From Pockets of Practice to Positive Tipping Points: First Discoveries from the Impact Innovation Circles

A reflection from Darija Miletic, Associate Director, GRLI

Across business and management education, there are signs of a field trying to turn toward its deeper purpose. Something important is stirring in classrooms, leadership teams, accreditation conversations, student initiatives and cross-institutional collaborations — more schools are asking what it means to educate for responsibility, regeneration and shared flourishing in practice, not only as an aspiration, but as part of how we learn, live and lead.

This growing energy matters in a world marked by ecological fragility, social fragmentation, geopolitical uncertainty and contested expectations of business. Business schools are being invited to prepare graduates who can act responsibly, relationally and fairly. Many institutions have responded with genuine commitment: new courses have been created, sustainability strategies have been written, and responsible management education has moved from the margins into mission statements, research agendas and student expectations.

And yet, a familiar pattern keeps appearing.

Sustainability is often added rather than embedded. Responsibility is carried by a few committed specialists rather than distributed across disciplines and decision-making structures. Promising innovations remain alive, but isolated, in pockets of practice. This is not a failure of intent. It is the gravitational pull of systems that still reward differentiation over solidarity, visibility over depth, and being “ahead” of the next institution over asking how “All of Us” move forward together.

It is in this context which GRLI partners have begun to explore Impact Innovation Circles, inspired by the BE the Tipping Point initiative.

Impact Innovation Circles are small, nimble, participant-led, institution-centered peer groups. Not a fixed program, nor a solution to be rolled out. They are emerging as a living inquiry: a lightly held, relational space in which business schools can surface live institutional challenges, test small practical changes, and pay the learning forward so that useful practice can travel beyond.

Early learning is still formative. It should not be overclaimed. But the first pilot Circles are already offering important clues about what may be needed if responsible management education is to move from pockets of practice toward positive tipping points.

1. The work is not only curricular. It is institutional.

One of the first discoveries is deceptively simple: the work is not only about changing what is taught. It is about how institutions learn to change. 

Across the two pilot Circles, colleagues from Deakin Business School, University of Bristol Business School, Católica Porto School of Business and Economics, Lancaster University Management School, University of St. Gallen, Kühne Logistics University, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, University of Johannesburg, University of Michigan and Copenhagen Business School have been holding and testing this inquiry together.

Responsible management education often enters the institution through the curriculum: a new module, a revised program outcome, a sustainability case, a faculty champion / “activist”. These are all important moves. But when they remain disconnected from governance, assessment, incentives, faculty development, student experience and wider institutional identity, they struggle to shift the deeper pattern.

The Impact Innovation Circles are helping make this visible. Participants are not only asking, “What should we teach?” They are asking:

These questions do not have simple answers. But holding them together may itself be part of the work.

2. Relational depth is THE infrastructure.

A second discovery is that relational depth is not a prelude to the work. It is the core infrastructure.

In many institutional settings, pressure for action creates pressure to solution too quickly. We move from introductions to outputs, from challenge to response, from complexity to toolkit. Yet the early Circles suggest that transformation may require a different kind of beginning – one that moves at the speed of trust. Participants need space to speak honestly about what is not working, and to name the institutional tensions that are often carried privately: autonomy versus coherence, urgency versus emergence, inclusion versus efficiency, ambition versus capacity, structure versus flexibility. When these tensions are surfaced, something shifts. The Circle becomes more than just a network for exchanging examples and best practices. It becomes a container for collective sensemaking.

Why this matters? Many of the barriers to responsible management education are not technical – they are relational, cultural and political. They live in identities, histories, reputational anxieties, incentives and unspoken assumptions about what business schools are for.

Without trust, these remain hidden. With trust, they become material for learning.

3. Inquiry before solutioning.

A third discovery is the importance of inquiry over premature solutioning.

The Impact Innovation Circles are not designed around a promise that every institution will arrive with a clear problem and leave with a polished intervention. Instead, participants enter a cycle of exploration, experimentation, integration and paying the learning forward.

This means outcome uncertainty is inherent to the process. At times, the most important result may be a prototype. At other times, it may be a reframed question, a clearer sense of institutional readiness, a new collaboration, or the courage to stop doing something that no longer serves.

This can feel uncomfortable in systems that reward clarity, metrics and deliverables. But complexity asks for a different discipline: the discipline of staying with the question long enough to better action possible outcomes.

In this sense, the Circles are not only supporting innovation, they are practising a different way of knowing: one that treats participants as co-inquirers rather than recipients, and institutions as living systems rather than machines to be fixed.

“The process we use to get to the future, is the future we get.”
– Myron Rogers

4. Small experiments can travel.

There is big value on small, context-sensitive experiments.

The ambition of BE the Tipping Point is large: to help business schools become positive tipping points for people and planet. But the work begins small. A course element. A faculty conversation. A student project. A revised assessment. A shared case. A new narrative that makes sustainability institutionally legible without reducing it to compliance.

These small moves matter because they are testable, adaptable and grounded in local contexts. They do not pretend that one model can be copied everywhere. Instead, they ask what can travel: a pattern, a question, a practice, a design principle, a story of what was prototyped and what was learned.

This is where “paying the learning forward” becomes important. Not to create another layer of performative reporting, but to distill learning into shareable artefacts that help others move faster, avoid reinventing the wheel, and adapt ideas to their own realities and contexts.

In this way, the field’s progress becomes a shared commons for the whole ecosystem rather than a competitive landscape.

5. From “how do we get ahead?” to “how do all of us move forward?”

Perhaps the deepest discovery is that the Impact Innovation Circles are quietly challenging the competitive logic that shapes much of modern higher education.

Many business schools want to contribute to a more just, sustainable and flourishing world. Yet they operate within systems of ranking, recognition and reputational comparison. Even initiatives aimed at collaboration can become badges of differentiation.

The question, then, is not only how to improve responsible management education within individual institutions. It is how to build the conditions for collective movement across the field.

• What would it mean for schools to share learning before it is perfect?
• What would it mean to treat institutional transformation as a relational practice to be cultivated?
• What would it mean to ask, again and again, not “what’s in it for me?” but “what’s in it for all of us?

The early Circles are beginning to surface in several places where a new Circle might begin. For example:

1. Learning That Leaves a Mark — How might learning move beyond concepts toward experienced practice, embodied learning, productive discomfort and changed behaviour?
2. Assessing What Matters — What are we really trying to assess, especially as AI pushes us to look again at reflection, integrity, demonstrated competence and responsible decision-making?
3. Making Responsibility Everyone’s Work — How might global responsibility become a thread carried across disciplines, programmes and roles, rather than a specialist plug-in?
4. Building the Commons Between Us — What connective infrastructure could help institutions learn with, rather than simply alongside, one another — through trusted spaces, shared memory and simple ways of making useful learning visible?

These are not fixed workstreams, nor are they topics GRLI wants to own. They are invitations. If one of these questions is alive in your institution — or if you are holding another pocket of practice that could become useful learning for others — there may be a Circle to form, join, or help shape.

There is no certainty here. The work is early, experimental and not yet fully measurable. But there are glimmers of something worth tending: schools learning with one another, small experiments becoming visible, and a growing willingness to move from isolated effort toward shared responsibility.