Leaders as Architects of Change: Three Choices We Made When the Field Gave Us a Blank Canvas

Here is something most leadership books won't tell you: the hardest part of researching leadership isn't finding answers. It is choosing which question to chase when the entire field is on fire.
Three L&D leaders entered the University of Pennsylvania's Executive Doctorate in Chief Learning Officer program with decades of experience and a shared realization that the playbooks they had relied on were failing. The program handed each of them a blank canvas and a single challenge: go research whatever you believe this profession can no longer afford to ignore.
One of us chose collaboration, after watching brilliant people collide and produce nothing for twenty years. One chose adaptability, after seeing organizations celebrate resilience while quietly breaking apart. One chose AI, the defining transformative technology of our age — and that the leaders who understand how to harness it — will be the ones who determine the future of work.
Those three choices became chapters in the Routledge volume Leaders as Architects of Change: Designing Organizations for Connection and Resilience in Times of Uncertainty, a book written by scholar-practitioners alongside global business leaders exploring how organizations can thrive in a BANI world.
In this Author Chat, we tell you what we found. But more importantly, we tell you what we almost missed, what surprised us, what challenged assumptions we didn't know we held, and why these three questions are more connected than any of us expected when we started.
If you have ever sat in a room full of smart people and wondered why nothing is working, this conversation will reframe how you diagnose the problem. If you have ever felt the ground shifting beneath your leadership and reached for a playbook that no longer fits, you will hear how three practitioners stopped reaching and started building.
Come for the stories. Leave asking a better question about your own leadership.