Posts tagged SoL
Mexican Exemplar Meeting Harvest: Poem
Mar 26th
Recently I have come across people who express themselves through poems and poetry. First in the Art of Hosting training in Karlskrona and then now in the Exemplar meeting in Mexico. That’s something I have hardly experienced at all in the past few years. So I feel lucky this new art form is starting to enter my life. Here’s a poem written by Manish Srivastava of Presencing Institute but as he puts it: Its ‘our’ poem as we (all the exemplars) inspired it. So here we go! Manish is the young gentleman with red T-shirt on the right hand side of myself, Ville.
Between,
Those heartfelt laughter,
Breath-giving winds and chirping birds,
Moist soil and tamarind seeds,
Between,
The rocks that spoke,
The wells that nurtured,
The depths that connected,
The pyramids that centered,
The communities that flourished…
In midst of,
This rich flow of life,
Streams of timeless energy,
And our inspiring stories…
I am falling in love…
With a new possibility,
A new community
A new depth,
A new horizon…
Oh here I am,
A moment when it all becomes one,
The living and the emerging,
Across our hearts, lives and work…
The new is emerging…
I am so full of life… full of hope!
And here are many pictures by Sue Sweitzer from the Sustainable Food Lab.
Festivals in the Workplace – Presentation by Roosevelt Finlayson at SoL Finland Meeting
Apr 4th
Couple weeks ago I had a chance to listen a presentation by Roosevelt Finlayson. He’s a man from Bahamas and he has done 12 years of inquiry about the connection and similarity between a workplace and festivals of Caribbean e.g. Carnivals. He started to wonder why people give everything for organizing their shows for the carnivals but do not do the same in their work places.
I got to know Roosevelt a little bit when we met in the SoL Global Forum in Muscat, Oman in April 2008. And now when I heard he will give a presentation at SoL Finland’s members meeting I had to go there because I am quite interested in his work for couple of reasons.
Firstly, I was in carnival in Rio last year during my trip around the world. See the picture above. That was a great experience, thank you Paulo for hosting me and Tapio there. Secondly, I think Team Academy is using festivals quite a bit in it’s processes. Third reason is the Esa Saarinen’s fantastic James Bond philosophy. In that the 5th point is following the real meaning of things is revealed in Bahamas. So one day I want to go to Bahamas and understand the real meaning of things.
What Roosevelt told about people who participate organizing festival reminded me of what Pekka Himanen talk about people writing code in his book the Hacker Ethic. In both cases, people are enthusiastic about what they do, are willing to work long hours, they want to do their best and get even better, they feel that they are appreciated and part of something bigger than themselves could achieve alone. The challenge is to bring this into practice. How can we build workplaces where people are like coders at their best or people working for the festival?
In the meeting there was also talk about power of images in building the vision and the power of self-organizing. He mentioned open space as a starting point for a new way of organizing.
This is a question that has no simple answer. (Maybe?) But for this complex issue of building organization Roosevelt brings the ideas of Festivals. He encourages people to organize festivals in their workplaces also literally. They offer people chance to take responsibility and thrive in a position other than their usual one. They are also good for bringing up the spirit of the organization, networking both internally and externally and celebrating success and learning. Like Kouzes and Posner say in their book The Leadership Challenge: Encourage the Heart! Is there a better way to bring up the spirit than celebrating together?
In Team Academy, where I used to learn on a daily basis, there are many festivals. Some are internal and some are open festivals for the whole network including customers and partners. When new penguins (first year teampreneurs) join the Team Academy in August there is a so called baptism party for them. After that they are officially part of Team Academy. That’s usually on the first week when they arrive. About after a month in early october there are the first ones of the bi-annual rocket days. The Rocket Days is a two-day event where whole Team Academy participates. This is the real carnival. All the teams are dressed according to a theme. For example once the general theme of the rocket days was the middle age and thus one team was dressed as farmers, the other one as monks, third one as nobel folks, some as slaves etc. So teams are clearly distinguished from each other. The other Rocket Days are held in March.
The biggest festival of Team Academy is the anniversary held around the 19th of January. The biggest party so far was the 15th anniversary which was also the day when Team Academy reached it’s vision to be the top unit of entrepreneurship in Finland. We had about 300 people in a seminar on Friday and 500 people celebrating in a gala on Saturday night. That was a nice party. Monkey Business (Ville and Tatu) were the MC’s of the seminar and Tatu even continued to host the gala. That was probably also the most international of our festivals as it had Ignition participants there as well as people from the first Team Mastery who actually did their final birth giving at the seminar and people from a Learning Expedition. All that was a good fun.
What are the festivals of your organization? Or your tribe and network?
Ps. Yesterday we were working at Aivomyrsky. It was loads of fun. Good action. I’ll post about that soon. It was a one kind of festival for young people interested in Entrepreneurship. Written by Monkey Ville
Ps2. Pictures and post in Finnish about the above mentioned Rocket Days at LeTim’s blog. Highly recommended!
Stories from SoL Oman GF part 1
Apr 22nd
As you may or may not have realized the fact that Monkey Business was in SoL Global Forum in Oman with 5 persons crew has inspired and affected my thinking quite a lot recently. I thought I could start writing stories behind the scenes meaning I will tell you what really happened over there. Here’s the first one that brought smile on my face again this morning as I woke up.We had a spot on the Learning Souq which in practise meant that we had a small spot where we could present our work and talk with other forum participants.
So we did take contact with people on the souq, usually chatting with them, telling a little bit about us and also asking what are they doing. Tatu had a special style of asking their level of interest and delivering material according to that. First he gave everyone Team Academy‘s Leading Thoughts and asked if the person was really interested. If the person was he/she would get also Team academy book. Another way was to tell them to read the Leading Thoughts in the evening and come back next day for the book if they were still interested.
So what happened was that we heard a good story from one person (I don’t know actually who this was, supposedly someone from Sweden). He had been reading the book in his hotel room in the evening, and he had gotten until specific point which I cannot remember right now when his roommate came into the room. Immediately as the newcomer saw the book he had said: “Hey, you’ve got the book!” and ran towards the bed and practically stole the book from the owner. And after that, the book owner didn’t get to read it anymore at that night because his roommate wanted to read it.
You can order the book from me (ville@banana.fi) for the price of 25€ including the postage fees if you don’t have a copy yet. And if you realize you’re part of this story please let me know, too.





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