Our Philosophy

Civis Global was established to bring high-quality professional education to the foreign affairs community.  We combine the best insights from social science with the lessons learned from practitioner experience to prepare foreign affairs professionals to confront the challenges of the 21st century.

We represent a new approach to professional training, leveraging two decades of success in diplomatic and military education.  We utilize a model that prioritizes team-based problem solving, participant engagement, and strategic foresight. 

Our vision is to become known as the gold standard for foreign affairs training in Europe.  We envision our graduates empowered through knowledge and emboldened by practice to take action, confronting complex problems and crafting innovative solutions that benefit democratic society and the world at large. 

We believe the liberal world order is worth fighting for.  When diplomacy works, rules are enforced, malign actors are deterred, and armed conflict is avoided, ordinary people get the opportunity to build lives, take risks, and start families.  Security is the backdrop for any healthy and prosperous society: ordinary things like work, travel, study, and self-reflection are only possible when basic security is assumed.  Any society perpetually lacking in safety, justice, dignity, or freedom becomes cynical, small-minded, and cruel, with zero-sum outcomes for all.

We believe the classroom is a temple.  We do not lie to our students and we do not serve an ideological agenda.  We always strive to present the most sophisticated and accurate understanding of any topic and to incorporate multiple perspectives, recognizing that there is seldom a single right answer.  We use our classes to capture insights and lessons-learned from practitioner experience that would otherwise be lost.  We structure our courses to allow for iterative practice and structured feedback.  In a world where everything is monitored and failure is scrutinized, we provide a secure space where people can take risks, experiment, and even fail without reputational harm or real-world consequences. 

We believe in the pursuit of excellence.  Excellence is achieved through iterative improvement: all our courses are continually in the process of being refined and updated.  Nothing is “good enough”: our basis for comparison is what is possible, not what other people are doing.  We always seek out the best instructors, speakers, materials, and learning experiences.  In any delivery, approximately 10-20% will be new or revised content.  We know excellence is achieved only through experimentation and a tolerance for failure.  We will try things that won’t work and we will learn from them.

We believe in partnership, collaboration, and group-based problem-solving.  This is reflected both in our business model and in the design of our courses.  In business, we seek out partnerships that allow all parties to leverage their best qualities and capabilities.  In the classroom, we design learning experiences that give all participants an opportunity to contribute and even lead.  We know that human beings tend to forge strong bonds through shared adversity, so we will provide intense training experiences in a controlled environment that facilitate a sense of mutual trust, cooperation, and shared achievement.

Undergirding all of this is a relentless faith in the power of education.  The best education inspires individuals to seek new heights and produce institutional change.  By emphasizing performance metrics, good design, and measurable results, we promise to deliver powerful results and demonstrated capability for our clients.