Applying humanities insights to modern business challenges.
Who we are
Our hand-picked team of humanities PhDs will bring uniquely tailored insights and critical and creative solutions to explore the untapped potential of your business as well as offer strategies related to your market.
What we do
PhiloSolutions offers what we call applied critical thinking and narrative business solutions.
Why humanities for business?
The skills of humanities doctorates are uniquely tailored to asking critical, ethical, and social questions, which are applicable to the interrogation of the conceptual groundwork of key business decisions.The speculative aspect of humanities training is well suited to anticipating future shifts in business models and can help develop strategies for efficiently dealing with them.
Contact
All questions and professional inquiries can be directed tocontact@philosolutions.com
Team
PhiloSolutions is the brainchild of Dr. Sean Braune who received his PhD in continental philosophy and contemporary literature from York University (Canada) in 2016. He holds an MA and an Honours BA from the University of Toronto. He has published widely on critical theory, experimental writing, and philosophy and continues to publish and teach in those fields. In terms of business, he was raised on the models of both of his grandfathers, who were entrepreneurs who began successful businesses after immigrating to Canada.Michael F Bergmann is currently a professor in Performance at the Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University). He holds an MFA in Design from Yale University, where he held an Eldon Elder fellowship, and is currently completing his PhD in Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph. His research explores the role of new technologies in live art and storytelling through his lab, TRiPL (Technological Research in Performance Lab). Before Toronto Metropolitan University, he worked in the Research and Development arm of the live event company Worldstage, innovating approaches to corporate performance and industrial events across the USA and Macau for clients such as Wynn, NBC Studios, Intel, and Nokia Bell Labs.Hand-Crafted Teams
We will assign a small team of highly skilled humanities doctorates to analyze your specific business problem, your business model in general, or isolate a potential problem and then this team will apply analytical approaches taken from the humanities to develop a unique report tailored to your business. We pull from our network of over a hundred humanities specialists to create the best team for your particular business.
The idea
In 2017, many major tech companies in Silicon Valley like Apple, Google, DeepMind, and Microsoft began to hire in-house philosophers or what Forbes called “Chief Philosophy Officers.”PhiloSolutions seeks to bring this same critical and creative mindset to your company by offering consultants from our hand-picked team of humanities doctorates.Our expertise includes: • developing a company’s narrative• understanding how a company’s narrative fits in a larger marketplace• ethical questions about technology, technological advancements, technology in relation to consumer habits, and artificial intelligence• equity and diversity training and approaches• developing a company’s value proposition• strategy consulting from a humanities and philosophical perspective• theorizing a company’s ethical position in today’s marketplace of multiculturalism and globalization• thought leadership• critical thinking about branding in a unique way that is distinct from traditional advertising approaches• humanities insights about consumer or client psychology and behaviour
Tools and Resources
As Stuart Armstrong and Sean ÓhÉigeartaigh argue in "Who Knows Anything about Anything about AI?" (2014), studies show that humanities minds are better suited at anticipating possible problems of developing artificial intelligence (A.I.) (p. 54). Along a similar tack, Daniel Kahneman makes the point in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2013) that non-experts routinely deliver more effective solutions to problems than experts because experts fail to recognize the limitations of their expertise.PhiloSolutions believes that business consultancy has become its own "box." In today's world, companies need real out of the box thinking.The narrative and logical training of humanities doctorates are useful in terms of the overall values and goals of the company and can assist in ensuring that business plans and decisions proceed in alignment with those values and goals.Critical thinking is a skill taught in humanities graduate departments and honed through the process of researching and writing a dissertation or an academic paper. Critical thinking is an approach to a problem that not only seeks to uncover the main issues of the problem, but also to ask questions about the process of thinking that went into the articulation of the problem, as well as the possible solutions linked to it.Critical thinking interrogates these various features of any question and features a variety of practical skills learned in the humanities that feature research, analysis, reasoning, evaluation, logical processes, general interpretative skills, and metacognitive evaluation of the patterns, assumptions, axioms, and biases that went into the thinking of and formulation of the problem.
Our principles
PhiloSolutions is committed to a practice of ethical, sustainable, and equitable values in today’s business world. We believe that in the face of numerous global threats that businesses should react in ways that focus on creating a sustainable future for humanity at large.
