I decided to blog this reflection paper, since MINN is all about open innovation, and who could call it open if I just write for our MINNteam and for our coaches? So here’s to you, a reflection of the elements that made us grow into a team during the year of 11 meetings in 7 different places around the world.

The core elements of MINN evolving into a real team – my top 6 list

1. Finland session January 2011 – A takeoff for the roller coaster year & 1st challenging video together as a common challenge

We started our journey in Finland in January 2011 by visiting head of Nokia’s crowd sourcing, Pia Erkinheimo. Pia was a sharp lady talking about the worldwide markets and the meeting with her left us with a thought: could we possibly support Nokia with Open Innovation  & crowd sourcing while we go around the world with MINN? We even made a video proposal for that on the same day, and it was not easy. “What could we sell as a minnteam?”, we asked ourselves. The most memorable thing we got out of the session was Pia’s kind and firm handshake that was guiding our behavior in all the tough moments on the rest of the year! From Helsinki we continued to Jyväskylä, and there Taulun Kartano, sauna, jacuzzi & mortal jumps on snow made Finland a wonderful experience for all the MINNERS and created a base for our roller coaster year to start.

2. Orio session – team complete

March 2011 we met in Orio, Basque Country. There 3 new people: Ander, Santi & Jordi joined MINN and the team became complete. A session was weird, included for example biodance & meditation, as well as a lot of personal reflection, but it worked fine for teaming up. Finally we made a birth giving for the big Spanish retail shop chain Eroski at Eutokia and I still remember how we implemented all the things we had learned in Orio instead of implementing all the things we had learned in life before Orio. Maybe Orio touched us so deeply? 

3. Learning Journeys & shared experiences: Finland, San Francisco & Chindia 

Traveling together always helps team to team up. April 2011 we had a week-long Learning Journey in San Francisco & Silicon Valley, and the homework was to make a pitch of our own project and present it for investors at Hub SoMa. The pitching event made us see each other’s work clearly and strongly. I believe that very afternoon in San Francisco in front of the investors caused a big step in our teaming up. There we were real, vulnerable ourselves, maybe for the first time with MINNTEAM.

#minnteam BG @Aalto Design Factory at Tongi Uni, Shanghai.

October 2011 we made a two-weeks-long Chindia Learning Journey, and there the element of growing most as a team was Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta. It was a touching experience for the team. Everyone got to the uncomfort zone when seeing all those people with totally poor conditions that none of them had chosen but the life had given to them. Our job was to help feeding these people and to give them care and love. Personally I was inspired to caress the hair of all the ladies, and as soon as I got the brush I got shocked too: the hair of the lady I approached was full of bleaches. Same thing with the lady on her right, and on her left! At night we went to sleep at Paragon hostel, that seemed to be full of bleaches too, but luckily was not. Paragon has been in our minds ever since and after India we’ve been more a team than ever.

4. Birthgivings: Birthgiving is a process of creating and crystalizing new knowledge and it’s one of the main learning tools in Tiimiakatemia. We made birthgivings in the end of every session, and to summarize the TOP3 I refer to the ones at Hub Madrid, Shanghai Aalto DF and Mondragon University’s main campus Onãti.

February 2011 in Madrid our birthgiving under the theme of co-creating with customers was sensational! We created a great tool called cook-creation for enhancing the co-creation with customers. We invented an open client-relation barometer too. In the end we made money with this birth giving by asking who sees value in us and wants to invest on #minnteam. More than 20 people out of 40 wanted to! We succeeded as a team and created an innovative & easy tool around relationships & cooking & relationships in no time.

October 2011 in Shanghai we had spent a day with Peter Senge at Taihu Great Learning Center and we gave birth with the question: “Zhong young is MINN, what do we want to accomplish?” The result was a great China-inspired learning session with 60-80 students of Aalto Design Factory @Tongi University. A minner Inigo Blanco has made a great reflective post about the knowledge created in that BG in his blog whitekaos.

December 2011 the birth giving happened with our intrapreneurial project teams that came to work with minners from each participating company: NRG, Init, The Hub Gipuzkoa, Danobat, Gaia, Monkey Business, Eroski, Tiimiakatemia and the question was: Why? Why? Why? – Why I’m doing this? – Why are we doing it / why this team exists? Why this project / company exists? And second question: What are the results this project is going to present by July 2012? All teams were making effort to present these fundamental things for the community of all the 60 MINN-intrapreneurs in Mondragon Tiimiakatemia’s main campus at Onãti. Our MINN team coach Jose Mari cried in the end, so touching it was to see the teams working for the cause that matters: our intrapreneurial projects. Of course his work as a team coach together with Anita had a strong effect on our team development: no team develops as fast as a coached team.

