Artful Leaders · The School of Wandering · by Co-founders
A year-long executive programme for curious leaders.
The freedom to wander
Most of us have gone a little numb without noticing it. The mind keeps switching from one message to the next until the switching itself becomes the weather we live in, and a body kept on guard stops tasting the air or lingering over a stone.
If that sounds like your own week, this programme is made for you. It offers no diagnosis and no cure. It offers a year in which the senses are asked back, gently and in the company of people who are tired in the same way.
There is something quietly sad in it too. Life is not lived in the abstract; it is lived in the senses. The years go by, and we arrive having been everywhere and seen very little.
And still, some things are found only when we stop looking for them: the thought that comes on the third mile, the light on an ordinary wall we had passed a thousand times without seeing. The School of Wandering is a continuous executive programme made for days like that. Six times you meet the others in person, and in between the year keeps quietly asking its questions.
For the rest of your life
When we were children we could wander the whole day and come home happy and a little tired, unable to say exactly where we had been. This programme is a way back to that feeling. There are six days together, and the year around them is full. Each encounter opens a question that you continue to explore in your own life, with thoughtful assignments and guidance, and a Book of Wonder where the year gathers itself.
What you take home is more than the memory of a good year. You take a way of seeing the world, and it stays with you for the rest of your life.
You begin to notice what habit had hidden: the quiet signal in a meeting, the possibility nobody has named, the beauty of an ordinary Tuesday.
Away from the next deadline, thought slows down enough to go deeper, and decisions made afterwards carry more of you in them.
Having enjoyed uncertainty in safe company, you meet it at work with curiosity rather than haste, and so do the people you lead.
Somewhere along the way the child who built worlds out of sticks returns, and brings back the lightness that makes new ideas possible.
Sixteen to eighteen people who have seen you wonder, laugh and change. They are the network this programme gives you, and the year is only its beginning.
The journey
01 · Seeing · August 2027
The world of perception
What do we see, and what remains invisible?
Through immersive visual art, light and unexpected perspectives, we explore how our assumptions shape the world we experience.
An encounter that invites us to look at familiar things as if for the first time.
Take with you
A new way of observing the everyday.
02 · Sensing · October 2027
The world beyond words
Can we know more than we can explain?
Through movement, music, sensory exploration and encounters with performing artists, we discover different forms of knowing.
A day to experience intuition, presence and the intelligence of the senses.
Take with you
Small invitations to listen to what cannot always be expressed in words.
03 · Encountering · December 2027
The world of others
What happens when we encounter realities very different from our own?
Through documentary storytelling, art and meaningful conversations, we enter worlds we rarely experience in our everyday lives.
A day devoted to listening, perspective and human connection.
Take with you
An invitation to encounter someone outside your familiar world.
04 · Time · February 2028
The world of deep time
What changes when we step outside deadlines, quarters and calendars?
Through nature, ecology, philosophy and environmental art, we encounter different rhythms and much longer perspectives.
A day to explore continuity, change and our place within something larger.
Take with you
A new perspective on time and what matters.
05 · Imagining · April 2028
The world of possibility
What worlds become possible when we stop asking whether they are realistic?
Through literature, theatre, fiction and creative experimentation, we explore imagination without predetermined outcomes.
A day to play with alternative realities, stories and possibilities.
Take with you
A personal imagination project, with no obligation to make it useful.
06 · Wonder · June 2028
The world you return to
What do you see now that you could not see a year ago?
Our final encounter brings together the experiences, questions, discoveries and relationships of the year. An artistic experience, shared reflection and a memorable dinner conclude the journey.
Not an ending, but a different way of beginning.
Take with you
Your personal Book of Wonder.
The year between
The days together are only the part of the journey you can see. In between, the year goes on quietly in the places where you already live: on the walk to the office, at the kitchen table, in a memory that surfaces unasked.
We have thought about these in-between weeks as carefully as the gatherings. Each month follows a thread from the world we have explored together, giving its questions time to find their way into your own life. The themes below offer a glimpse; the detailed invitations unfold during the year.
Everything is collected in your personal Book of Wonder, so that by June the year is held in one place: observations, images, stories and the discoveries nobody planned.
Gathering · Seeing
What familiarity hides: how habit shapes what we see, and what becomes visible when we question the world we think we know. The month brings an invitation and a little guidance for looking again.
