Overview

In the face of AI’s rapid disruption, the structures that once defined academic leadership—committees, hierarchies, and strategic plans—proved too slow to adapt. Yet beneath those formal layers, new networks began to form: agile, lateral communities of practice where ideas, strategies, and resources moved fluidly across institutional boundaries.

Led by Dr. Angela Gunder (Opened Culture, University of Arizona) with co-authors Dr. Melissa Vito, Dr. Claudia Arcolin, and Dr. Marcela Ramirez, this study followed those emergent connections across universities and associations worldwide. Through interviews, cross-institutional dialogues, and leadership convenings, the team identified how innovation spreads in a manner more akin to mycelium than machinery—branching, recombining, and adapting in response to shared challenges.

The research revealed that AI has not simply transformed educational tools—it has transformed the ecology of leadership itself. Leaders now act less as directors and more as stewards of dynamic systems, tending the conditions that allow innovation to thrive. Drawing from these insights, the team launched the Academic Innovation Council, a global initiative connecting higher education leaders who share a commitment to cultivating cultures of openness, experimentation, and care.

Three ecological principles emerged from this work:

• • Collaboration as mutualism: Sustainable leadership requires reciprocal exchange across boundaries.
  • Creation as regeneration: Innovation grows from existing roots; every experiment feeds new learning.
  • Connection as pollination: Ideas travel and evolve when shared across contexts, creating adaptive capacity in complex systems.

These findings reimagine leadership as a living practice—one that evolves through communication, diversity, and continuous renewal. Rather than responding to AI as an external disruption, institutions can use this moment to replant their roots: clarifying values, redistributing resources, and cultivating the ecosystems of practice that make enduring transformation possible.

AI and the Future of Institutional Leadership closes with an invitation: to see leadership not as a solitary role, but as a shared act of stewardship within a global forest of learning.