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OSR Alumni Association presents

2009 Annual conference

Five practices of the art of illumination

Mark Shimada with Steve Byers

Sunday, June 21	Limited to 50 participants
All day: 9:00 am–4:00 pm
A 90-minute workshop is presented on Saturday.

Collective virtuosity. The experience of wholeness. The balance between individualism and collective action is delicate.

The Art of Illumination explores this balance in an effort to understand how collective virtuosity — an inspired group experience — can influence the individual’s organizational life.

Five practices structure both personal and group activities — the practice of recognizing, suspending, unfolding, embodying, and enacting. This experience provides the opportunity for you to realize this inner sensibility as an individual in a collective.

The one-day workshop for this conference will familiarize you with enough learning possibilities so you can incorporate the five practices into your own change work. You'll also receive access to Mark’s entire design document files.

Dress & accessories: Please wear shoes and clothes that you can get paint on, and extra shoes for walking in the hallways. Also, your favorite writing utensil, iPods, and CD players with your own CDs are encouraged.

Your workshop takeaways

• Apply the Art of Illumination’s design concepts to personal and organizational change opportunities;
• Apply the Art of Illumination’s content to frame change opportunities with an emphasis on both inner dynamics and collective action.

Here are two stories from participants in the original workshop design — five half-day workshops over five weeks, with one practice explored each week.

“Over the course of a couple of weeks, I saw this go from a full-fledged grievance, to an intent-to-grieve, to resolution. Prior to The Art of Illumination, I would have thought through (had a plan) how to get from point A to Z... In this situation, I trusted we’d get there even though I didn’t know what “Z” would look like. We had conversations with each other throughout the process rather than only in formal meetings. I came away with a better understanding that the issue was really about the labor/management relationship and not the specifics of the grievance. By trusting the process to unfold and letting it take its course, I saw labor and management rebuild the relationship, solve the issue around which the grievance was made, resulting in meeting the needs of both labor and management.” -- H. Stafford, Senior Personnel Analyst

“Now I ask, am I doing the right work today? Am I coming up with ideas to make my work more valuable? Am I doing anything that’s innovative, as opposed to the status quo?” — D. Olson, Network Analyst

Page updated Tue, June 2, 2009