Reinventing education in an era of profound change
- Dec 3, 2025
- 4 min read
The following insights are drawn from a November 2025 roundtable focused on the unprecedented pace of global change and the imperative for education systems to reinvent themselves to survive. The provocateur for this roundtable was Professor Blair Sheppard, Global Leader for Strategy and Leadership at PwC and Professor Emeritus at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University.
We are living and working in a transformative era. Every industry faces an existential crisis driven by four overwhelming global trends whose speed and scope have been drastically underestimated by leaders worldwide. Our collective challenge is no longer uncertainty; it’s the inevitability of change on a profound scale.
This shift has rendered traditional management tools (like scenario planning and portfolio theory) essentially useless, instead requiring innovative approaches and mindsets to adapt our systems, business models and individual ways of thinking and acting. Take climate, for example: fixing the climate crisis requires the complete reinvention of multiple industrial systems (including energy, food and defence), representing a multi-trillion dollar overhaul.
In this context, education has a dual responsibility: not only must it reinvent its own obsolete model to survive, but it must also accelerate the transitions all other industrial systems need to engage in.
Polarisation and the fractured world
If these macro challenges are inevitable and the need for action is obvious, why is global progress stalling? The roundtable identified the "fractured world" as the hardest trend to overcome and the primary obstacle to collective action. In practice, this means that social and political divisions prevent the necessary consensus on issues like climate change, making large-scale, unified solutions "virtually impossible."
Participants pointed out that higher education has compounded this issue by showing a lack of acknowledgement of the divided world. Universities have a crucial role to play in preparing people to navigate polarisation, helping them learn to evaluate ideas and information dispassionately, and deconstruct harmful rhetoric.
To achieve systemic reform, we need to overcome these divisions — and their symptoms, such as cancel culture, — as only by doing so can we unblock collaboration and encourage constructive engagement with opposing views.
Shifting from critics to agents
Roundtable participants put forward that the core cultural pivot required by education is a shift from critique to action, moving from producing passive commentators to resilient, purposeful creators. Graduates with a strong sense of purpose and direction are the ones who will actually take these overwhelming trends and turn them into a positive future.
As Blair put it, the central question for educational leaders must become: "How do you graduate students with a sense of agency?"
Doing so requires a dual pedagogical focus:
Agency: Instilling the confidence and practical competencies to take action in complex environments.
Character: Pairing agency with character and ethical reflection to ensure students consider the moral implications of the world they are creating.
What’s more, the entire education system must accept that the old model of high exclusivity is a liability. There is no shortage of success stories from graduates of state universities achieving parity with — or even outperforming — those from elite schools. As Prof Sheppard argued, a university’s quality should be measured by its success in creating “useful citizens”, not by its ability to exclude.
The path to reinvention at scale
The massive scale of the challenge can be overwhelming, but the path forward lies in accelerating innovations that already exist and fundamentally changing how talent is developed.
Rather than waiting for grand, unwieldy global solutions, the answer lies in synchronous local action and innovation that adds up to genuine impact. As one participant argued, we must focus on "minimal viable ecosystem ways" to solve problems locally.
For the education system, there are a number of principles that can help them to accelerate reinvention at scale:
Reject legacy: Acknowledge that the current model no longer works and move from the theoretical to the practice by focusing on the physical systems that AI and climate change are forcing us to reinvent.
Learn from fresh perspectives: Nations with wealth must have the humility to study emerging nations (such as in Africa and Southeast Asia), which are "building it right the first time" and possess the youth-driven energy to create the future.
Create the ecosystem: Education must shift from exclusively producing PhDs to creating an ecosystem of talent. As one participant stressed, we need “non-PhDs who have PhD-level insight”, focused on implementation, collaboration and solving problems in industry.
Accelerate existing solutions: Focus on adopting and scaling innovations that already exist (such as long-storage batteries, new farming techniques) across these reinvented industrial systems.
By adopting these principles, universities move from being reactors to critics to accelerators of systemic change, fulfilling their responsibility to society.
Thank you to our roundtable partners: the Global Business School Network, International Coalition for Sustainable Infrastructure, ABET, Lenovo 360, Instructure, Engineering for One Planet and Tyton Partners.
Thank you also to everyone who attended this roundtable. We look forward to continuing this urgent dialogue as we actively work with partners across education and industry to build innovative models that prioritise human qualities in an AI-driven future.
