Sanvaad began as a place for conversations professionals often feel the need to have – about how to use their authority most effectively, how to build cost-conscious and effective organisations, how to handle the perennial conflicts in the team, how to spot trends in the market, how to encourage creativity in a rapidly changing environment, how to build a team that lived by a shared purpose, and many others that had a do-or-die feel about them.
We called this place Sanvaad because it truly exemplified what we were trying to do. We did not provide solutions, we did not assume knowledge, and we did not offer short-cuts that skirted real issues. Instead, we encouraged people to marshal inner dialogue to sharpen perception, and external dialogue to help build common ground among stakeholders.
Sanvaad comes from the Sanskrit sam and vaad – the sense of communicating in harmony. More than a mere chat, it suggests an exchange that builds understanding, where something may be discovered between people that was not present in either person’s starting position. Because it builds on a willingness to find harmony, it dispels the cloud that obscures seeing clearly, that refuses to notice anything that contradicts. On that sharper perception among individuals rest listening, empathising, imagining, inspiring and enabling. With such people, any organisation – commercial, non-commercial or social – can be resilient, creative, perceptive, and effective.
That is the spirit in which this site has been built.
The Sanvaad writing ranges across education, children and childhood, society, organisations, leadership, relationships and the questions that sit beneath all of these. Some pieces are concerned with public questions; others begin with something much more personal. What connects them is less a subject than an interest in looking closely at how we make sense of the world and of one another.
The "Archive" brings together writing from earlier years. Some pieces remain substantially as they were written, because the circumstances and assumptions of their time are part of what makes them interesting. Some are accompanied by a contemporary note, acknowledging what has changed and what has not. Others have been revisited more substantially, because returning to an earlier thought after the passage of time can reveal things that were not visible then.
The newer writing in "Thoughts" continues this process in the present.
"Conversations" builds for the future – an invitation to engage more directly with questions, ideas and experiences that may benefit from being explored together.
Together, this is a place to let Sanvaad take us where we need to go.