Mentoring at Vision Factory is collaborative work with the key aim of promoting learning, skills, growth and insights. Mentoring is an interactive process where everyone learns and it is an excellent support for training, coaching and development projects, fostering individual and team learning. Mentoring is often a journey shared by both parties.
Sparring at Vision Factory provides support for thinking and action, such as spending an hour exchanging thoughts with another expert. Sparring is a short-term arrangement, for instance, a team can reserve a couple of hours with an expert to bounce ideas and exchange thoughts in their development process. Sparring typically involves the team presenting ideas, thoughts, and questions, which the coach then gently challenges, inquires about, and guides the team in their thinking and decision-making.
Mentoring and sparring have become important parts of our development projects with clients.
So what is a good time to incorporate mentoring or sparring into a development project or training? It’s when we want to strengthen and ensure the learning and progress of teams or individuals, or when teams have their own projects to develop and, in addition to shared educational events, want to ensure team-specific progress.
Often in training and sparring, we get inspired and gain more knowledge, but things become tangible when you start implementing them. And that’s where support is needed.
says Outi Kinnunen
Mentoring helps advance long-term projects, while sparring can help solve a specific challenge or support decision-making.
How can you or your organisation acquire sparring or mentoring?
Mentoring is often a part of training, sparring, or development project. On this page, you can find an example of mentoring for the teams in Ecosystem School 1.0, which you can explore and ask us more about.
You can purchase sparring sessions for yourself from Vision Factory’s store. You can book 1.5 hours of sparring at a time with different experts. You can choose the content theme yourself, such as service development, co-creation, service design, innovation, workshop planning and facilitation, or gamification.
Ecosystem School 1.0
In 2022, in collaboration with Työ 2.0 LAB and the Ministry of Finance, we carried out Ecosystem School 1.0, aimed at developing cross-organisational phenomena. The goal of Ecosystem School was to provide participants with the readiness, skills, and tools to enhance ecosystem activities. A total of 11 teams representing public sector organisations or actors at their interfaces participated in Ecosystem School.
As part of the Ecosystem School journey, we provided mentoring for all ecosystem teams.
Each team received five group mentoring sessions from an expert, with the purpose of supporting ecosystem development and future planning specifically for that team. The mentoring sessions aimed to create a confidential and open atmosphere where the team’s issues were genuinely addressed and developed. While the stages and tasks of Ecosystem School set the main objectives for the mentoring sessions, there was also room for individual progression and growth within the groups. Outi Kinnunen served as the mentor for Ecosystem School 1.0.
Feedback on Ecosystem School 1.0 Mentoring (September 2022):
The mentoring had a clear place, especially feeling that the mentor carefully listened to what kind of mentoring the group needed and was able to provide advice and alternative ways of thinking, as well as acting as a mental mirror and challenge.
Good sparring with a suitable firm hand.
The mentoring was fantastic because we had the opportunity to discuss our ecosystem matters with an expert.
The tailored support was invaluable; we received answers specifically tailored to our challenges.
For more information about mentoring and sparring, you can contact Outi by calling or sending her a message.