Meeting with cool people
Three Books on Brands
Nov 15th
This Saturday, I was asked which books I would recommend if a person wanted to learn about brands. My response may not be the most obvious. But here they are, three books to start with:
- Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard. In my opinion, this one is a great example how building the brand starts from passion and mission, and is based on strong business philosophy.
- Project50 (Re-invenvting work) by Tom Peters. Visiting Kisko Labs last week reminded me of the genius of Tom Peters. I think in the core of the brand is attitude. And this book has thought me a lot about that.
- It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be by Paul Arden. This book will give you an idea about the visual side of branding and sales. It has nice design, is easy to read, and was highly insightful at least for me.
What do you think? Where would you start when it comes building a strong brand?
Open P2P Design Course at Pixelversity
Sep 23rd
I am in a train to Helsinki. Again. But let’s start with what I wrote a week ago:
I am in a train to Helsinki heading for a what seems to be a very interesting two weekend workshop organized by Pixelache, it’s about Open P2P Design. I met Massimo shortly at the OKCon in Berlin this past June/July and he told me about this workshop. Many times when I travel abroad I hear about Pixelache, Alt Party or Assembly, but this is the first time I participate in meetings organized by the Helsinki visual school. Well, besides Open Data stuff in fact.
I don’t know much what to expect, I know very little about Open P2P Design. But I like it all, open is cool, P2P is the future, and Design is beautiful. So expectations are high. I am not aware that any of my friends would be joining the sessions, so it’s also exciting to meet new people.
After doing a little a research, I come across following questions in Massimo’s presentation about Open P2P Design:
How can we design projects for a locality and its community?
How can we enable the participation of a community in the design process?
I find these questions very triggering. Because I think what we really need is more collaboration locally. And that is the hardest part. It’s easy to go and travel and meet cool people, but when it’s time to make a difference at your home it can be very hard. The most local is the most systemic says Peter Senge. Local is the only thing we have. Local is our playground. How can we bring people together and make things happen?
I am going to participate in these workshops with Mental Models Game in my mind. The idea is to build it with Open Source / free software philosophy. I am not sure though what it means in practice. But just recently I can say that we’ve got the open hardware side on it, too. In practice, our friends Theresia and Florian have found carpenters in Germany to build a game for them. Let’s see when we get instructables online either from our prototype made by Janne, or the ones made in Germany.
So, now it’s time for the second weekend of the course. It’s been fun, I have learnt in theory and practice (a little) how the open source projects are being managed. How to work with revision control systems and software. I think all this will be useful for the future where I see us collaborating more and more globally. Working on a same project but based in different locations.
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
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
Mental Model Game at Hamburg
Apr 4th
31 brave people came together for an “Innovate or Die” event on 10 March in Hamburg, Germany, hosted by a German-Finnish crew, one of them from Monkey Business. Super Monkey Iiro Kolehmainen. It looked like everyone survived, and yeah, even had some serious fun.
One crucial tool we used was Monkey Business’ the Mental Model Game. It supports the process of recognizing one’s own and other people’s ways of seeing the world, and helps appreciate the different viewpoints.
Really interesting to see how the form of a game impacts people’s conversations. Maybe Marc Prensky provides some good thoughts on this phenomenon in “why games engage us”:
Now what happened during the Mental Model Game? Put simply, the participants shared their views about open inquiries, so questions like “what’s the difference between craziness and genius?” or “are we alone in the universe?” They talked in various constellations, for example large groups, smaller groups or individually, and they captured key insights. Initially, questions were given by the hosts, later the participants generated their own. Here are some juicy bits that people in Hamburg reflected:
Everything can be questioned what I had thought I knew
Don´t think just with your own head
Think crazy
Everything is changeable
Ideas are formed in the “connecting room” – don´t create any borders for yourself
Perspectives, perspectives, perspectives
People see things even more differently than I thought
It is important to have fun in life!
Again I learned quite a bit about myself
There is no limit for human creativity
The dialogue in the group reached a good level, and when one of the participants brought up the question: “What is the core of a human being”, it arose so much interest that it became the basis for the birthgiving phase of the workshop (conversion). This was guided by the question „if the inner core of the human being is so important, how will I incorporate it into my business?“
Participants’ creativity did not even stop at biblical quotations when Jesus, surrounded by his apostles, did a headstand, and remained in that position for the rest of the Last Supper. A really good way of shaking one’s mental models, isn’t it?
Thank you Monkey Business for playing the Mental Model Game with us in Germany, let’s continue this good cooperation in the future.
Writer is a friend of Monkey Business and enthusiastic of Team Academy
Theresia Warwitz
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.
