There is no other choice for community college leaders than to be forward-thinking. Bob Johansen, a distinguished fellow with the Institute for the Future. will discuss how forward-thinking leaders can ensure their colleges are future-ready. Johansen, who spoke at a session during AACC 2026 in Seattle this spring, answers a few questions about navigating chaos, the dominance of artificial intelligence and resilience.
(Editor’s note: This interview comes from AACC’s Community College Journal. It has been updated for clarity.)
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In this BANI ( brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible) world, can leaders find a way to plan for the future while mired in the daily chaos?
In our book [Leaders Make the Future:10 New Skills to Humanize Leadership with Generative AI], we develop a Positive BANI. Below is our checklist that will help you flip the BANI threats to positive:
- Brittle: Be bendable, with resilient clarity stories — but nobody can have certainty.
- Anxious: Be attentive, with active empathy and kindness for people and communities.
- Nonlinear: Be neuroflexible, with practiced improv techniques.
- Incomprehensible: Be interconnected, to see whole systems with full-spectrum thinking that avoids outdated categories and labels.
The BANI Future will reward clarity but punish certainty.
The American Association of Community Colleges released a report and tools in the fall – “Resilient by Design” – to help colleges become more resilient. Are there exercises colleges can do or tools they can use to build resilience?
I like the “Resilient by Design” framing. We say leaders need to tell resilient clarity stories. You need to be very clear about the direction you want to go, but very flexible about how you get there. All leaders need to be great storytellers. Our brains are wired for stories; if people don’t hear stories, they make them up.
Artificial Intelligence isn’t going away, and a lot of colleges are grappling with how (and if) to use it – both in the classroom and in administrative offices. What advice do you have for college leaders when it comes to AI?
The best advice is to be open-minded and experimental. It is too early to be certain about much of anything. We’ve just finished a new book on the impacts of Generative AI on leaders and leadership. To the right is a summary of our findings.
The [first list, below] is the typical portrayal and issues that are being discussed regarding GenAI. The [second list] is our forecast of where we will be 10 years from now. AI will certainly be important for college leaders, but you will need to prototype your way to success. In Silicon Valley, some of us follow the motto “fail early, fail often, fail cheaply.” Beware of people who think they understand this new medium; nobody truly understands where it is going yet.
GenAI: What will be the biggest impacts on leadership for the BANI Future?
Present-forward view from 2025:
- Efficiency and speed
- Prompts and answer-finding
- Automation
- Certainty seeking
- Personal agents
- Guardrails needed
- Avoiding hallucinations
- Increasingly secular worldview
Future-back view from 2035:
- Effectiveness and calm
- Mind-stretching conversations
- Your augmentation
- Your clarity story
- Human/agent swarms
- Bounce ropes with stanchions
- Meaning-making
- Re-enchanting our world
