Pictures
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
Pictures from Illikka aka Eräelämys
Jun 23rd
The summer is here in Finland and some of the monkeys are already having their holidays. I wanted to do a little post with a link to a photo gallery about this wonderful place that we have been using for some coaching and also for own retreats. It’s called Saimaan Eräelämys and I find it amazing. Every time I go there my mind starts to relax and I feel good. We did organize the second part of the Penquin Expedition 2008 there last August. This year the place is booked around the time of the Penquins arrival so I think we will offer you a possibility to do a something like the Jaworski’s solo experience explained in his book Synchronicity right after the Team Mastery Arena event on Saturday the 19th of September.
Here are the pictures of Illikka behind this link (requires flash player).
Monkey Business in Equador Part 1
May 20th
Henna from Monkey Business with a teamentrepreneur from Takomo (?) Valtteri Melkko are right now working in Equador in the Village of Salinas. Here are the first greetings from them from the May 14th:
Ecuadorians are entrepreneurial by nature, and in Salinas they have done nationally appreciated great work in forming co-operatives to help local farmers to export their goods to the local and international markets. Salinas is a very beautiful, mountainish (altitude 3500 meters) village of just 1200 people, but around it there are 10 000 people living in the area. Those who don´t live in the village are extremely poor, just survive but need support to live fine.
Organizations that we work with in Salinas are taking this situation into account by trying to offer education, access to the knowledge and microloans for the local families to grow out of the poverty.
This is why Salinas School of Entrepreneurship was formed here in June 2008 with the help of Finnish coaches and Finnish Ministry of Foreign affairs. In Salinas people have skills as people in Finland do. We can only offer encouragement and knowledge about how to transform skills and will into action and results. This is what we are doing here now with Valtteri from Team Academy and Timo from Finland and from the founding team of Salinas School of Entrepreneurship.
Our goal here is to try to create a sustainable basis for the project since it is so new. In order to do this, we will establish a facilitator team to work on the project and coach this team. This team will then hopefully be able to secure the diverse content of the project as well as the continuity here.
A lot of work is to be done in here still, and the main improvement to do would be improving the education. For example people in normal school in Salinas have studied English for 3-4 years, and when you ask them “How are you?”, they can answer just “¿Que?”, “What?”. Education styles are like they were in Finland 50 years or more ago, based on learning by heart and listening to the teacher giving the knowledge. Team work, interactive learning and own responsibility for learning are very new things in here. What a great field to work – we´re ignited!
After travelling for about 84 hours from Finland through London, New York, Miami and Panama city, sleeping a bit here and there, also spending an evening in New York, we finally arrived to Salinas on Wednesday evening.
Our first impression about Salinas School of entrepreneurship was: what a marvellous work they have done already! On the first night we were welcomed by the whole team of 30 learners and 4 coaches and organizators. They had prepared a program for the night for us to get to know what is going on with the school. I (Henna) also had to speak Spanish for the whole group right away, and it was okay despite the mistakes make all the time. Valtteri and Timo are fluent in Spanish already, and as a team we can manage.
Pictures from Team Mastery
Mar 17th
A New Learning Expedition starts tonight as our guests arrive to Jyväskylä. Tomorrow morning a Check-in (Everybody gets to speak, say their name, little background, feelings and why they are here) and on we go. This time we will have a group around 6-7 people but with loads of interaction with Teampreneurs of Team Academy. I am excited. We’ll update Twitter and hopefully blog too during the Expedition so even if not you are in Jyväskylä you can follow and maybe even participate in some way or another.
I also finished the Team Mastery report I was working on earlier and for that I went through my pictures of the previous session in Haarlem. I should post more about it at some point but let us get started with pictures. I like blogs with pictures and try to be the change in the world by posting some on my own.
Hanna, Patrick and Pauline
Manu and a local Teampreneur
Team Mastery in Strasbourg Photos
Feb 9th
First of all, sorry for the silence with the blog. Many of the Monkeys are travelling and I am working on figuring out the way in the jungle. Good news are that I’ve updated the system behind our blog which means I can add new plugins and staff. And what this means that I am experimenting with photos. Here’s the first post with a new kind of gallery. Check out the photos from the second last session Team Mastery 2 held in Strasbourg. I already wrote about the anniversary of TA Alsace.
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