By Carla Filannino, Community Coach LEINN & Content Editor on TeamLabs/
MTA turns 15 years old. We are part of this international community and we celebrated the anniversary together at MTA Oñati Lab, sharing learnings, experiences and creating our new leading thoughts.
Few months ago, I had the honor to meet Heikki Toivanen – Tiimiakatemia Global CEO – and I was impressed with his question: “Do you have a dream?” He asked to me and to the group of LEINNers and colleagues while we were attending the meeting: “What is your dream?”
He told us about the importance of having a dream in our lifelong learning path.
A dream: a huge purpose in our life.
It is difficult to understand what is the purpose that moves our lives and we have to be very brave to decide to make our dream come true.
But with a team it is easier.
I want to start this article about MTA Anniversary with this memory because I think that also the MTA story starts with a dream and with a team. Indeed, the MTA story – our story – started from Finland, from Tiimiakatemia.
BUT. First of all, what is MTA?
It is a dream, of course. But it is also a reality, an international network composed by more than 2500 team entrepreneurs who work with the same purpose: creating a global network of social innovation ecosystem labs, around the World.
At MTA Irun lab, I saw a photo of 4 guys and a sunrise: Jose Mari, Aitor, Sain and Sari. I thought the MTA dream (and story) started there. They are the team that made this dream come true and now? Now we are more than 2500 people.
A photo, a dream and a team. 15 years, dreaming and learning.
So, from a dream of 4 was born a worldwide project. Sounds amazing?
And now? What do we want to do?
This project is 15 years old and all the community (indeed, 2500 team entrepreneurs) are involved in a huge celebration.
We started to celebrate at one of our MTA Labs, in Oñati (Basque Country).
The 8th of June of 2023 was the first date of our celebration.
Of course, it was a party but in our style: learning + fun = satisfaction.
Authentic and realistic leading thoughts
So, we use this day to start thinking about our future and what will be the leading thoughts for the next years.
We believe in people, we can do extraordinary things in a team and leading thoughts are our guide: principals that help us as a community.
Our challenge for this anniversary is to understand what we want to create for the future and for this reason we created new leading thoughts.
We created these new line guides with our most powerful tool: dialogue. We took a session with people from different Labds: LEINNers, team coaches, entrepreneurs, and members of the community.
Teaminners (team coaches that are learning at Teaminn) and We4Allers (participants in MTA We4All programme) led this process and this are the results, our new leading thoughts.
- Clarity in values: give safe spaces to people
- Create our own castle: with our clear and shared red lines
- Take ownership: we are a network, we are one
- If we really want to, we will make it happen!
- Celebrate wins. Together.
- Create new forums to approach the social challenge
We create these new paths with illusion, intensity, inspiration, sharing, motivation, reflection and connection.
We started a rebirth and we want to continue learning and dreaming for more and more years.
As we said in MTA (and in LEINN, indeed): trust the process.
I would like to add: trust the excellence of the process.
Because if we put together our passions, our dreams, our teams and our purpose we can only create an excellent learning process. And we started to do this in Oñati but this is just the beginning.
Next step? Next academic year in MTA Barcelona Lab!
Do you want to join our community? Do you want to join our challenges?
You are welcome to our MTA community around the World!
