My Meaning 2015 round-up
by Jenni Lloyd, 2015 curator & creative director
Today is Monday, the start of a new week. I’ve had the weekend to reflect on and review the fourth edition of the Meaning conference (Friday was spent nursing a hangover not only from celebratory Prosecco but from the curious come down felt after a year’s worth of planning was expressed in a single day. Louise calls it the Meaning Boxing Day).
This conference was a very special one. It was the first we’d run outside the auspices of NixonMcInnes. We didn’t know what difference it would make or if participants would notice, but it was a very big deal for me in particular. Having had the original idea way back in 2011 I’ve always worked on it in the background. But this year it was my job to curate the speaker list, to work with Louise to design the day and to play host on stage. It felt like an enormous responsibility and looking back there are a million things I’d like to have done differently.
Meaning came about because I want to change the world. And I was part of a company of people who want to change the world too. It was born out of a belief that business can and should play a major part in creating a better future for our communities and for society as a whole. We knew that we weren’t alone in thinking this, so we wanted a way of bringing people together to explore the role that business has to play in bringing about the kind of future we want.
The future is just a story — it hasn’t happened yet, so there’s no way of knowing what it will be like. But energy follows attention so however we think the future will be is probably the direction we’ll travel in.
So Meaning is a place where we can tell new stories about business, stories that move us towards a different kind of future. Each of the speakers invited on to the Meaning stage had a story to tell that does just that.
Jos de Blok of Buurtzorg
Buurtzorg first came to my attention through Frederic Laloux’s book Reinventing Organisations. This book expresses really clearly how a new form of organisation is emerging, one fit for the 21st Century. Buurtzorg exemplifies this new kind of org and Jos showed us how their self-managing teams of digitally connected nurses are revolutionising social care in the Netherlands.
His humorous, assured talk questioned all the familiar activities of business — strategy, HR, management.
And demonstrated how trust — in your people and your own knowledge of what needs to be done — leads to better outcomes for your people, for your customers and for your financial performance.
Now all we need to do is Buurtzorg-ise the NHS!
Miriam Turner of Interface
Miriam leads the global Co-Innovation Team at Interface, a billion-dollar carpet manufacturing company. In 1994 Interface founder Ray Anderson had an epiphany which caused him to shift the focus of the company to embrace sustainability and:
“Be the first company that, by its deeds, shows the entire world what sustainability is in all its dimensions: people, process, product, place and profits — and in doing so, become restorative through the power of influence”
Miriam shared with us how this challenge to the company lead her to ask herself ‘how can a carpet tile company solve global poverty’ and how that eventually became the Net-Works initiative. An amazing story of inter-organisation cooperation that’s resulted in a community-based supply-chain for collecting discarded fishing nets in rural coastal areas in the central Philippines.
Miriam candidly shared what she learned from the project and detailed the unexpected consequences — which included the development of a community banking operation among previously unbanked communities. Not bad for a carpet tile company.
What’s stuck in my head from this story is the power of the big question — and an environment that lets you ask it. Miriam knew the change she wanted to see in the world and treated carpet manufacturing as a resource to help her make the change. Inspirational.
Jackie Lynton of the NHS Horizons Team
Jackie joined us from a night spent in the local A&E so her presence was a bit of miracle. As was her ability to string two words together, let alone share how her team has built a massive grass-roots movement for change inside the world’s fifth largest employer.
In such a huge organisation, under financial pressure and prey to ongoing ‘transformations’ Jackie told us how easy it is for employees to check-out. Even though no-one becomes a nurse or doctor to do bad things it’s possible to become disconnected from the ability to the right thing because of bureaucratic structures and processes. So what’s needed is not another top-down change initiative but instead a switch in the power relationship to give those working on the front-line permission to make whatever changes they can.
By activating “the mavericks, heretics and radicals” to do something because they want to, not because they have to #NHSChangeDay has created a tidal wave of actions — some as small as pledging to smile more.
The initiative has since become a global phenomenon, spreading to health services around the world.
Power Panel
After a well deserved break we went into a panel discussion, something we’ve never tried before at Meaning. Hosted by entrepreneur Tom Nixon, our group of guests debated the question ‘Where does power belong in the organisation of the future?”
We’re really grateful to Jack Hubbard of Propellernet, employee ownership specialist Carole Leslie, NextJump MD Kevin McCoy (who stood in at the last minute for colleague Tarun Gidoomal) and community ownership obsessive Dave Boyle for the feisty discussion.
Panellist Dave Boyle shared his starting position with us before the conference and Jack Hubbard has since written up his views on the topic, as has Carole Leslie.
It was such a meaty topic I think we could definitely have spent longer exploring it, so these blog posts are a really great way of getting a deeper understanding of each point of view.
Jack’s talk from Happy Startup Summercamp is worth a watch too.
Annette Mees, Creative Fellow at Wired & The Space
Annette is an immersive theatre practitioner — meaning she designs theatre experiences in which the live audience has a role to play. She explains in her Wired profile interview:
“They’re there — what can you do with that? Whatever I make as a maker changes depending on who’s there and what’s there. It means I’m a part of a process as much as the audience is part of the process and together we get to surprise each other and delight each other and challenge each other.”
She believes in the future as a public space in which we can all participate. Currently the story of the future tends to be handed to us by policy-makers, brands and the media. Through fun, participative experiences Annette intends to open that up so that we all have a part to play in designing the future we want.
In her talk she introduced her latest project ‘The Almanac of the Future’ in which she will create a think tank on each continent which pairs 15 year olds with 65 year olds to write their story of the future.
