Let people write on the toilet walls.

1. Pay attention to coffee room and kitchen of the office. Get rid of automatic coffee machines, get some real good coffee and encourage people to spend time drinking good coffee. This may sound crazy, but I believe we are more effective drinking coffee than on our computers by ourselves.

2. Use toilets’ walls creatively as a notice and pin boards with various internal advertisements about on going projects, strategy etc. Use cartoons, illustrations and other easy to understand elements.

3. Organize “No Agenda” dialogue meetings every second week. These are voluntary and could last about 3-4 hrs each, start with a check-in and finish with some kind of check out. Learning dialogue takes time, but if you keep doing this for 3 months I guarantee surprising results.

4. Organize a monthly seminar for the whole unit. This is compulsory for everyone in the organization and should last no more than 2 hours.  Program could include music, theater and other more entertaining elements mixed together with presentations about important issues eg. projects and focus points for the next month. Program should be co-created with participants, and you may want to promote tools for creativity such as pecha kucha.

5. Twice a year you could take your people out. Whether it’s just before holidays like we do it, or in the middle of the season, provide everyone opportunity to join this informal gathering. Maybe rent a cabin, or a rural hotel, organize a little seminar to justify the participation, but the main thing really is party together with your colleagues. These are moments where people can cross-pollinate ideas intensively and have fun.

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!)

It’s made of 11 modules in the following 12 / 18 months. I copy the modules below so you can see where we are as it would be lovely to meet you next year.

1. January 16th to 21st [2012] – Team learning (Finland).

2. February 23rd to 25th [2012] – Learning and Co-creation with the client (Madrid).

3. March 26th to April 3rd [2012] – The art of Pitching and Design Thinking (California).

4. May 3rd to 5th [2012] – Self management and leadership (Zaragoza).

5. June 4th to 9th [2012] – Pitching, intrapreneurship proceses and learning tools (MTA + Mondragon Coop).

6. July 5th to 7th [2012] – Open Innovation and Team Evaluation (Amsterdam).

7. September 6th to 8th [2012] – Blue Ocean Strategy for Team-Intrapreneurship projects (Barcelona).

8. November 11th to 18th [2012] – Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid and global challenges (China).

9. November 18th to 24th [2012] – Sustainability as a trigger to innovation (India).

10. December 13th to 15th [2012] – Wrap-up and future (Irun / Bilbao).

11. January 17th to 19th [2013] – Check out (Finland).

12. June (to be specified) [2013] – Scored goals (Berlin).

We are super excited because the original ideas for Monkey Business where born when me and Tatu participated together in a learning process called Team Mastery about five years ago. I think this coming year the Monkey Business will be taken to a whole new level.

I will write a short pre-post before every session and another one after in a more de-briefing mode. We want to leverage our insights and ideas to our friends in our network. So let’s be in touch!

Have a great new year everyone with enough things to do and many good adventures! Br, Ville

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.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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?

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