On 18 February 2026, we held the very first edition of what we hope becomes a monthly rhythm. It was intentionally small and experimental, a real working session rather than a polished broadcast. And that turned out to be the point.
The GRLI’s partners and associates increasingly work in a ‘scattered together’ mode: we meet the field where it already gathers – inside existing convenings, networks, and platforms. Pulse is the complementary practice: we come back together, online, to compare notes and convert lived experience into learning that can travel. At Pulse GRLI’s distributed community connects the dots and turns what we’re sensing across the wider landscape into shared meaning, mutual support, and coordinated action.
What follows below is a community-facing reflection (not a minute-by-minute recap, and it is largely sanitised to honour any sensitive information shared). It preserves the learning without turning a relational working space into a reporting performance.
1) The moment we’re in: pressure, volatility, and the human cost
From the first check-ins, a shared reality surfaced quickly: many institutions are operating in conditions of tightening resources, restructuring, and overload. The language in the room wasn’t abstract.
One participant named the strain plainly: the world is “asking us to do more with less.” Another described a workplace tempo where people are “replying emails… after midnight, 2 a.m., early mornings.”
Alongside that practical intensity was a deeper emotional note: disorientation. As one leader reflected on the current public environment for higher education, “it’s just disorienting that this is our reality.”
The early Pulse learning is simple but important: transformation efforts in management education cannot ignore the human sustainability of those carrying them. If we want long-horizon change, we need infrastructures that acknowledge depletion—and create conditions where people can actually stay in the work.
2) Micro-practices that matter: breathing space as strategy
One of the most useful surprises of Pulse #01 was how quickly the conversation shifted from constraint to prototype. Not “big initiatives,” but small practices with real leverage.
A striking image came from Bali: an annual day of reflection where everything stops for 24 hours – airports, traffic, work. It is, in the words shared with the group, a “reflection day,” where “the whole world stops for one day.” Whether or not that scale is transferable, the underlying question is.
How do we build breathing space into the business and management education ecosystem – and into our institutions – without waiting for ideal conditions?
Sulitest offered one concrete experiment already in motion: “we just launched a new kind of vacation… what we call a breathing day” – not a trip, not a perk, but an intentional pause “from time to time, to just… breathe.”
Another participant shared a lighter-weight version of the same impulse: a “Research Café” as a wellbeing touchpoint – “we don’t have a luxury for a whole day… it’s just a few hours,” but even that creates a signal: “we are all here.”
The learning here isn’t that everyone should adopt the same ritual. It’s that the field may need a portfolio of small, replicable pauses – prototypes that counter a culture of permanent acceleration.
3) Meaning travels: mission repetition as a stabilising practice
In volatile conditions, “strategy” often gets reduced to firefighting. One of the most hopeful threads in the call was a reminder that meaning-making can be operational.
A dean described how students and faculty responded when they consistently brought mission and values into everyday interactions:
“Some of the values include courage and social responsibility and gratitude… and I just always repeat and bring this home to our students. They just love it… they say they’ve never seen a leader repeat stuff like that.”
This wasn’t presented as charismatic leadership or motivational talk. It was described as disciplined stewardship: taking what is already “good here,” elevating it, and making it a shared reference point.
A colleague immediately mirrored the lesson: “I’m going to emphasize more that, yeah, this is our mission and we are achieving it together… we’re all in this together and we’re helping each other.”
In a period where institutions can feel like they are fragmenting under strain, repeating mission can become a practical technology for coherence.
4) Student energy as an asset: structures that channel agency
Another concrete thread: student energy is real and it can be organised.
A powerful example was a Dean’s Student Advisory Council that has grown to around 20 students across all undergraduate years, meeting twice a month. The group isn’t symbolic; it’s productive:
“We talk about how to make the college better… they organize events all year long.”
The practice has also expanded outward by convening presidents of student organisations and using platforms like LinkedIn for outreach.
Another participant shared similar dynamics through collaboration with a student union president and external partners – building “interdisciplinary” and cross-sector projects with the ambition to “co-create something bigger… so we have bigger impact.”
Across different contexts, the shared insight was this: student agency becomes a force multiplier when it has structures, convening rhythms, and outward-facing channels.
5) A live tension in the field: sustainability vs competing priorities
Pulse is not just for good news. It is for naming fault lines without collapsing into cynicism.
From Sulitest’s vantage point – working across many institutions – one theme keeps recurring: “sustainability is not necessarily the priority for all of them,” and even sustainability leaders “struggle to make that priority.”
A sharper tension was named in the same breath: “AI topics… are taking more space into leadership reflections.” The concern wasn’t anti-technology; it was about attention and proportionality:
“We know that if we are not acting for a sustainable future, we know that we’ll probably hit a wall… whereas… we don’t really know where AI is taking us.”
This is precisely the kind of tension Pulse is designed to hold: not slogans, but the real question of what gets centred when bandwidth is limited.
6) What Pulse is for: coordination, connection, and commitments
The call ended where a working session should: on practical next moves.
A few commitments emerged that are worth sharing as an invitation to the wider community:
- Share short Pulse updates that capture learning and point to usable artifacts—“almost like a newsletter,” as one participant put it.
- Use Pulse to support partner-matching, especially when funding opportunities appear and time is short.
- Strengthen multiple contact points within institutions, so relationships don’t sit with only one overloaded person.
- Grow entry points through practical micro-structures, including GRLI’s Impact Innovation Circles as an on-ramp for international collaboration and peer learning.
One participant captured the intent crisply: we are scattered together at events—Pulse is where we “bring all of those learnings together online, together as a community.”
A closing reflection: small is not a weakness
Pulse #01 was small. That’s not a problem to solve; it may be the feature to protect.
In one hour, people from different parts of the ecosystem—who had not previously connected—surfaced common pressures, shared practical prototypes, named a live strategic tension, and made concrete offers to collaborate.
That’s the bet: not scale for its own sake, but coherence—and a rhythm that helps learning travel.
If you’re part of the GRLI community and want to plug into Pulse, consider this your invitation. Bring what you’re sensing, what’s keeping you awake, and one practical experiment worth sharing. We’ll do the rest together.
Subscribe to the GRLI calendar and join the Monthly Pulse meetings.
