The Socrates Program is excited to host our Winter Seminars this February 5th-8th in Aspen, CO. Seminar tuition is $3,000. Tuition includes all meals and seminar participation. Limited scholarships are available by application here. Registration is open. Secure your spot now!

Your seminar will be broken up into 3 sessions from 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm on Saturday and Sunday, and 8:00 am to 12:00 pm on Monday.

Seminars are text-based collaborative dialogues - curated readings will be distributed digitally in advance.

One of the three seminars have been announced. Check back for the final topic and moderator!

Winter 2027 Seminars:

Is Human Connection Worth Fighting For?

Work has always been relational -- and whether you lead a team, collaborate across functions, or simply have to get things done alongside other human beings, you know how much relationships shape everything else. But right now, something is shifting. As AI takes over more of our tasks, from drafting our emails, summarizing our meetings, to analyzing our data, we are being quietly relieved of the very moments that used to create connection. The awkward conversation. The honest feedback that someone needed to hear. The disagreement that, when handled well, leaves a team stronger than before.

And yet: people remain as complicated as ever. We still have colleagues who undermine us, managers who make us feel small, and teams that can't seem to get out of their own way. We still avoid hard conversations, smooth over tensions that deserve to be named, and mistake politeness for trust. The relationships that make work meaningful -- and make teams perform -- are not getting easier. If anything, they're getting harder to prioritize.

So what does it take to thrive at work when relationships feel this messy? And in an age when AI promises to smooth over friction, why might we actually want to preserve it? These questions sit at the heart of what it means to work alongside other human beings, and they have never been more pressing than now, when the alternative to doing this work is so readily available. How we answer them may determine not just how well our teams perform, but whether we preserve something essential about what it means to work together at all.

Together, we'll explore:

• When a colleague's behavior makes work feel impossible, where do we even begin?
• When working with others feels like the hardest part of the job, how do we still find a way to do our best work together?
• How do we speak honestly at work without blowing up the relationships we depend on?
• What do we lose when we outsource the friction of human relationships to technology -- and what might we gain by leaning into it instead?
• Can conflict actually make a team stronger? And if so, what separates productive tension from the kind that just does damage?
• What would it mean to have a real relationship strategy -- not just an operations strategy or an AI strategy -- and how would that change how we lead?
• In a workplace increasingly shaped by algorithms, what is the irreplaceable work that only humans can do -- and are we doing it?

This is not a seminar about being nice. It's about being honest, with yourself, with your colleagues, and about what it actually takes to build something meaningful together. The cost of getting this wrong isn't just a dysfunctional team. It's the slow erosion of the trust, candor, and connection that make work, and us, fully human. Because the teams that thrive are not the ones that avoid the mess. They're the ones that learn to find the magic in it.

Moderator: Amy Gallo is the best-selling author of Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People) and the HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict, a how-to book about handling conflict professionally and productively. She is a workplace expert who frequently writes and speaks about gender, interpersonal dynamics, difficult conversations, feedback, and effective communication. She works with individuals, teams, and organizations around the world to help them collaborate, improve how they communicate, and transform their organizational culture to support dissent and debate.