Greetings Members and Friends,
I am thrilled to share the developments of our emergent and remarkable 2015 conference event with you. Over the last few weeks the program details have been slotting into place as our conference team have been attentively contributing their skills and passions to create a truly impressive, ground-breaking event on behalf of the SLaM community.
This newsletter will be the first of a series that we intend to publish each week until 18 June when the SLaM Conference Early Bird 30% discount prices will close – and by which time we need a minimum of 40 registrations if we are to proceed with a conference this year.
We trust that you can see the value of attending, and invite you to put this value into commitment by registering your early bird attendance.
The event program and facilitation team is now active on the SLaM website and we encourage you to engage with our social media and forum conversations… These platforms can act as your portal for participation and will grow in content and diversity as the conference itself grows. Here is a sneak preview of our wonderful Facilitation Team.
We will introduce you to our Facilitators with more information in our next newsletter.
What is this conference about?
The intention of the 2015 conference is to identify the spirituality, leadership and management “field of action”. It is a collective professional development retreat, recognising that how we live our business and professional lives becomes the world we hand on to others. This is our mind in the matter of everyday working life: seeing the world in a grain of sand.
Who are we now? What do we do? Why are we doing it? Where is it taking us? And why?
Things have changed since 1998 when SLaM was formed: at one level the field is still seen as “alternative” as it was in those early days, and at another level, aspects of it have become “mainstream”. New generation consciousness networks are springing up, new institutions are offering expertise, 21st century corporate pilgrimages are almost commonplace, and the language is pushing its way into policy and practice. Dimensions of spirituality, such as mindfulness in leadership and management, could be said to be coming up everywhere – and SLaM’s networks of practitioners and advocates have been there.
Our conference retreat is intended to be the time and place where the spirit of the spirituality, leadership and management field comes into view as a whole, maturing, synthesising dynamic to which we all belong and for which we are each a gift to its wellbeing.
Our argument is, that given the opportunities and challenges of our times, and given that our field is at an inter-generational turning point, we have a moment in time to see what we create and who we can be in meeting our future generations as they come to meet us. It is a moment of weaving the threads of our wisdoms, visions and learning into a basket that holds us all.
(Basket weaving; image courtesy of Rosalind Atkinson)
How will the conference be this inter-generational turning point?
The conference program is designed specifically to enable you, the practitioners and advocates for spirituality in leadership and management, to consciously be the individual and collective embodiment of the field.
We hope that this experience will extend back into your everyday lives:
- First, the conference is a two and a half day retreat on the Hawkesbury River, providing the opportunity for sustained engagement so that this awareness can come about;
- Second, the conference design is made up of four strands, each providing very different ways in which you can (re)discover your core body of practice and your reaching edges;
- Third, the design is organised so that what is normally experienced as hard choices between presentations becomes the gold thread of the SLaM community coming into being: your reflections, conversations, questions, insights and choices about what to do next at the conference, are the pathways of your unfolding journey. As you travel from one strand to another and back again, facilitated by our brilliant facilitation team, you will map and walk your journey into your questions, into new understandings and companionships.
The conference is intended to be an undiscovered country partly hidden in the mists, holding the threads of your journey to find within you:
- A strengthened sense of your understanding and practices of spirituality in leadership and management
- A confirmation of your place and pathway in the SLaM community of practice
- An understanding of the strategic purpose and intergenerational potential of this community in 2015 and its connections to the emerging new communities in this space
- An enhanced sense of who you are and who you want to become within this community in its networked associations so many others.
This is no ordinary gig. The SLaM committee and our networks realise the enormity of what lies ahead. We believe that this community, our developing SLaM community and friends is essential to best possible futures.
Do you want to be with us? Register here
Susan Goff (PhD)
President
