By Nicole Bradfield for Enlivening Edge Magazine
Check here for other Integral European Conference previews from Enlivening Edge and visit the official IEC website here.
Eighteen months ago we at Brighton and Hove Integrated Care Service (BICS) began our journey to sense and articulate our higher organisational purpose. Now we want to share what we’ve learned, and to hear from those on similar journeys.
BICS is a UK-based social enterprise delivering health care services in the south of England. As we’ve grown, we’ve found it increasingly important to be clear about why we exist, and why our work matters.
We knew we wanted the journey to be rich, reflective and inclusive, so we focused on holding the space and inviting our community to participate in our enquiry.
We also knew we wanted to take a mindful approach to our process.
In a beautiful way, exactly the right people came together to support our journey.
Joel and Michelle Levey have been pioneering the mindfulness-at-work movement for nearly 40 years and offered invaluable wisdom as they guided us and invited us to explore individual purpose and its relationship with collective purpose.
Meanwhile Neo are a brand and communication agency “for the world we want”. They helped us surface our organisational purpose, articulate it, and put it at the heart of our story.
Our session together at the Integral Theory Conference on Sunday 8th May is an opportunity to blend story and experience. Those that helped guide us will be with us on the day, and we invite you to join us in exploring ways to cultivate awareness through attention, intention and attitude, enabling us to see clearly and act wisely as individuals and as organisations.
We’ll show how we’ve been developing our capacity to listen and design practices that encourage collective purpose to surface within our organisation, our partners and our wider community. We’ll share the ways in which we’ve used mindful practices to transform not only our approach to this journey, but the way we operate every day.
We’d like to bring people together to reflect, practice and share their own inspirations. We know the collective wisdom on the day will help us develop our work, to better serve our colleagues and our communities. We look forward to meeting you.
Zoe Nicholson is co-founder and chief executive of Brighton and Hove Integrated Care Service, a not-for-profit social enterprise delivering healthcare to 1 million people in the UK.
Joel and Michelle Levey are arguably the world’s foremost experts in how our complex, challenging lives can be improved through mindfulness practice. Their work promotes leadership, change resilience and collective intelligence within government, healthcare, business and even the armed forces.
Nicole Bradfield is the Managing Director of Neo, a brand and communication agency for the world we want.