Marcus Coates, performance and video artist
Marcus was perhaps a leftfield choice for a business conference but I came across his book ‘A Practical Guide to Unconscious Reasoning’ at an exhibition of his video piece Dawn Chorus at Fabrica. I spent over an hour engrossed in the book and knew that I wanted him at Meaning.
My belief is that the scale of the challenges we face in the world, in society, in business require us to access the full spectrum of our human capabilities. But we’ve created social and business norms than constrain us to use only a limited range of that spectrum. Marcus’ work challenges us to reconnect with the outer ranges of ourselves — overcoming the risk of appearing foolish, or different in order to access our untapped reserves of creativity.
As an added bonus I think we can all learn from the artistic process of exploration with no fixed outcome — as described by Marcus in relating how he created Dawn Chorus:
Lunch!
Food is a big deal at Meaning. We believe that eating together is the best way to connect as a community.
Speaker-lead sessions
We know that a 25 minute talk often leaves people wanting more access to a speaker, and more opportunity for discussion about their work and ideas. So this year we asked each speaker if they would lead an hour long session to do just that.
Julia Rebholz of Centrica
We’ve never had a representative from an old-school, reputationally-challenged corporate on the Meaning stage before and it felt quite risky to ask Julia to join us.
I met her through her work for Blueprint for Better Business where she has just taken on the role of Practitioner in Residence, on secondment from her main roles at Centrica and as MD of Ignite.
She told us how she reached a point of realisation that the North American company had an unsustainable business model — the cost of energy was going up, consumer pricing was fixed at a lower level and the relationship between company and consumers was characterised by a total lack of trust. From this point on she has followed a personal journey to understand her own purpose and explore how our beliefs affect our behaviour. This has helped her to help her organisation to reconnect with its founding purpose and develop ways to bring that purpose to life.
Jaideep Prabhu, Professor of Marketing at Judge Business School
I first hear about frugal innovation on a BBC Radio 4 programme called In Business: Frugal Feast. It struck me then that the developed world had a lot to learn from those in resource constrained environments. And that we could all benefit from recognising that we are all ultimately resource constrained — in that we have only one planet.
Jaideep shared with us a host of examples of people doing more (and better) with less — and the principles that underpin the case studies.
James Vaccaro, Head of Strategy at Triodos Bank
We rounded off the day with a banker, but not that kind of banker. Triodos Bank has been a hero company of mine for years. They only invest in organisations that make a positive difference — socially, culturally or environmentally.
James challenged us to re-imagine banking and reconnect to why banks exist. He proposed that finance is an enabler for communities — as we saw in the Net-Works story at the beginning of the day. He talked about financial exchange in a deeper sense, based on relationships and a better understanding of value.
It was a good point at which to finish — closing the day knowing that even the most compromised of industries can be re-imagined.
But in the end, everything we put together — the speakers, the beautiful lanyard, the historic venue, the tasty communal lunch — they were all just props. The true story of the day will be written by the people who were there. It’s their intentions, their interactions and their actions afterwards that will bring it all to life.
Because Meaning isn’t meant to just be a nice day out. We’re here to change the world. The stories we heard on the day show us how it’s possible to write the future we want — now we just need to go and write our own stories.
#MeaningMission
It turns out that Robin Hall has kick-started things nicely with his follow-up blog post. In it he sets out the action he’s going to undertake as a response to this year’s Meaning — and he’s inviting us all to do the same:
If you’re keen to start making your own contribution then a great starting point is to become a part of the Meaning Community. Why not connect with and take inspiration from the people at Meaning, the HR people at #NZLEAD focussed on making the workplace more humane, the people around you who share similar ideas and then ask yourself how are you going to add even more value to your small part of the world. What are you going to make your Meaning mission!?
I love the idea that we can keep the connection going through pledging an intention to the community. I hope to see #MeaningMission popping up on Twitter and following the actions that are taken. I’ll pledge my own once I’ve worked out how to not think about Meaning all the time!
Here’s Robin’s blog post in full:
Thoughts from the floor
Several other Meaning participants have shared their responses to the day. Thanks to Perry Timms, Jen Andersson and the Rooster Punks as well as Robin Hall — superstars all!
Things I wish I’d done differently
This year’s Meaning was the one most beset by difficulties — we had the very obvious technical issues with the sound and we also started very late in order to make sure Jackie could make her slot. Looking back I think we could have made some different decisions but in the heat of the moment starting late looked like the best option. Because of that we rushed to make the time up and some of the things we’d really invested in got pushed out of the way. Primary among these were the reflection points in between speakers.
We’ve had feedback in previous years that it’s hard to digest so much content when there are no breathing spaces in between. So we designed the day to include reflection points. And added pages into the lovely booklet/lanyard to support that. We appropriated and adapted the guided journaling questions from Otto Scharmer’s USchool and the intention was for me to lead everyone through those questions throughout the day. Under pressure of time I decided not to do this — and that’s my biggest regret of the day. If you still have your book/yard then I invite you to take 30 minutes one day and work your way through the questions. If you have no book/yard then here’s the questions:
- What are the three or four most important challenges I currently face?
- What are the three or four most important things I’ve learnt or achieved in my life?
- What are my most vital sources of energy? What do I love?
- What is holding me back? When have I listened to the voices of cynicism, judgement or fear?
- What is it I’m trying to get done at this stage in my personal journey?
- What d I need to let go of in order to bring something new into being?What old behaviours do I need to shed?
- What in my current life provides the seeds for the future I want to create?
- Who can help me make my highest future possibilities a reality? Who will be my helpers and partners?
- If I were to bring my intention into reality what practical first steps would I need to take over the next few days?
Thank you for reading this far. Add a response if you’d like to share your experiences of the day, give any feedback or ask any questions.
