Executives at the Leading Edge is an exclusive series of online events designed for executive leaders in higher education, featuring provocative keynote inputs from global thought leaders on themes that matter most across resilient leadership, institutional transformation, navigating political contexts, AI-enabled change, and leading on contested topics.
What does it mean to lead a higher education institution through genuinely unprecedented disruption – not the managed uncertainty of strategic planning cycles, but the kind that arrives without warning and demands a response before the dust has settled? That question sat at the heart of the first session in Advance HE’s new Executives at the Leading Edge programme, which brought together senior university leaders from across the globe for a focused, frank and thought-provoking conversation.
Chaired by Professor Yusra Mouzughi, Provost at the University of Birmingham Dubai, the session opened with a quietly arresting observation. Professor Mouzughi described how her first year in post had encompassed a global pandemic’s lingering effects, catastrophic flooding that closed the institution for ten days, and – on the very morning of the session – the acute regional tensions unfolding across the Gulf. “Pandemic, floods, and war,” she reflected. “If there was ever a need for resilience, it would be those three things.” It set a tone: this was not a theoretical exercise.
The pressure points: context and complexity
The first provocation, on context and the external environment, laid out the scale of challenge facing higher education globally. Financial pressures, declining enrolment in many regions, shifting student expectations, the demands of internationalisation, the irreversible arrival of AI, and – perhaps most fundamentally – a growing scepticism about higher education’s value proposition. Professor Ahmad S. Dallal, President of The American University in Cairo, was direct about the stakes: institutions can no longer take for granted that governments, students, or societies will automatically see the worth of what they do. “What cannot be explained cannot be defended,” he argued, “and we will only endure if we know why we should.”
Crucially, he framed these not simply as management problems but as threats to something deeper: institutional autonomy. Who teaches, what is taught, who is admitted – these defining questions of academic independence are increasingly being challenged from outside, and financial fragility is what makes institutions vulnerable to external pressure. Mission and values, he suggested, must function as an anchor, not a luxury, precisely because the context in which they must be defended has become so demanding.
Breakout discussions reflected both the breadth of this challenge and its local variations. Participants identified student experience as the most acute vulnerability – not just because students fund institutions, but because the transformation required to remain relevant to them is profound. The question of staff was equally present: goodwill cannot be assumed indefinitely in an environment of relentless change, and equipping people to feel genuinely confident and capable – particularly around AI – matters as much as any strategic initiative. Underpinning all of it, participants agreed, is financial sustainability: without a viable business model, none of the other conversations can be had.
Governance under pressure
The second provocation, on governance, drew on first-hand experience of one of the most testing processes any institution can undertake. Professor Georgina Randsley de Moura, Acting Vice-Chancellor at the University of Kent, reflected on her institution’s ‘legally committed’ merger with another university to form a new multi-university group – a governance event, she was clear, as much as a strategic one. Major change, she observed, “exposes everything”: how a board understands risk, whether it is genuinely operating at a strategic level or drawn towards operational detail, and – perhaps most revealingly – whether apparent alignment in an executive team is real or merely polite.
Her five lessons were grounded and practical. Start with principles and your ‘why’ before entering detailed governance processes. Surface red lines early – because those that emerge mid-negotiation can derail everything. Build trust with regulators, funders, and governing bodies.
Group discussion echoed and deepened these themes. Participants noted that governance structures designed for more settled times can be ill-suited to the pace of change institutions now face – tied, in particular, to academic cycles that make agility structurally difficult. The recurring image was of governance fragility under stress: the real test of any system is not how it performs when conditions are favourable, but whether it holds when they are not.
Rethinking the role of leadership
The third provocation, from Joan Lurie, founder of Orgonomics, offered, perhaps, the most challenging reframe of all. Drawing on three decades of organisational practice, she argued that the dominant models of leadership and change – fixing broken systems or inspiring people through them – are simply not adequate to the moment. In their place, she offered an ecological lens: organisations are not collections of structures or people, but complex networks of roles, rules, and relationships that have evolved into particular patterns over time. Those patterns define behaviour. And when the context changes fundamentally, as it has for higher education, it is the patterns themselves – the implicit assumptions, the mental maps of how things should work – that must be disrupted.
This reframes what leadership is actually for. The role of the leader, in this view, is not to be the expert who fixes what is broken, but to act as an ‘ecosystem disruptor’: someone who can see how the system is functioning, help it find new networked forms, and create the conditions in which new roles, rules, and relationships can be designed. Resilience, on this account, is not about individuals ‘bouncing back’ – it is the embedded capacity of a system to adapt forward into new forms.
Discussion in the groups took this further. Participants reflected on the tendency – understandable but limiting – to operate in permanent crisis management mode, and on the optimism bias that can sustain it: the assumption that ‘years four and five will look better’, which can keep institutions cycling through the same difficulties rather than genuinely transforming. There was also a notable observation about the sector’s competitive instincts: while institutions compete, they frequently face identical challenges. The shift from competition to collaboration, as Joan Lurie noted, is itself a pattern disruption – and one that every leader can begin to model, regardless of structural incentives.
What participants took away
As the session drew to a close, participants were invited to name what was staying with them. Several themes emerged clearly: the need to create protected space for staff to engage with change, rather than adding it to an already stretched day job; the importance of transparency – sharing financial realities widely enough that change is understood rather than simply imposed; and the value, not to be underestimated, of simply being in a room – even a virtual one – with peers who are holding the same weight.
That last point, perhaps, is the quiet argument for this series itself. Higher education leadership can be a solitary business. The problems are large, the pressures relentless, and the expectation of institutional self-sufficiency deeply ingrained. What sessions like this one offer is something genuinely scarce: time to step back, think collectively, and test one’s own assumptions against the experience of others navigating the same terrain.
The remaining three sessions in the Executives at the Leading Edge series will explore transforming institutions through inclusive leadership, navigating political contexts, and AI-enabled transformation. Together they form a coherent arc for any senior leader grappling with what it means to lead a resilient, values-driven institution through a period of genuine disruption.
