What Happens When You Stop Talking About Change and Actually Create It
- Dhiva Krishanan
- 21 hours ago
- 6 min read
In early May, Eric Luo, Chief Financial Officer of Good Mood, travelled to Malaysia as part of the company's early-stage business expansion across Southeast Asia. Joined by William Tseng, co-founder of Cultural Impact, the itinerary included the usual markers of a regional visit: meetings, introductions, and a sense of the landscape. But the moments that stayed with him were not in a boardroom.
It was a school.
Ideas International began as a school committed to giving refugee students access to quality secondary education, but it has grown into something more layered than that. Today, it operates as a social enterprise, increasingly welcoming international students on full fees while continuing to support UNHCR-registered students through external funding. It is, in that sense, a school in genuine transition: holding its founding values around inclusion and access while building the financial sustainability of a functioning international school. One of the people steering that transition is Jan-Willem Smulders, board director and founder, who sat down with Eric for an honest conversation about what that reality looks like from the inside.
The conversation between Eric, William, and Jan-Willem was candid. They talked about the reality of what these schools face. The behavioural challenges, the mental health pressures, and the gap between what schools want to offer students and what resources and systems currently allow. They talked about wellbeing support: what exists, what is missing, and what genuine, lasting support for young people actually requires.
What emerged from that conversation was not just alignment in values. It was the beginning of something more concrete.
Two Companies, One Direction
Earlier this year, Good Mood and Cultural Impact formalised a joint venture; a partnership grounded in a shared belief that the most important work in education and organisational life is not surface-level. It is not a workshop here, a poster there, a policy that sits in a drawer. It is the slower, more demanding work of changing how people actually relate to one another.
Cultural Impact is a boutique consultancy based in Kuala Lumpur, with over thirty years of experience working across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Their core focus is intercultural dialogue: helping people live and work together more honestly, more effectively, and with greater awareness of the cultural forces shaping how they think and behave.
But over the years, that work has evolved. As Cultural Impact's founders Marie Tseng and William Tseng describe it, the work was never really just about culture in the abstract. It was always about what dialogue genuinely requires. Not just talking. Listening without rushing to correct. Learning to hold discomfort. Noticing what we assume is normal. Staying in a conversation long enough for something new to become possible.
Good Mood shares this orientation. Their vision for expanding into Southeast Asia is not purely commercial, and the visit to Ideas International was a signal of that. A deliberate choice to understand the human terrain: what schools need, what children need, and where technology and human expertise might work together to meet those needs more meaningfully.
The world (both companies would agree) keeps making the case for this kind of work. Differences are not going away. If anything, it is becoming more visible, more layered, and more complex — in our teams, our schools, our families, our communities. Dialogue is not a soft skill. It is infrastructure.
Exchange Theatre: When the Stage Becomes a Classroom
One of the most distinctive tools Cultural Impact brings to schools is Exchange Theatre, a programme developed and delivered in partnership with theatre practitioners at KL Shakespeare Players.
Exchange Theatre is not just a performance, but an experience. Actors portray realistic, relatable scenarios such as a disagreement between friends, a moment where someone is made to feel less than, and a situation where the expected thing to say and the right thing to say are not the same. The audience watches. Then they are invited in.
They can stop the scene. They can step into it. They can redirect the actors, test a different response, and see what happens when someone chooses to speak up, stay silent, or push back with care rather than anger.
Shortly after Eric's visit, Cultural Impact and KL Shakespeare Players ran an Exchange Theatre showcase at Fugee School. The session centred on mental health and friendship under a programme called Out of Step. A scenario portrayed involved a disagreement among four friends with divergent ideals about how to handle a once-beloved hobby, now a chore. One held strict rules on how the activity should be done, while the other was more concerned about having fun and enjoying the process. They also found two more friends caught in the middle of the disagreement, quietly experiencing discomfort. When students were invited to step in and redirect the scene, a male student walked up and told the characters, simply and clearly, that a compromise was necessary and that both parties must find balance. They were there as friends, all hoping to have a great time together, not to prove that one is better or above another.
Other students voiced different views. Some disagreed. The room held it all.
That is precisely the point. Exchange Theatre does not tell students what to think. It creates the conditions in which they can think out loud, in front of each other, with the safety of fiction and the reality of genuine feeling. As one student reflected afterwards: I should not be afraid to stand up for myself. Another: I shouldn't limit myself to others' expectations; instead, I should do whatever makes me happy.
Cultural Impact brings Exchange Theatre not only to international schools like Ideas International and Fugee School, but to national schools and community settings across Malaysia — anywhere there are young people who need a space to practice being human with each other, before the stakes become higher.
Building Intercultural Bridges: The Long Game
A single session can ignite something. But Cultural Impact has always known that a spark is not the same as a fire. This is why Exchange Theatre is designed to work alongside a longer, structured programme called Building Intercultural Bridges (BIB).
BIB is a year-long intercultural learning module developed by Dhiva Krishanan, Cultural Impact's Education and Research Lead. It was designed in direct response to something she and Marie observed repeatedly in her early conversations with students and teachers at Ideas International: young people are being exposed to polarising, complex, often harmful content earlier than any previous generation, and they have almost no structured space in school to process it.
The module is not a class in the traditional sense. There are no correct answers, no memorisation, no grades. Students lead the discussion. The facilitator holds the space. The curriculum progresses year by year; from younger students learning to notice and name differences in their own communities, through to older students using cultural frameworks to navigate genuinely complex questions about power, identity, justice, and belonging.
After two full years of piloting and refinement at Ideas International (beginning with a single Year 9 class in 2024 and expanding to an eleven-class, school-wide rollout in 2026), the results are promising. Among upper secondary students surveyed after completing the module, 90% reported feeling safe speaking in class, 93.8% said they were better able to understand others' perspectives, and 83% reported working more effectively in groups. Perhaps most meaningfully, 70.4% said they believed they would be at a disadvantage later in life if they had never had access to this kind of learning.
These are not just numbers. They are a quiet argument for what education can be when it treats students as people with inner lives, not just exam candidates.
What Comes Next
The joint venture between Good Mood and Cultural Impact is, in many ways, still in its early stages. But the direction is clear.
Both organisations believe that the most urgent problems in wellbeing, education and human development (loneliness, polarisation, the erosion of empathy, the inability to sit with discomfort or hold a disagreement without breaking) will not be solved by more content, but by better conditions. Conditions where honest conversation is possible. Where psychological support is prioritised. Where differences are treated as data rather than a threat. And most importantly, where young people — and the adults around them — are given the skills and space to relate to one another with greater clarity and care.
What started as a conversation between Eric Luo, William Tseng, and Jan-Willem Smulders has opened into something with real momentum. The work being done daily in classrooms through Exchange Theatre and Building Intercultural Bridges already demonstrates what becomes possible when that kind of conversation is taken seriously.
What makes this partnership worth paying attention to is not its ambition but its method. Leaders not talking about change, but practising it, one honest conversation at a time.
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