5. Twitter & box & informal meetings, parties and phone calls

#minnteam has been our reference in twitter, and anytime I wanted to see what’s up with our team or when I wanted to announce something for our team I did it there.

The.box has been our tool for sharing for essays & reflection papers. Useful for reading my teammates reflections, but we should blog them more openly. However I thin that the box has to improve in openess, and maybe  for example an open blog would have been a better option for our sharing.

In Madrid we partied together, and in Jyväskylä too. Parties always do good for team spirit!

6. Dialogue: We discovered dialogue really just in India after 9 months of the journey together. Dialogue between us and projects between our fascinating participating companies would take MINNTEAM to totally new level! Now we are on the way there as we have realized this. We had quite good dialogue in Barcelona around the 360 team feedback  session already, but it really demands more practice, with a team like ours 800 hours would take us to good skills, according to the practical study made over 19 years in Tiimiakatemia. In MINN1 we did not really practice freely flowing dialogue more than 36 hours maybe. That we should practice more and also we should spend more time together as a team just talking about whatever where ever.

How these learnings/elements/actions could be applied to the teams of our own intrapreneurship projects?

Now Tatu and Ville from Monkey Business are participating to MINN with about 20 others – MINN is growing!

I think in our company we are implementing a lot of MINN / Tiimiakatemia tools and actions already. It’s natural for us because we are a Tiimiakatemia-born company. We are using dialogue, sharing everything online in our blog & dropbox & twitter & Facebook, and sometimes doing birthgivings too and of course tracking customer visits and sales.

Here’s my opinion on how we do with Monkeys in my 6-point checklist of elements and what we should improve:

1. Videos together – we started this by filming & editing a documentary: Monkeys Year 2011 and Insights About the Future.

2. Team complete – we should search for the skills we are missing and acknowledge the team we are, like Janne did well in his blog post about Monkey Business team for 2012 (post in Finnish here).

3. Learning Journeys – we should do more of Learning Journeys with Monkey Business as participants: Paphos seminar with a very influential Finnish philosopher Esa Saarinen in summer 2012 maybe!

4. Birtgivings: why not doing more of birthgivings with/for our clients and for ourselves?

5. Sharing knowledge in online environments we handle ok in my opinion – we just need to keep exploring new tools and maybe start using Karmacracy too!

6. Dialogue - we are learning this every week 4 hours, we still need to learn to speak more directly and maybe change the setting of this dialogue session now that Monkey has grown from 6 to 8 people and sharing with 8 takes more time than sharing with 6.

Hopefully in 2012 this list will grow and MINN2 will rock and roll for totally new levels! In fact I’m sure about that. Let’s go!

With Yellow regards,

Henna Monkey

One of the evening’s high lights for us was being given the Revolution-award. We didn’t find out or hear what the criteria for this award was, but I guess the name of the prize tells it all! 2012 truly is the year of “DO THE NEVER”!

We want to send out humble `thank you` for all of those who voted us. So here it comes; THANK YOU!

(About voting; today is the election day here in Finland. We vote for new president. I hope that `DO THE NEVER` theme continues throughout the weekend. To the ballot box!)

More action! That is the core of Monkey Business. What is it that challenges us to do and act more? It can be more money for one, for other it is more challenges – some of us could motivate them through competing with others. On 21^st of December, on a very cold and wintery Monday  morning Monkey Business sat down started to think about goals and budget for the year 2012, which I have named as following;

“2012 – The Year of Intrapreneurship”

What is the attitude towards entrepreneurship nowadays? What about trying new things, acting before thinking and planning for ages? Experimenting and then maybe even failing? Finnish society hasn’t been so kind and positive towards these. This is something that I feel that has slowly started to change. (Correct me if you think I am wrong?)  I heard something recently, and it puzzled me;

- In Finland every 42nd person is considering about becoming an entrepreneur

- In rest of the Europe the average is that every 7^th person has at least considered becoming an entrepreneur.

I am not saying that the only route to happiness is to become an entrepreneur – but surely it is an option. I also want to generate discussions around the topic ‘intrepreneurship’. That is what Monkey Business wants to create within organizations. People, who are willing to speak from their hearts, take responsibility and act. Atmosphere, that doesn’t judge failing and mistakes – it’s a pity, that people are afraid to admit their mistakes in organizations. Sharing those would make others to learn from those too! There should be an award in every working space and place named “The Golden Screw Up” – not for encouraging people to fail but for not being afraid making mistakes, either.

