Posts tagged Mental Models
Keynote Cancelled? Call us!
Jun 6th
Not long ago Hugo was doing his morning duties at his bathroom when his cell phone rang. It was somewhere around 8 am. He thought: “Nhh. It’s too early. I’ll call them back later.” And he didn’t pick up the call that came from unknown number. The same person tried to reach Tatu but apparently was so anxious that even if Tatu wanted to answer he wasn’t fast enough. If Hugo had picked up, we would have been offered a chance to jump on a stage as a keynote in biggest Youth Entrepreneurship event in Finland, Aivomyrsky, within 2 hours.
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
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.
Mental Models Game
Oct 22nd
Hi All!
Sorry for the silence of the blog. Let’s see if we can pump some life in here. I want to share with you about a game, a mental models game. We have been using it quite a bit lately, and want to play more in the future because it seems to work rather well.
The game is based on the Peter Senge’s discipline Mental Models from the book Fifth Disciple. It was back in 2006 when we had a creative intelligence and flexibiblity session coached by LeTim where we came up with the game. Homework for the session held in Pukkila was to read the part from Fifth Discipline about Mental Models. On the session we visited Kiasma and Heureka, where happened to be a game exhibition. I think it was because of those visits in the birth giving we came up with the game about mental models. The world of innovation is indeed interesting. In that session there were many great people such as Erkki, Teppo, Olli-Matti, Virpi along with to-be-monkeys myself, Henna and Hanne. There were others as well but I am sorry cannot recall everyone.
What’s the game like? You can play it from three to hundreds of players, I guess, but the basic unit to play with is usually between 10-20 people. That’s a good size to practice dialogue. What’s the goal? To gain understanding about existing mental models we hold, and maybe question or enrich some of them. The main point is to become aware of them by talking about them.
I think the mental model game works because it’s really a game. It has a serious content but not so serious approach. There are time limits for dialogues, there is unpredictability, there are surprises in the game and there’s an end. The game is a platform, I think, and people really get to participate.
We have found the game successfully taking dialogue into meaningful levels very soon, and thus it creates value even in short workshops (e.g. 2 hours). Usually the impact with such a short workshop is not so big, but I think the mental models game can really give participants food for thought.
I will travel to Central Europe twice in November first to Strasbourg and Brussels between 3rd-10th of Nov. And then to Basque Country, Spain from the 22nd – 29th or so. It would be great to play the game with you, so if interested, let me know and let’s fix a time and place!
Keep it yellow! Ville
Ps. About the future of the game. I forgot to mention that you can use it with any theme. E.G. we can use it to talk about our mental models related to social media, experience economy, leadership, team learning etc. In future we want to build a place online where you can download new sets of questions for example from Jarkko Könönen, Esa Saarinen or Peter Senge and so on.
Brazil update: Mental Models and workshops that are not workshops
Jun 23rd
One week of coaching in Brazil is now behind, and it’s time to reflect a bit the process. First 2 days were like flying – digging deep in TA tools and methods, that were totally new for our brazilian teams. Of course there was enthusiasm, and also some zombies were created and killed…and a lot of dialogue was gone through, especially about the Leading Thoughts, and later in the workshops about Learning Thoughts as well. One of the most challenging and inviting actions was to fill in an empty Rocket Model plan. What’s needed to build up entrepreneurs? Which processes are the most complex and therefore the 4th year stuff – and what you have to take care of in the beginning? Those were the key questions for overcoming this challenge.
Well, to describe the process in here a little more concretely: we made a plan of 8 workshops (4 hours each), during the first days with all 30 people participating the TA experience. Plan is based on the themes this group found the most interesting in TA model and this is how it looks like: 1. Innovation / Knowledge Management 2. Learning / Learning Tools 3. Leadership 4. How to implememt TA model 5. Individual Learning 6. Leading Thoughts 7. Dialogue 8. Community Learning (Torture days).
We are now half-way of the workshop-process, and it has been getting better and better all the time. I think the reason is both that we are developing as a coach-team, and also that the participants are able to constract understanding about TA and coaching style of TA. Our workshops are dialogue workshops, not any magic tricks or constructing some tools or guidebooks. We try to talk about the things that matter and follow the results, that’s it.
Some insights along the way are worth of sharing, for getting a picture about the environment, habits and culture of doing in here. For example: ”I’m used to deliver education in a way that I send the ready material for the participants to read before the sessions, and they get everything served in a training session. And I’m asking them to be protagonists… So, should I maybe them some questions about the topic instead?”
”Challenge for protagonism is more the culture, we have a command & control systems that makes it impossible to develop protagonism.” For Team Academy protagonism is so deep in the culture that it automatically is the way to behave for each of us. Leadership and protagonism are like our clothes or like our shoes, we just wear them every day and feel good using them…we don’t see any big thing in being proactive. But that’s not the case in an organization filled with normal Uni. Alumnis who didn’t have to lead themselves so much before the Masters thesis and the working life. It’s new for the existing culture in here to ask for portagonism.
In my opinion, SENAC would have good possibilities to implement TA coaching in the organization because the mood of SENAC’s people is so straight forward. One comment describes well their ”Make an initiative, don’t wait for instructors. –attitude. ”I love education, that’s why I like my work in SENAC, and I like to do initiatives. Our boss is not saying yes to all of them at first, but still we start to do what we think is good, and when he finds out what we have done he normally likes it.” Yes, TA woudl fit well in the brazilian impulsive workstyle. Here we have a lot of action-orientation!
May the story continue after more workshops and more insights.
Mental Models Game Workshop – Mielenmallipeli
May 14th
We did experimental two hour workshop at Hope-Myrsky this Tuesday. Tatu was the MC (and did excellent job!) in the two day event, and me and Johanna were the Monkey Business workshop facilitators. Hanne read the story about mice and cheese and change inspired by Spencer Johnson’s book “Who Moved My Cheese?”.
Mielenmallit Hope Myrsky 12.5.09
View more presentations from Ville Keranen.
Above are the slides, and they can be also downloaded from here as a pdf. Most of the theory is from Peter Senge’s book Fifth Discipline. Slides are mostly in Finnish, I had prepared them three years ago when the game was invented. The theory part didn’t go so well, it was teaching not coaching. I talked and others listened. Not so good. Tatu gave me a good advice, as he was observing our workshop from the back of the room: “How about asking people what are Mental Models, and then just adding something by yourself if needed?” Yes, this is what we shall do next time, but before that we have to make more mistakes in order to learn more.
Just before my theory we had done good action by re-organizing the space together: “Let’s take the tables away!” and did Bar-Camp inspired three word introduction, although people were going around and meeting others and just saying their names and tree words. So not necessarily everybody met everyone else, but there was again good action and talking and meeting new people.
We got plenty of new questions, and they will be available for you with a creative commons license as soon as we get them on to digital form. Also we are working on making the whole game to be available with some kind of open license for you to use as well.
Pictures featured in this article are courtesy of the HOPE project PR Lady Jenni Ahlstedt. Thanks a lot and nice to meet you! Yellow regards, Ville
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