 It's amazing to be here. My voice is a bit froggy. It's gone down an octave for some reason, but never mind. I'm delighted to be here. And I'm delighted to have listened to both the speakers, because it's an extraordinary conversation that we've been invited into. And yet, you know, there's a question that haunts me, which I've now heard from a young man in Africa, a woman in her fifties facing another redundancy, a friend that was dementia, an ex-CEO, a refugee and a man in prison. And it is what is to become of me. And faced with the world's challenges, we might also ask what is to become of us. And I think Mario's talk spoke to that, as did the first speaker. And yet, we are all here. We're at a conference on meaning. All of us made the decision to be here, and so did I from the other side of the world. You might notice the slight New Zealand accent. But is this the best use of our time? Given all the challenges that face us, surely we need to be doing something practical with urgency and something that works. And as Mario Lanes just said, meaning is so problematic. So how can being at a conference on something complex, nebulous, subjective provide an answer that is relevant to time that demands urgency, practicality and an ability to act together? And how will it help us focus and respond to the heartfelt questions of humanity? There is a simple and profound answer available. And it's a map. It's a map that helps us to see, as any map does, where we are at any given moment. And from there, plan a future direction, individually and collectively. And it's a simple map, and it's one that we carry within us already. So that once we've become familiar with it, we can do what Mario was suggesting. We can use it in virtually any circumstance. And it's called the Map of Meaning, and it is the work of Mario. It's been my joy to work with her in the growing group of practitioners some of whom are here today, who have developed this work over the past 18 years. Our experience is that with this map we can establish the profound relevance of meaning to human activity in a way that can involve everyone and lead to practical action. This is new knowledge for humanity. And we wanted to share it with you because we've seen how much having a practical tool for working with meaning can offer. I think we did make the right decision to be here. The Map of Meaning arises out of rigorous research into what human beings agree, makes life and work meaningful. And it's based on the simple premise of Victor Frankels that the question what is the meaning of life, which I spent a lot of time thinking about, is too big, I agree, and too hard for us to answer. But that we can answer each one of us what is the meaning of my life today? Maria made that the basis of her research question and found that human beings do agree on the broad experiences that make work and life meaningful, and these are captured in the Map of Meaning. So, let's check this out. Given all that's happening in your reality you plan to come here, I'm imagining, to be inspired and to inspire others and to give hope, because meaning comes from being connected to what inspires us and being called towards what could be, and it could be a community pub, whatever it is that calls us. I expect that you, as I do, want to meet others who share your passion and with whom you might form alliances because we share a longing to belong and to work together. I suspect that we are all people with strong values. We want the conference to reflect these because it matters to human beings that we can work and live in ways that align with our values and to be true to ourselves. I certainly came here to learn, and I expect you did too, to get ideas we can use because we need to use our talents to the full and be creative and accomplish things for life and work to be meaningful. And then, round the outside, there was reality again. The cost of the ticket, travel and accommodation, time away from the family, health and well-being issues, to say nothing of the endless urgency of the global challenges that every day seem more pressingly real. Meaning is grounded in what is so in the earth on which we stand and in our fragile self. And yet, we came here, hoping that in some way what we learn would help to make a difference, to offer help to someone here, to stand for the possibility of some healing solutions and insights, to make a difference now and in the future because we long as human beings to contribute something of value to each other and to the world. Now, all these longings are shared and while we may each experience this in a unique way, we are united in a common framework. It's a framework that holds us in the profound tensions between our need to just be and our need to do. Our concern for ourself and our concern for others and the lifelong tensions between our inspiration and the reality of our self in circumstance because meaning is found in some sense of balance or harmony amongst all these dimensions which eb and flow and shift and change throughout our life, sometimes minute by minute. Does this map of meaning seem familiar to you? Does it ring true in some way? When someone looks at the map or in my experience, they so often go after I've gone, isn't this exciting? They go, well, yeah, that's obvious. So what? What is the use of such a question, such a map? And that was our question. So the three of us, that's Mario Lane, Patricia Greenhoff and me