I am slowly starting to relax and calm myself towards Christmas – I want to end this year 2011 with the Hit Mr. – theory*, which will be the guideline for us in Monkey Business in the year 2012; (The letters for this theory come from the Finnish words Haasta, Prosessi, Tee, Mallinna, Rohkaise)

• Challenge the process / Haasta prosessi
• Inspiring and shared vision / Inspiroiva (ja jaettu) visio
• Enable others to act / Tee toiminta mahdolliseksi
• Model the way / Mallinna tie
• Encourage the heart / Rohkaise sydäntä

For me the year 2012 will be guided by these five sentences – especially the 3^rd and the 5^th; Enable others to act and Encourage the heart.

I wish a Merry Christmas for you all who are reading the Monkey Business Blog – I hope to meet many of you during the year 2012 face to face. For the fellow Monkeys I just want to say this Let’s keep it yellow!

*Hit Mr. Philosophy’s  main headings have been adapted from Kouzes’ and Posner’s  bestseller book The Leadership Challenge

The picture is licensed with Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike License so feel free to use it when appropriate. For a higher quality version get in touch with Ville.

Maybe some of you have heard of Jim Collins and the Hedgehog concept presented in his book Good to Great? I had, too, but never really used it until few days back. There are three basic questions:

1. What are you excited about?
2. Where are you best in the world?
3. What is profitable for you?

And according to Risto Kuulasmaa, if you can answer these three questions, you can get a glimpse of your mission as an organization. So we thought about the questions and this is what we have now:

Monkey Business mission is to make the world more fun and more yellow. We help companies to innovate and solve problems by making people talk from their hearts.
We are happy if our work results in more:

• Initiative and action – Courage to experiment new things.
• Feeling of responsibility and ownership of the organization
• Reflection about the way things are done.

We master hundreds of tools and theories in the fields of leadership, marketing, creativity, facilitation, team coaching and strategy. We do not follow a strict method but strive to be present and seize the moment in order to see what is appropriate way to proceed. However, there are two corner stones to our work:

1. Dialogue – It’s about the power of thinking and learning together. Becoming and being a community.
2. Experiments – Einstein’s definition of insanity is to do things in the same way but to expect different results. So we need to try out new things.

In other words, our method is simple. How does this sound?

Ps. Thanks Guillaume for the idea of having both positive (innovation) and the problem solving side in our offering.

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// Minnaisa Monkey

In this year at Pipefest I saw Adam Tensta live. (Thanks Anu of ZestMark and all who have done work to build up this phenomenon in Finland.) Adam got a cool set up on stage. Live Drums, DJ, and a guy behind a sampler. So beats were tight! I suppose the beat came from all three sources, and I can tell, the bass kicked nicely.

Adam Tensta got a song titled Monkey. That, quite obviously, caught my attention. What is he singing about? What does it mean – Monkey See. Monkey Do? I think I had heard these words before, but never got to study about the concept before. Wikipedia got a short article about it as well as usingenglish.com – I understand the idea that so that Monkey mimics and copies behavior, even if he doesn’t understand why he does it. Just seeing and doing. A great example of that is the story about the five monkeys experiment. Copying behavior, without asking why, that is.

One reason I got excited about this Monkey See Monkey Do concept is the just passed summer holidays. After the holidays I have asked myself many times this simple question, why?

Why am I doing what I am doing?

What is it that I should be doing? I am in the search of meaning, so that work is not only about seeing and doing. Tatu told me today when we were taking a bus to our Yellow Office that August has been hectic but he has managed to keep his own rhythm still. How about you? How is the Autumn and work looking like?

Alex: After more than 5 years of experience in IDEO, we identified six principles to build environments that create innovation

1. “It’s about how we learn, not about how much we gain financially.” Not to do but to learn. The return should be learning, not economic performance.

It is important to know what you want to do, but it is also very important to know where you are good. When you find something that combines these two aspects you have found something precious. Something you could build your business on. Monkey Business is good at creating an interaction environment, teamwork and entre /intrapreneurship.

When we started the business I had a clue what we want to do: to make world more yellow and fun. Help organisations and individuals to find meaning for their work. The second question: Where we are good was not that simple. It took two years and hundreds of meetings and projects to have some clarity to this matter. When I look these three main things, it is obvious that those are our core competences, but it was really hard for me to understand that.

Core competences make our life easier

When we are planning a coaching session or process we know what we can do by ourselves and where we need to use external professionals. If we don’t know about the issue, we should ‘t try to be experts on that field. It is really good for your self-confidence when you can say:

“I don’t know anything about that”.

It makes it possible to concentrate where you are best.