W.I.P Labs Creative Arts Exploration / Management schools
For business and management schools
Not a course about social change. A sustained encounter with the people making it.
Business schools worldwide are asking how to produce leaders capable of navigating the social, ecological and political crises of the moment. Central Saint Martins with Birkbeck, Stanford GSB’s social innovation and ecopreneurship curriculum, and the SMU Cox joint degree with Meadows School are all answers to that question. What is largely absent from Indian management education is a programme that puts students into direct, sustained creative encounter with the people and organisations actually doing the work.
Arts for Social Change
Eight weeks, two credits, two sessions a week. Each week a different practitioner enters the room and students work rather than listen: Forum and Image Theatre with Aagaz, a mural planning session with the Aravani Art Project, participatory journalism with Khabar Lahariya, devising with Jangama Collective, a Parai workshop with Adavi. The analytical frame follows the lived encounter. The programme deliberately avoids the language of CSR and impact metrics.
Assessment: process journal 30 per cent · collaborative public work or community intervention 40 per cent · critical essay 30 per cent
Management for Social Change
Ten weeks, three credits, with field engagement. Students apply management tools to real problems faced by real organisations, and are required to question whether those tools are adequate. Case studies run live: Khabar Lahariya on alternate business models, Aagaz on governance without hierarchy, Aravani on funder relationships and mission drift, Adavi on inclusive organisational design. Teams present final work to the partner organisation’s leadership, and the organisation responds.
Assessment: organisational analysis 20 per cent · strategic plan for a live partner 50 per cent · critical reflection on the limits of management tools 30 per cent
Arts-Based Learning: leadership capability through arts practice
Distinct from the social change programmes. These build what management education most struggles to teach: deep listening, presence, improvisational thinking, collaborative decision-making and comfort with productive uncertainty. They are not team-building exercises.
The Improvising Leader
1 day to 1 week · Baan G with DIO practitionersFree improvisation as a leadership practice. Making good decisions without a script, listening at full attention, leading and following fluidly inside a group. No musical background required.
Deep listening · Improvisational thinking · Group decision-making · Leadership and followership
Listening as Leadership
1 day or semester elective · originally developed for IIM AhmedabadDeep listening and sonic awareness as leadership tools. Acoustic ecology exercises, field recording, structured listening and sound design, developing the capacity to hear what others miss.
Active listening · Presence · Attention to the unspoken · Communication depth
Theatre of Presence
2 days to 1 week · applied theatre practitionersPresence, communication and the ability to read a room, through physical theatre exercises, ensemble performance and structured public presentation. Executive communication addressed by doing rather than by instruction.
Executive presence · Narrative · Empathy · Managing ambiguity
Sound, Story and Strategy
2 days to 1 week · Baan GSound design, narrative construction and sonic storytelling as tools for communication and strategy. Sound, structure, rhythm and silence as instruments of meaning.
Narrative thinking · Strategic communication · Brand and identity · Persuasion through form
Object, Material and Making
2 days · Anurupa Roy and Adheep DasPuppetry, object theatre and material-based making as tools for systems thinking and the management of complexity. Participants build objects, construct narratives through material, and present the work.
Systems thinking · Creative problem-solving · Working with complexity · Material intelligence
Art Immersion
1 to 3 days · fully customisableA curated immersive experience combining sound, movement, theatre and visual practice, designed for leadership groups, whole cohorts or cross-functional teams. Our most flexible offering, structured around the specific context of the institution.
Leadership presence · Team dynamics · Creative thinking · Productive vulnerability
Live partner organisations
Student teams are matched with a real organisation from the social change ecosystem for the duration of the programme. We maintain standing relationships with all of these.
Khabar Lahariya
India’s only all-women rural news network, built by Dalit women from Bundelkhand.
Aagaz Theatre Trust
Applied theatre for active citizenship, led by young people from Nizamuddin Basti, Delhi.
Aravani Art Project
Transgender-led public art collective in Bengaluru, working with institutional commissions while staying rooted in community practice.
Adavi Arts Collective
Anticaste folk arts collective in Bengaluru, built on the principle that anyone can play the Parai.
Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.Bertolt Brecht
Shorter formats exist for institutions that cannot accommodate a full elective: a two to three day intensive, a one-week sprint with one practitioner a day, a monthly masterclass series across a semester, or a one-week live challenge embedded with a partner organisation.
The next step is a thirty-minute call.
Which cohort, which semester, how much studio time you can protect, and what you want them to have made by the end of it. We come back with a course outline written for your credit structure.
+91 73887 28268