The idea behind the Symphonic Circle™ began while I was a graduate student at Harvard. It was during my time in Cambridge that I came to really understand how isolating the Academy can be, especially for those who crave collaborative discourse.
I was constantly amazed at not only just how deep the intellectual cleavages were, but also just how acceptable it was to remain buried behind a desk in a remote piece of real estate on the Harvard campus—never to ask the person next to you what he or she was working on and how it might relate to your own views on the world.
It was not until I left Cambridge, with degree in hand, and began working in the “real world” that I quickly realized that parochial solutions seem to exist everywhere.
Even in business, with its purported emphasis on quick, concise, and clear communication—the discourse flowed through silos. Employees in one part of the organization rarely interacted with or even spoke to their counterparts a few cubicles over.
This really kicked in one day while I was sitting in a window seat on an early morning flight home from a business engagement. As I watched the sun rise, I found myself amazed at just how peaceful, yet interconnected, life seemed up here above the clouds.
As the plane began its downward descent into the clouds, I found myself inspired by the experience. The sun rise brought with it so much promise and I hated to leave promise behind.
The guiding philosophy behind our approach is based on a strong belief that the forces most dominant in society tend to reward competition and rugged individualism, no matter what the costs.
Society acknowledges the specialist, but it punishes the generalist.
We sincerely believe that we need to redefine our notions of success, placing greater emphasis on adaptability and agility. Globalization forces us, as individuals, and as organizations, to compete on a new playing field and we think that most people and most organizations are not prepared for this new reality.
On a personal level, the inability to adapt to new challenges and opportunities can be debilitating. Unfortunately, too many people respond in isolation, blinded by parochial solutions to problems that are often interconnected.
At the organizational level, being unable to respond to new competitive threats in the environment can be devastating to your effectiveness and, in some cases, your very own livelihood.
That is why we bring a holistic approach to social change, looking in diverse places for unique solutions to problems that appear on the surface to be impossible to solve.
We seek, simply, to democratize the process behind transformative change; to bring ideas and people together in a global, inter-disciplinary movement—a symphonic dialogue at sunrise.
