Weaving Futures: Leadership in an Intelligent Age

This summer, travelling inland from Spain’s Costa Blanca, I watched the mountains shift from slate blue to golden ochre to deep violet. Valleys suddenly opened up between the crags, where olive groves and almond terraces clung to the slopes and whitewashed villages rested in their shadows. The whole landscape seemed a tapestry of stone and light, patiently interlaced by nature and people over millennia into patterns that endure.

Threads that bind societies

In one village market, hand-woven rugs displayed colours and motifs passed down for centuries. Across cultures, textiles have long bound societies together—threads carrying warmth, identity, and meaning.

Even the Jacquard loom’s punch cards foreshadowed the logic of programming, threads and codes entwined long before algorithms shaped our worlds. Learning, too, has always been an interwoven practice: ideas, people, and cultures combined into durable patterns across generations.

Leadership’s hand on the loom

Today, education faces unrelenting pressure for efficiency. Partnerships and mergers proliferate. Yet genuine transformation cannot be treated as a corporate deal. It must be crafted from cultures, missions, and people. Pull too hard and the fabric tears; neglect the pattern and it loses coherence. Leadership is the hand on the loom, ensuring resilience, beauty, and integrity. Globally, universities are braiding new connections: regional alliances, industry collaboration, and the integration of artificial intelligence. Each strand carries both risk and promise. Thoughtfully combined, they can create resilient, future-ready systems. Carelessly handled, they unravel.
 

Vision and Detail

The leaders who thrive in these transformations work at two levels. They hold the vision—why combine these strands, what opportunities will emerge, and how learners and communities will benefit. And they attend to detail—regulation, systems, and the reassurance that staff and students will not lose their identities. Without vision, the cloth is hollow. Without detail, the structure collapses. Lasting change is woven from courage, patience, and empathy. It carries risks such as the loss of heritage, the collision of cultures but it can also open remarkable potential; shared resources, innovation, and new capacities to serve humanity in the intelligent age.

 Shaping Futures

Leadership now also means fusing human judgement with machine capability. AI can swiftly bring efficiency, scale, and insight, but without human empathy and responsibility at the loom, the result soon grows brittle. Duty of care requires leaders to choose carefully which threads of automation to integrate, and how to ensure the result remains recognisably human.

Leadership in these moments is not about closing transactions. It is about shaping futures—futures strong enough to hold, open enough to adapt, and human enough to matter. Above all, it is about acting with empathy, responsibility, and a duty of care—qualities that keep our collective fabric human in the intelligent age.

So, how can you grasp the loom in demanding uncertain futures? At OEB25, leaders from across the globe will gather in a unique forum: a safe space to test ideas, exchange perspectives, and interlace international experience. Together, we will ask: what does it take to combine threads wisely? How do we preserve what must endure, while shaping what is ready to evolve? And how can partnerships—across institutions and with intelligent technologies—strengthen rather than weaken our shared fabrics?

Written for OEB Global 2025 by Gilly Salmon.