to do that by writing and explaining our tools and methods in this blog and now I got a whole new perspective – not only tools and methods, but also the purpose. Why Twitter? Why Qik/Youtube? Why Facebook? Why Blog? Am I just using the social technologies to broadly cast my own ideas? Do I really want to engage participation? What’s all this noise I am creating? Or maybe just like Henna asked at some point of our summer days: “What are you saying and is it connected to anything?” I will dig into these questions later on in another blog post.

The third point on my list is about the way this movement called Likeminds is being organized. If I have understood correctly anybody can organize anything for so called likeminded people. Who are these likeminded people? I think you are because you are reading this, and I am because I am writing it. I had heard about likeminds breakfasts through hellohelsinki.fi and from our Green Monkey Liher. How to do it? You just add the hashtag #likeminds into your event, youtube video, Flickr images and so on. So then, likeminded people, can go and see what’s going on near you or participate virtually. I think simple is beautiful. Hashtag as a platform for organizing probably truely approaches the minimum structure needed to enable self-organizing. I am starting to believe more and more in self-organizing, and starting to doubt more hierarchy and control. Let’s trust people.

Ville Monkey

Ps. Thank you Teemu, Mikko, Petra and everyone at Dicole for hosting this inspiring event. We will follow your example here in Jyväskylä. Thanks also for all of you whom I met and shared interesting conversations. In this event with many start-ups and related people, I am happy I also saw futurist and philosopher Sam Inkinen, who made remember that Monkey Business is a lifestyle company. Thanks a lot Sam!

We visited Design Factory at the Aalto University in Espoo and met Inka (in the picture below on the left) there. Actually, she was already a friend of Henna’s since Paphos seminar last summer but we didn’t know that before Tatu gave her our Banana business card. She is also a designer, also for material but nowadays more and more for intangible. Very interesting place that Design Factory.

I am sure the visit to Design Factory contributed to our learning. What we learned for example that we are at our best when creating the interaction culture. We can create an environment for learning, and an environment where people can talk with one another. And that probably is the core of our business.

Here are first three development versions of our elevator pitch, first one was: We are Monkey Business and we first thought that we ignite collectives. Hä? Now that doesn’t say much, right? Let’s try again… We are MB and we are learning designers. Hmm. Still pretty broad and doesn’t really tell what we do. Ok, we worked a bit more and with the time came the idea of MB building learning environments. That was quite ok, but many times people associate learning environment with something virtual and happening with computers. So not so good for us. So finally we came up with this…

We are Monkey Business and we help our customers to build a better interaction culture.

How does that sound to you?