In early April, GRLI convened two virtual touchpoints of the Deans & Directors Collective, hosted by SPJIMR. The sessions were designed as a peer-learning collaboratory—not a webinar—where the “content” comes from what Deans and senior leaders are actually carrying: live questions, trade-offs, experiments underway, and the constraints that shape what is possible. From the outset, the framing was grounded in a living-systems view: in complex settings, means and ends are not separable, and “the process we use to get to the future is the future we get.”
How the Collective works
The flow is intentionally simple and repeatable. It begins with Whole Person introductions—brief, relational, and human—because leadership challenges are rarely only technical. Then participants move into small groups to surface (1) what they are carrying, (2) a live question they want peers to help them think with, and (3) what they can offer others. Before any formal input, the room is invited to name a single “statement of intent” or a question they are not willing to drop. This becomes a shared reference point for the remainder of the session.
Because the two touchpoints were shaped around global time zones, the convening also tested an asynchronous bridge: plenary excerpts and a short “what we heard” brief were shared across both sessions, so learning could travel in both directions even when not everyone could attend both live calls. The Whole Person bios served as part of that bridge—helping participants arrive already oriented to the people in the room, rather than starting from zero.
SPJIMR’s “Wise Innovation” viewing point
Dean Varun Nagaraj opened both sessions as the first Dean voice—explicitly not as a keynote speaker, but as host. He shared a personal pathway that has shaped his interest in wise innovation: decades in Boston and Silicon Valley innovation roles, followed by a later move into academia after becoming increasingly concerned about innovation pursued without sufficient attention to consequences.
Varun offered a working definition that helped anchor the conversation. Innovation includes novelty and risk, but what matters is impact, and the judgments that shape that impact. He contrasted the concept with more explicitly normative framings (such as “responsible innovation”): ethics, responsibility, and sustainability are essential, yet real leadership decisions often play out in uncertain and ambiguous contexts where trade-offs are not clean. In that sense, “wise innovation” points to a practical capacity: context-sensitive judgment under uncertainty, exercised over time, and accountable to consequences.
SPJIMR’s contribution was also practical. Rather than presenting a model to replicate, Varun described experiments the school is trying—some working better than others—especially at the boundary between academia and practice:
- Incentivising faculty to write practitioner-facing pieces (press and popular articles), alongside traditional research incentives, to signal that dissemination matters.
- Producing a magazine that translates highly ranked research into usable practice insights for industry—while acknowledging that distribution and uptake remain persistent challenges.
- Working with startup ecosystems through a national “pitch-a-thon” and student engagement, noting that startups often engage more readily when the exchange of value is clear.
- Experimenting with an executive education model built around real organisational problems: identify priority challenges, provide targeted learning inputs, and stay alongside teams as they work those problems over time.
In the second session, Varun also shared a candid observation: efforts to introduce more systems thinking and critical thinking into an MBA curriculum can meet resistance from students who are understandably focused on immediate employability. That tension led to a broader reframe: instead of treating the MBA as a bounded product, what would it look like to design management education as a long relationship—a 30–40 year learning arc—in which faculty remain relevant voices in alumni learning ecosystems? He suggested that new technologies could help, but emphasised that this is disruptive to how universities currently imagine themselves.
What participants surfaced
Across both sessions, the most valuable material came from the participants’ questions and the patterns that formed between them. Several topics recurred, not as abstract themes, but as lived tensions.
1) Time horizons, acceleration, and formation
A number of Deans described pressures to move faster—shorter programmes, faster throughput, “efficiency” narratives—and the unease that comes with trying to accelerate what is, at root, a formative process. The concern was not about change itself; it was about losing something essential when time horizons compress. One participant used a simple metaphor: you can rush a cake, but something gives—either the outside burns or the inside stays uncooked—and over time this affects trust and institutional legitimacy.
This also connected to a deeper question many institutions are now facing: what does it mean to educate for human agency and judgment in a context where technologies (including AI) and short-term economic incentives shape attention and decision-making?
2) Incentives, KPIs, and the “locked” system
A second thread was how difficult it is to shift what institutions reward. Participants were not debating whether impact and dissemination matter; they were describing practical barriers. If salaries, promotion pathways, and prestige are tied to old measures, leaders cannot simply announce new priorities and expect the system to follow. One Dean named it plainly: the highest-paid faculty are often paid for yesterday’s KPI logic, and those contracts and expectations persist. This is the kind of issue that benefits from peer exchange—not because it is easy, but because transitional approaches can sometimes be designed when leaders compare how they are navigating constraints.
This also raised a broader question: where is the leverage point for change? Is it inside schools, or in the external measurement systems that shape behaviour—rankings, accreditation, and other signals?
3) Leverage points in a complex system
Participants explored two related ideas. One was the notion of a “hot spot”: a single node in the system where change could trigger wider effects—faculty incentives, rankings, accreditation metrics, or some combination. The other was a living-systems counterpoint: rather than searching for a single starting point, perhaps the more important capability is to “start anywhere, follow everywhere”—to learn how change spreads across contexts and institutions, and how experiments travel without becoming slogans.
This wasn’t resolved—and it may not need to be. The value was in recognising that leadership work here is not only about choosing a lever; it is about building the collective capacity to carry learning across boundaries.
4) Impact beyond the classroom: ecosystems, stakeholders, and centres
A consistent interest was impact outside the immediate student cohort: engagement with business, policy, communities, and wider ecosystems, especially in relation to socio-ecological challenges. Participants surfaced both aspiration and difficulty: stakeholder engagement is necessary, yet complex to manage across different expectations and power dynamics.
One promising practical avenue emerged: many institutions represented have centres, institutes, or convening platforms already. A possible next step is to explore a light network-of-centres approach—sharing speakers, exchanging practice insights, and pooling convening capacity—so the effort of “impact work” becomes less isolated and more mutually reinforcing.
5) Structural imagination: beyond incremental reform
Finally, the conversation periodically touched a more foundational question: if institutions are deeply shaped by inherited structures and incentives, what would we design if we could begin again? One participant framed it as a thought experiment: if resources and borders were not constraints, what would a “new business school” look like—especially if wise innovation were truly a central organising idea?
This question is not a rejection of existing schools. It is an invitation to keep imagination alive while doing the practical work of change within constraints.
A set of learnings worth carrying forward
Taken together, the two sessions offered a few grounded learnings that may be useful beyond the room:
- The convening method matters. A peer space that starts with whole-person presence and holds inquiry carefully can surface realities that often remain hidden in formal settings.
- Wise innovation points to judgment, not slogans. The challenge is less defining values and more practicing discernment in grey zones over time, with accountability to consequences.
- Time horizons shape everything. The pressure to accelerate is real; so is the need for formation, reflection, and relational learning that cannot be rushed without cost.
- Incentives are the hard terrain. Many leaders want different outcomes, but need transitional designs that respect institutional commitments while shifting what is rewarded.
- Impact requires architecture. Centres, local engagement, translation of research for practice, and student/alumni learning loops are possible nodes—yet they require sustained attention to dissemination and value exchange.
The tone of both sessions was not one of certainty. It was more like careful work: leaders naming the tensions they are living, and testing small, practical ways to move. That is, perhaps, where wise innovation begins—not as a destination, but as a practice.