some time ago. And the others who originally came together around this work, we just began to work with it. I used it to learn what I truly believe in each of the dimensions and then I examined how that actually guides my life or doesn't. Others created more meaning in their work. Partners used it with each other to see what really matters to each one which is quite surprising results. Patricia writes to her coaching clients what's really important in each of the dimensions as a way to help them clarify what really matters and then she used it to set the strategic direction of a small organisation with whom she still uses the map each year. And Mario Lane used it in a board meeting where as the board began restructuring they turned to a copy of the map on the wall and asked, for example, how can we have unity with others? Well, perhaps we could from the beginning involve the union which they did and which worked out really powerfully. Another pioneer, Dave Burton, used it to solve an organisational issue where a young man was having problems coping with his job. Dave emailed us joyfully saying, it works, it works, I've still got the email. I just used it with this manager to see where he spends most of his time. It's all in service to others because he heads a helpline. He's exhausted and it's affecting his marriage. But his real longing is to be in unity with others. So, instead of adding another layer of distancing by putting in a messaging system which he was thinking of doing, he's taken the insight. He's set up meetings with his colleagues and established warm relationships with his key users and the way they work together. The Mac works. People used it to make decisions, to give new depth to performance reviews, to resolve conflicts. We used it in organisations, prisons with artists, nurses, teachers, social workers and one man with farmers. It's allowing Pacific Island students to stay connected with their beliefs around all those dimensions and their culture while entering into the more Western world of education. Early on, it was used in Saudi Arabia and Romania. A Japanese university as well as the one in Sri Lanka has invited Maria Lane to come and speak with them. And I'm working with an organisation called Meaningful Aging Australia with applying the map to the experience of aging. How can we find meaning right throughout our lives and how can the aged care organisations understand best how to help us do that? I'm certainly getting very interested in this question. From our experiences like these, we were able to see what having a neutral map, our human map of meaning can offer. Because firstly, as Frankel pointed out, when you start to raise meaning as a topic, what becomes clear is people often don't feel competent to talk about it. And they often don't want to talk about it. Yet Michelle Foucault argues that discourse, the ability to speak about things, is the power to be seized. And that without a way to bring meaning powerfully into the world's conversations, not in that co-opted way that Maria was talking about, we cannot protect what matters most to us. And if language creates reality, how do we create a meaningful future if we cannot speak constructively and collectively about meaning? And having a map of meaning is a framework from which to make sense of the everyday language in which people do talk about meaning. But it took us a while to see how this works, because when I first rushed at an organisation saying, have I got a map for you? Someone took me aside and told me as gently as possible, Lani, we don't talk about meaning here. Then we found when we listened from the map of meaning, people talk about meaning all the time. It sounds like this. I just can't believe what they've done. They've split the team up in the name of efficiency, my closest colleagues in another building, so we can't work together any more, which is the destruction of unity with others. I gave them this great idea, and they thanked me, then nothing happened. Well, that's the last time I do that. Frustration of expressing full potential. I don't like what we're doing as an organisation, but it doesn't feel safe enough to say that, because they'll think at the moment, I can't risk that. And we had this great motivational speech from the big boss, then three weeks later, the budgets come out, and I'm faced with trying to achieve this vision with a 10% reduction in resources. I mean, why give us a vision if we can't achieve it? So when we talk about meaning as subjective feelings like this, they are so easily dismissed by others, by management, by society, and more importantly, by ourselves, because what it sounds like is complaining, and what it is is people talking about the absence and destruction of meaning. Something caused so often, and Mario pointed to this, and completely unintentionally, by managers and leaders who have no framework for understanding the consequence of their decisions and who therefore do destroy meaning on a daily basis, and the cost, both human and financial, is phenomenal. With the map of meaning, we can easily see that our feelings about meaning are expressions in a whole human conversation of meaning, and people can start to speak as dignified adults with a real understanding of the importance of what they say, and we can speak up to protect what is dear to us. The framework is holistic, ordering the complex issues of meaning into a limited number of constraints