Visitors from France, Canada and Jyväskylän Maalaiskunta at the Yellow Office
Feb 13th
I am excited about coming week as we are getting local and international visitors at our home nest, the Yellow Office. I think this week culminates some of Monkey Business vision of being a global microbrand. I believe in Peter Senge‘s words that the “what is most systemic is most local”. But that we need to connect globally as well if we want to be more creative. I really agree on what Esko Kilpi once told me: “We need to organize places and space where people can meet and something new can emerge.” I think it perfectly resonates with the video below by Steven Johnson on Where the Good Ideas Come From:
About next week: First, we have the board of Maalaiskunnan Yrittäjät meeting at our office on Tuesday evening. Chairman of the board is our neighbour and friend Jouko aka Musti from Seripiste. Little birds are saying we may get a seat on the board, too. Also, a little after that there’ll be a group of people interested in Organizational Development coming all way from France and Canada to see where we dwell. In fact, the visit to our place is part of their learning expedition to Team Academy organized by SoL France. I heard from my friend that one of the participants have a blog called La nature d’une nouvelle entreprise. It seems to be all in French but Pascal said it’s good and I believe him so if you understand, check it out!
This past week our office has been occupied by people from Team Academy taking intense course of marketing coached by Heikki Toivanen. See the picture above. We are very happy to have people at our place, for a meeting in a creative environment or to experience the sauna.
Furthermore, Samuli Karjalainen dropped by for the first time in our office few weeks ago, and with him we explored the idea of a business sauna. It would be an event for local people interested in learning and meeting new people. First start with a short story or a presentation by someone followed by dialogue and sauna. Who is in for that?
Tiina came into the HOUSE!
Sep 22nd
Little things are often the biggest ones. Last winter when moving to this new location we had a wellcoming party. And I called a little local newspapers to come and visit us. And they did and writed an article(below).
Well it´s all in finnish, chaotic and so on. The thing is that you newer know who will read an article like this. And what it will cause in the head of the reader. Neither did we. About three weeks ago I got an telephone call. It was Tiina. She wanted to come and see us. So I ansvered YES. Tiina came and started telling:” last spring I saw that article and decided that I´want to work in a place like that. And here I am. Ready to rock.” So here she is, photo taken this morning. And she brought some liqourice to us also, yellow, in the front of the picture.
Well you can see Tiina´s work here. She is a professional illustrator. (the one who can draw cool pictures, creative and so on.) And we have encouraged her to use that ability. And she has taken it into the action. She has contacted BusinessArena to co-operate in graphical facilitation. And she has been visiting local center for starting entrepreneurs(Luotsi). And said that it was depressing:” they told me to came back with countings and numbers. Not very enthuastic. Are they trying to kill the entreprenial spark in me?” On the other side of the table was sitting Hans, old team mate of Johannas&mine. Hans had got samekind of experiment with Luotsi. So here you can see how Hans normally protects himself against idea killers. (Hans is the humanbeing at the right side of the picture. On the left is a Sunflower brought from Villes homeyard at Paltamo.) Anyway, yellow both.
So what I am thinking is that how do we really help others to be at their best on what they do? And I am really happy that Tiina came to visit us. By Matti Nykänen:” Give chance a break “. Let´s aim for enriching each other. For little things. Let´s listen our hearts and numbers will follow. It´s not about the idea – it´s about the attitude.
Tantourist – always on travel
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!
Team Evolution & Dialogue – insights from TA@Uni Surrey
Apr 4th
At 18th-19th of March we had an honour to work with Uni of Surrey and SoL UK by hosting 2 days of TA workshops at UK. There’s a plan to implement TA to the educational field of UK, and therefore we are learning and working together. The workshops were hosted by Surrey Team Enterprise Project, STEP1 team. From TA the hosts were Petrus Piironen from 3rd year team company Cromita, Alexandra Tancula from the World Wide Team, myself from MB and Mikael Hirvi from Partus, the Team Academy adult education and brand managing company.
In the workshops one theme was rising up as essential part of TA, and here I want to reflect on it. There had been a thought of implementing TA in Surrey as short courses / summer programs with an intention of piloting it so. Before we even got into deeper discussion about the benefits and downsides of the short courses, Petrus got a system intelligent insight of showing this Team Evolution modelling made by a Monkey fellow Ville Hast.
We described this figure by sharing a fact that on the first year teams are less productive than members of the team as indivuals could be, but investing time for working as a team makes us exponentially productive by the 4th year. Then Arie de Geus took this figure in deeper analysis by sharing us a story and example of the power of dialogue from the Roayl Dutch Shell, where the management teams aimed to spend hours and hours dialoguing. Why so? Because due to the shared knowledege and understanding they gained by dialoguing their desicion making process improved remarkably making them fast at implementing desicions and committing people to work on changes. Dialogue simply brought competence for the company.
It was clear then, that short courses of TA are useful as pilots, but for making it really a successful learning program in the Uni no less than 3 years is the recommended lenght of a program, because team learning and dialogue need time. In Team Academy Finland team companies the first two years go for learning the dialogue with 8 hours / week basis and investing for learning, and the 3rd and 4th year as a team bring exponential growt in quality of the ideas and action of the team members and thus the revenues also grow. In adult learning programs 1 year time frame works well, because adult learners come with more experience and capabilities to think together than the BBA learners aged 18-30.
Summasummarum: dialogue is power and it’s wise to make effort for allowing time for it in any learning program and company. At this UK journey I started valuing our Mondays Are For Monkeys dialogue sessions especially! …we’ve got a chance to improve so much when we invest on dialogue.
With yellow Easter regards,
Henna Monkey
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