MEANINGFUL COMMUNICATION - White Paper
This white paper (also in the form of an ebook), with lead authors Minter Dial (speaker and author) and Lena Rantsevich (founder of Reputy.io), was written using the outputs of an interactive session held in London UK, on February 21, 2024, featuring 36 contributors from a wide array of backgrounds. They included business owners, scientists, senior business executives, psychologists, an anthropologist, business coaches, Web3 and Technology experts, start-up founders and artists. We looked at assessing Meaningful Communication (MC) in the workplace from a diversity of viewpoints and existing theories to explore how we can bring more MC into the business environment. This work was sponsored by dunnhumby, in partnership with Global Tech Advocates-Future of Work.
If you have any questions, comments, or requests, please use this form here where you can also sign up for further information. If you’d rather just purchase the White Paper, it’s available for $0.99 (USD) on Amazon Kindle.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This white paper is the second in the series of Human Renaissance (H ∞ R), a project inspired by Humanism and Techno-Optimism promoting the symbiosis of human ingenuity and technological innovation. Its purpose is to look at the relevance of Meaningful Communication (MC) in the workplace, with the pragmatic goal of growing business effectiveness and creating a thriving culture. With a complex business outlook, rising mental health conditions and difficulties in recruiting, retaining and motivating talent, the team that contributed to the writing of this white paper saw MC as a key quality for business leaders. By engaging in more MC, not only do teams tackle some of the more important topics for the long-term health of the business, but also foster more meaningful relationships.
The road to evaluating and measuring Meaningful Communication, meanwhile, is not simple. There is a wide variety of ways to identify what constitutes MC, and fundamentally, it will depend on the context and environment in which it happens. Furthermore, whether it is in the situation or the topic, many business environments do not engage in MC in any serious or intentional way. Whether this is because of the existing culture, a lack of awareness of the issue or because the business mode is strictly pragmatic and transactional, it can be challenging to enable meaningful communications. Some of the challenges presented included accepting – much less promoting – a variety of opinions, creating psychological safety, strategically choosing the more complex topics (such as ethics, politics, or organisational purpose), and allocating the time in the right situations for meaningful conversations to take place.
This paper will look at some of the key questions and methods to bring more MC into the workplace. We explore a range of topics including its definition, the role of technology, and the challenges of engaging in MC at a personal, collective, business, and societal level. This paper aims to set out four premises: the scope of meaningfulness in work, what are the most meaningful topics, who and when to enter into MC and how to bring it into the workplace.
In the hopes of inspiring more work on this front, the authors will continue to explore ways to evaluate, measure and improve the future of work in the most appropriate manner. The authors are actively seeking individuals who would like to contribute to this effort.
To get the full white paper (50-page PDF), please fill in the form below. If you’d rather not fill in the form, you can buy directly from Amazon here!
LEAD AUTHORS, SPONSOR & PARTNERS
About the lead authors of this white paper:
Lena Rantsevich – Lena is a future-curious venture architect building products with a greater purpose. Founder and CEO of Reputy.io, the new CV standard helping people reveal and grow their core skills, evidence them and land better jobs, find partners, attract investment or choose the most suitable career strategy. A serial founder in hospitality, events, consultancy and Web3 space, Head of Samsung Electronics in Belarus for 8 years, awarded as the youngest Business Person of the Year. Ex-CMO in large Ukrainian companies and a strategy advisor for 70+ brands. TEDx Youth speaker about thriving environment. Find out more about Lena Rantsevich here.
Minter Dial – Minter is an international professional speaker, elevator and a multiple award-winning author. Minter’s core career stint of 16 years was spent as a top executive at L’Oréal, where he was a member of the worldwide Executive Committee for the Professional Products Division (PPD), in charge of Digital, Education, the Eco-Salon and Business Development. Previously, he was MD of L’Oréal PPD Canada and MD Worldwide for Redken. He’s the author of the WWII biography and documentary film (The Last Ring Home, 2016) and three award-winning business books, Futureproof (FT Press 2017), You Lead (Kogan Page 2021), both of which won heralded Business Book Awards, and Heartificial Empathy, 2nd edition (2023). He has a weekly podcast, Minter Dialogue, and is currently working on a new book, that was published serially online over 79 weeks: Dialogos, Fostering More Meaningful Conversations via Substack https://minter.substack.com. Find out more about Minter Dial here.
Core Sponsor:
dunnhumby
Dunnhumby helps retailers and brands deliver better experiences through Customer First strategies. When businesses are built around the people they serve, the world becomes a better place – and every Customer experience becomes more meaningful. It’s why Customer data has never been so important. But to maximise its potential and use data to inform smarter decisions, businesses need the ability to interpret and act on Customer insight at scale and in real-time.
dunnhumby empowers brands and retailers to do this through more relevant and engaging experiences. We help our clients build Customer First strategies with cutting edge solutions, and we never stop innovating – ensuring the decisions clients make encourage Customers to return, time after time.
Partners:
REPUTY
Founded by Lena Rantsevich, Reputy is the new CV standard with validated human skills on a mission to unlock global talent and bring fairness to the Future of Work. Reputy provides hard proof of human skills via real-life experience. See more here.
Global Tech Advocates Future of Work Group (GTA FoW)
GTA Future of Work is a rapidly growing global think tank of over 500 business leaders working across 18 countries, representing a global workforce of over 10 million. A specialised and focused group of Global Tech Advocates (GTA), through our leadership, industry standing and collective resources, GTA FoW Group aims to shine a light on the future way of working and suggest best practice as we move forward in a post-pandemic world and work toward a shared goal of creating a global workforce that thrives from employee to employer. See more here.