Ville Keränen: From Team Academy to the future: Building organizations for humans [EN]

1- Who am I? Ville Keranen, Geek, Learning Designer, Team Entrepreneur at Lifestyle company Monkey Business (spin off from Team Academy), Team Academy Alumni, Team Mastery Coach

2- Human Touch. Tender and Dynamic greetings. Say hello to your neighbour in a appreciative, encouraging and inspiring way. It makes a difference the way we greet each other when we come to our workplace. No matter how much technology, I believe, we still need the human touch. This is benchmarked from Finnish Philosopher Esa Saarinen. 1 minute buzz will take place and the room will be filled with energy.

3- Why do we need new kinds of organizations? (Think about that: If you had to provide 1-2 sentences on that in your outline, what would they be?)

Fun at work. Meaningful work. Better life. More human workplaces. What are those? How to build them?
Better dialogue = better decision making = better business.

Using your strengths - Tom Peters: "I would have done some real cool stuff but my boss didn't allow me." Potentially the text in many guys' gravestones in today's organization.

4- Team Academy :

The School I went to - although you are not supposed to call it a school but Academy

Basic facts: Founded in 1993 by Johannes Partanen; started with a note - Do you want to travelaround the world and learn some marketing aside? BBA Degree, about 200 people in Finland and 200 abroad, real business - Team Companies turnover approximately 1 500 000 million euros

Really different - No lectures; no teaching; no exams; no grades, no simulations
Instead: Team company, real clients and projects, loads of dialogue, team coach, & 120 book points that is approximately 60 books

Network of Team Academies and partners: Jyvaskyla 93, Tampere 00, Turku 11, Debretzen 10, Budabest 11, Angers 10, Strasbourg 11, Haarlem 07, BILBAO 08, Mondragon 10, Sao Paulo etc. in Brazil 2012, Team Mastery program to train coaches and managers to run the Team Academies.

Three learning Principles of TA:

• Learners construct their meanings themselves (constructivism)
• Learning is situational and contextual
• Learning is social and done in a community.

5 - Personal Story

Leadership Challenge with Ignition;

1. Everything fails because of leadeship
2. If you can't lead yourself, you won't be able to lead others
3. Leadership fails because of bad communication

I was kicked out from the project management position because of lack of communication. I travelled to Canada but forgot to tell the stakeholders (coaches, project team etc). Leading myself is still very difficult for me, but when I call back to my projects at TA I can see how I have developed. The communication is the key.

6- Friend Leadership and Team Entrepreneurship

How do you lead collegues? How do you work with people? Monkey Business, 7 equal partners in the business. Weekly monday 4 hour dialogues. Many people don't like monday mornings and they say Monday mornings are for monkeys - we think the same. It's team learning. Sharing the income equally. Aim is to work smart, not a lot. Slow life? good life. Sustainable life. Organization is agreement between people. E.g. people with children work 4 days a week. The idea of entrepreneurship is to make a difference and have fun doing it. Fun comes from working together and also taking new challenges. Succeeding in them and completing projects.

7- What about the practice?

Researchers say it seems to work in practice but how about theory?

Entrepreneurs say it seems to work in theory how about the practice?

4th question of the evaluation is - What will I do next? What will I put into action? How about the real life?
Our task is to make people talk - My friend Shinsaku says many problems arise from the lack of communication. I think communication, dialogue includes emotions. It's ok to make mistakes. Without mistakes there is no development. If ze can share them, and we feel still accepted, the feeling is great. I think in the end it comes back to very basic human need. The need to feel accepted as we are. The need to feel loved. Pekka Himanen says courage comes from enriching community. Janne my fellow monkey says Courage comes from loving community.

Is it easy? not always. We are the intervention into the system. Because we are present people should be able to talk more and about things that are not discussed otherwise. When we go and intervene with company with 25 men that are not used to talking, and in every other situation too, we start with simple things.
I will work more on this section - I will finish with a question

8- More information - Few links to find out more

Reflections article: http://www.eclo.org/pages/uploads/File/ECLO%20Publications/Creating%20th...

MB blog - www.banana.fi

Thesis of Friendleadership by Johannes http://partus.fi/sites/default/files/materiaalipankki/Partus_Principles_...

Takeaways:

• Understand why and how current organizations need to change
• More human centric
• Understand how it could happen
• What's my first step to take?
• Understand that this is more than consultant hype