Gathering · Sensing
Knowing before words: what the senses understand before we can explain it, and how that knowledge finds a place in our lives. You are given a way in, and room to try it your own way.
Gathering · Encountering
The world through another life: how another person's experience can unsettle our certainties and widen our sense of what is true. For this theme a specific invitation arrives, with guidance.
Gathering · Time
The time we belong to: what changes in our sense of responsibility when we think in generations rather than quarters. You receive a question to carry, and instructions for carrying it.
Gathering · Imagining
The possible within the ordinary: how imagination opens other ways of living, and what we begin to see when we allow them room. An assignment follows, shaped for this part of the year.
Gathering · Wonder
The people you meet
16–18
The School of Wandering brings together a small, carefully curated group of experienced leaders from different industries, organisations and walks of life.
People who share leadership experience but not necessarily the same worldview. The group is intentionally diverse.
Here, titles matter less than curiosity.
Somewhere along the year something unexpected happens. Grown, accomplished people begin to crawl under things, reach up to touch them and ask what they are for, with the same joy and curiosity they had as children. The School of Wandering gives you back that child, playful and curious, and lets you bring them to work.
The programme creates opportunities for genuine connection, thoughtful conversations and relationships that extend beyond professional roles. Six meetings in person over a year is also a network: people you will still call long after the last one.
The philosophy
To imagine that things could be otherwise is, we think, one of the most precious things a person can do. Imagination does not grow well, though, when every hour has to produce something by evening.
Art lets us understand the world in ways that analysis and everyday language cannot reach. A story lets us live for a while inside someone else's life, and an unexpected encounter can quietly unsettle what we took for granted.
The School of Wandering gathers these experiences into one carefully composed year. It will not hand you ready-made answers. It makes room for new questions, for a deeper kind of attention, and for possibilities nobody saw coming.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.”
Programme details
For the one who signs the invoice
Some who come here have to account for the year to someone else: a board, a chief executive, a chair who asks what it is for. The honest answer is that this is not training and promises no result, and that what a person brings back becomes visible later, in how they sit in a meeting and what they dare to say in one. A company that sends someone often notices, over the year, that decisions carry more of the person in them, that not knowing is survived without hurry, and that the circle around them now reaches outside their own industry.
Exact dates, venues and the artists, philosophers, researchers and practitioners who will shape the programme will be announced soon. Participants will receive a detailed programme once they have registered.
An invitation
Some discoveries cannot be planned, but we can leave room for them.
We are shaping The School of Wandering for a small circle of senior leaders. If something here speaks to you, we would be glad to hear from you.
The circle will be small: sixteen places, no more. Preliminary registrations are open until the end of January 2027; after that, the programme will be offered more widely.
Prefer to write first? info@co-founders.com
Artful Leaders
Organizations already have creativity. What they lack is the ability to combine its different forms.
Breakthroughs begin with better questions and the courage to face the answers.
But insight is not enough. Breakthroughs take energy to move, and trust to explore The Open.
We help leaders recognise and unlock diversity in thinking and turn it into real advantage.
Using your full creative potential should be a no-brainer.
The open is the part of a situation that has no answer yet. It is the room that stays around a real question after the analysis is done and before the decision is made: a market that has shifted under us, a colleague who has stopped saying what they think, a direction that no longer seems to lead anywhere.
Most of us have been trained to close it. Uncertainty is uncomfortable, so we reach for the first plan that makes it quiet, and we call the relief judgement. What is lost in that moment is not time. It is the only room in which anything genuinely new can appear.
Keeping the open open does not mean postponing a decision. It means staying in touch with what is not yet known long enough to notice it, among people you can tell, in front of them, that you do not know yet. That takes energy, because there is no map, and trust, because there is no cover.
Co-founders developed the Artful Leaders Club, where chairs, CEOs and executives meet a few times a year around a question that matters to their own work. The School of Wandering grows out of that Club.
Programme leaders
Founder of Co-founders and Professor of Practice at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, where she works with the Artpreneurship research group. Her research asks how artistic creativity strengthens leadership, a question she has lived with for a very long time.
Partner at Co-founders and a founder of the design studio Idean. He also co-founded Cultural Forces of Finland with Ia and some others. A cultural influencer, he holds one belief: culture is the most underused superpower in education, business and geopolitics, and in life.
Images are atmospheric illustrations and do not depict confirmed participants, venues or programmes.