and tensions so that we can use it to speak about and design meaning into our lives and our work, and move quickly to practical solutions. We can design the upcoming budget cuts and how we're going to work with them into an inspiring speech. We can discuss how to make it safe for people to raise ethical concerns, and we can listen when people tell us that they're working closely with colleagues that are supportive and inspiring, and we can honour and act on people's ideas. Well, we do these things, but without seeing how they connect meaning, these initiatives are so easily lost in the next wave of management reforms. Understanding the dimensions and the importance of meaning takes it from a subjective world of feeling to a shared and objective community. One practitioner, a woman brought in to work with a professional group in a developing country who was struggling to achieve certain standards in a given task, began by asking them, I'd love to know what inspired you to do this work. And as they spoke, the manager came into the room and she said, is it alright if I stay and listen? And they said yes, so she did. And the stories of what this work could mean to the people in the villages who moved everybody, and the manager said, I had no idea who I was working with. So then the staff asked the manager what inspired you, and she told them and they said they didn't know who they were working with either. Then our colleague asked, so what was the reality when you arrived? And people told about feeling abandoned after the first week when the designated buddy disappeared. Finally they resolved issues, they now felt comfortable facing together. And the feedback was that everyone had been grateful to retain their dignity in a situation which they feared they could easily be humiliated. The map of meaning releases an inherently democratic language and this is what we've been talking about this morning already because it grounds us and returns us to our own deep knowing of what is meaningful to us and to the deep narratives of life because while it speaks directly to meaning it also speaks to questions who are we, where we are people who search, as Mario said for and with the map can find meaning. And how will we journey together? We have a shared map and what is to become of me when reality is overwhelming as a friend said to me inspiration can seem like a mockery but I can still take small steps in each of the four pathways of meaning. We can use the map to return to ourselves, be at home in ourselves and therefore at home in the world. We can be responsible, able to respond, to take action and claim our inherent and this is so moving to me our inherent constructive nature as people longing to live worthwhile lives and to do work that is worthy of our talents and our time and our energy. And I titled this talk Designing from Meaning and I use the concept of design to intentionally influence because the map gives us a tool to do this and I suggest first we do no harm the map is in our bodies we carry it wherever we go so learn to recognise it in your feelings so it becomes alive for you use it to find and create meaning each day in a meeting when is meaning being created and where did it just get destroyed was that for me or was that for everybody how did that happen what would restore meaning use it to stand strong in yourself so that you can stand strong in the world and if you feel confident you could ask questions from the map how can we ensure that this initiative leads to increased unity amongst all the stakeholders and as you get more confident and familiar you may choose the map as a way to design meaning into a project and into an organisation or into a business but remember people have their own meaning and the map of meaning is not a licence to tell people what is meaning for but rather help them get clear for themselves and speak about what is meaningful I was asked to share the map with a group of women ex-prison inmates who had formed an organisation to care for local women in prison and to help each other stay out I sat in a number of meetings and listened before I talked about the map and when I did speak all I could say is I have nothing to teach you all I can do is mirror back to you your own deep wisdom the organisation was the inspiration of a woman and she's made it a reality in terms of unity with others you offer so much support and belonging to each other in service to others you're running a food bank caring for children caring for the women in prison each person is busy learning new skills so in terms of expressing full potential you're excelling yourselves and in terms of integrity with self you're honest about how challenging it can be to stay true to your goals because reality can be overwhelming at times with our human map of meaning we can move from being at the mercy of people and events that destroy meaning each person take responsibility to the degree we can in each circumstance and we can use it to rethink the way we create organisations we can use it to bring peace into the room we can draw it in the sand and wipe it away and no one need ever know we just empowered someone we can use it because it is natural to us and we can start today we could reflect after a workshop what was meaningful we can start where we are start small and start now and we can build meaningful work and a meaningful society from the bottom up or just where we are now so thank you