Last week, we gathered in Chicago with community college presidents, chancellors and senior executives for a leadership workshop on navigating the Intelligent Era. This convening marked a vital milestone: the culmination of the CCLC1000 leadership journey that officially began in Santa Fe. (CCLC1000 is a Community College Leadership Council play on the notion of the next 1,000 days following ChatGPT’s first 1,000 days.)
Our participants represented 12 states: California, Oklahoma, Virginia, Illinois, Colorado, Iowa, New York, Oregon, Kansas, New Mexico, Washington and Arizona. They came from vastly different economic environments, rural communities, regional economies and major metropolitan hubs. Yet despite these diverse institutional circumstances, everyone shared a common reality.
We are all living on the frontier.
For some, the frontier is technological, driven by artificial intelligence redefining what machines can do and what humans must learn. For others, it is demographic, marked by shifting migration patterns and aging populations. For many, it is economic, as industries restructure and traditional occupations evolve.
The core challenge facing higher education is not any single wave of change. It is the convergence of these waves all at once. Our Chicago workshop, “Wayfinding Through the Intelligent Era: From Signals to Reimagined Possibilities,” tackled a foundational question: How do we lead across terrain we do not yet fully understand without losing sight of what matters most?
The evolution of human capability
To understand our current moment, it helps to examine the broader arc of human technological development. Each era builds upon the last, expanding human capability while shifting what society must learn.
- The Pre-Industrial Era: Long before industrial machinery, human societies developed extraordinary capabilities through agriculture, writing, mathematics, navigation and science. Consider Polynesian wayfinders navigating vast stretches of the Pacific Ocean without modern instruments. By observing stars, ocean swells, winds and birds, they maintained a sense of direction while interpreting changing conditions. Later, Gutenberg’s printing press around 1450 expanded the circulation of knowledge, proving that human ingenuity and shared learning have always been powerful forces of transformation.
- The Industrial Era: Beginning in the mid-18th century, steam power, mechanization and mass production amplified human physical muscle. While industrialization dramatically expanded productive capacity, it also birthed the rigid organizational structures many colleges still rely on today: standardized processes, hierarchical decision-making and systems designed for scale rather than agility.
- The Digital Era: During the late 20th century, semiconductors, personal computers and the internet transformed how information was stored, analyzed and shared. Yet many institutions responded by merely digitizing existing processes, leaving underlying industrial assumptions intact.
The Intelligent Era: Today, AI systems participate directly in reasoning, creating, discovering and taking action.
To grasp the magnitude of this shift, consider the historic matches between AlphaGo and grandmaster Lee Sedol. AlphaGo’s Move 37 stunned the world by executing an unorthodox, highly creative strategy that no human expert would have anticipated, proving that machine intelligence can transcend conventional rules. Yet the deeper lesson of that encounter lies in Move 78. In a later game, Lee Sedol responded with a brilliant, highly improbable human countermove known as “God’s touch,” a flash of intuition and creative agency that confounded the AI and secured a historic victory.
The Intelligent Era presents us with both dimensions of this dynamic. AI expands computational power and automates complex tasks, but human agency provides the intuition, ethical grounding and judgment required to direct those capabilities.
This tension brings us to the central question of our time: When technology can increasingly perform the work, how do human beings develop the capability to understand, evaluate, improve and responsibly direct that work?
We call this the Human Capability Paradox.
Three elements of Wayfinding Leadership
When the environment itself is constantly changing, traditional strategic planning assumptions fall short. Leadership in the Intelligent Era requires Wayfinding Leadership, structured around three interconnected elements.
1. Conditions: Reading the reality of the frontier
On the frontier, conditions do not wait for strategic plans to catch up. They shift concurrently across technology, demographics and economics.
Traditional Polynesian wayfinders survived the open ocean not by predicting every storm, but by reading the interplay of stars and shifting sea swells. In leadership, we must make the same distinction between our enduring stars and our immediate conditions.
Our stars are our core commitments: educational purpose, student success, equity, human dignity and community stewardship. These must remain constant. But the signals defining our daily environment, changing labor markets, evolving student expectations, and intelligent automation, demand that we read the frontier as it is, rather than as we wish it to be. We cannot pilot a frontier institution using maps drawn for an industrial past.
2. Frameworks: See the bigger picture
Recognizing a signal is only the first step. Leaders need robust frameworks to interpret its meaning:
- The Hummingbird Effect: Innovations produce second- and third-order consequences far beyond their original purpose. For example, automating routine entry-level tasks with AI may boost immediate productivity, but if we fail to redesign developmental pathways, we risk starving our pipeline of future experts.
- The Adjacent Possible: New possibilities emerge from existing capabilities. By leveraging AI, colleges can reimagine learning environments, such as turning campus infrastructure into a Living Learning Lab where students work directly with real-time building data, energy systems and authentic operational challenges.
- Measurement Governance: More data does not automatically equal better understanding. We must guard against Goodhart’s Law, the McNamara Fallacy, the Cobra Effect and Surviorship Bias, ensuring we measure actual student comprehension and cognitive growth rather than just superficial task completion.
3. Navigation: Move from insight to action
Wayfinding Leadership relies on a continuous operational cycle rather than a static plan:
Sense – Interpret – Orient – Imagine – Choose – Act – Learn – Adjust
This iterative loop equips institutions to navigate uncertainty responsibly, adjusting course as new evidence emerges.
Stewardship and the road ahead
Wayfinding is inseparable from institutional stewardship. Leaders must evaluate the whole institution across core layers: students and their experience, mission and academics, student services, operations, technology and data, and energy and facilities, all anchored by a strong institutional focus on our people, culture, sound governance and sustainability.
We concluded our Chicago gathering by asking leaders to translate these insights into concrete action over the next 30 days and 90 days. True leadership is demonstrated not by the ambition of a strategic plan, but by the daily decisions we make and our willingness to learn from their outcomes.
This entire journey from Santa Fe to Chicago, and the collaborative work that sustained it, would not have been possible without the generous support of our sponsors: Educate+Innovate, Lumina and N2N. Their partnership has been vital to our shared mission.
As we bring the CCLC1000 work to this milestone, the diversity of our communities remains striking. Twelve states, distinct economies and varied histories, all navigating the same changing frontier.
We do not need a perfect map of the future. We need a reliable sense of purpose, the capability to read our changing environment, and the judgment to shape what comes next. The stars remain, the waters are shifting and the voyage is ours to make.
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Lee D. Lambert is chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District in California.
Leslie Valmonte is the founder and principal consultant at Bridge 5D Consulting and a faculty member at Chaffey College (California).
