“We intend to break with the paradigm of participants coming as vessels who are summoning expertise from the outside, to being collaborative participants who are generating collective expertise from within.”
Helena Read and Glenn Martin (Feb 2015)
Your invitation from the President to the SLaM 2015 Conference Retreat
Susan Goff, President,Spirituality, Leadership and Management
Our conference this year is intended to galvanise the Spirituality in Leadership and Management field.
The theme is “Mind in the Matter”: the title invites us to see mindfulness in our business and professional lives, and to consider the consequences of this sighting for the world.
The conference retreat is a two and a half day collaborative inquiry into what we are learning about mindfulness and where we need to take it next.
The invitation is to synthesise this inquiry in our working lives to increasingly activate the benefits of mindfulness:
- conscious business
- non-violent communication
- integrated ways of knowing
- systemic praxis
- incorporating new philosophies and spiritualties into our turning points
- improving decision-making
- seeing efficiency and flow through ethics
- attending to new economies like social entrepreneurship, renewable energy and indigenous business
- seeing wicked problems transform to post-heroic leadership.
Our touchstones for mindfulness are many as the field diversifies, so we ask: Do they cohere? Can SLaM be a purposeful community?
In consideration of the survey we conducted last year across our network, the SLaM Committee has created a new form of conferencing. It recognises our delegates as experts, utterly relevant to our time. Four strands, each supported by a specialist facilitator, and through which you traverse at your own pace and choosing, offer you:
- The best of our scholarship in the Programmed Inquiry Strand
- The best of co-creativity in our Open Space Strand
- The best of being in inquiry in our Being in Nature Strand, and
- The best of realising personal potential in our “Gone Fishing” Strand.
We will have but one Special Guest, whom we have designated to be a Keynote Listener, who will be our companion throughout the days of the conference retreat.
As your inquiry rises within you, you can follow it, nudge it, open it up, show it the stars, give it away and see how it becomes part of the whole that you take back within you – from which it originally came.
This is my opening invitation: we welcome your contributions to our Blog.
