Hi and welcome to our first blog!

This is a pretty momentous day - the website goes live, I set off for the UK and the book launch at the end of September and the presses start printing our book!

It is a wonderful day to reflect back on what brought us to this point.  About fifteen years ago Marjolein and I, quite independently – although we had met each other – began to study and research the role of meaningfulness in the world of work.

I was at the University of Bath studying for my Master’s in Responsibility and Business Practice and Marjolein was embarking on her PhD at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.  While Marjolein found and mapped the dimensions of meaning in the Holistic Development Model, I wrestled with issues of how we put what was most meaningful to us at the foundation of work.  The challenge of doing this made me instantly see and appreciate the value of the Holistic Development Model when I saw it in 2000 at its first public outing.  At that point, along with our colleague Patricia Greenhough, we founded the Holistic Development Group with a view to further testing the model and then taking our work into the world.

It has been a long eleven years with workshops in various parts of the world, articles for academic journals, endless experimentation ourselves on ways to use the model, and over the years growing support from people who also began to use the model in a wide variety of ways.

In 2008 the group of practitioners in the UK asked us for a book.  They expressed their concern because they had no “home”.  “It’s a great model but no-one has ever heard of it.  We want a place where all this can come together.”  So we returned to New Zealand and began to write.

Now the book is finished and being published in the UK by Greenleaf Publishing [LINK] and we are once more returning to the UK to celebrate.

In this, our first blog, we want to thank all those people who have supported us on this trek.  If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a group of cheering supporters to write a book – especially on a subject as nebulous and hard to grasp as meaningfulness in the workplace.  When ideas are just forming, it is wonderful to have others who ‘get it’ and also get excited by the possibility of the ideas. 

We welcome you to our website, www.holisticdevelopment.org.nz and to our blog.
Given the excitement of our lives over the next months as we launch the book and run workshops and give speeches to support it, we promise to keep you up to date with once a week postings.  In the meantime, thank you, every one of you.  We could never have done it without you!