Beyond Peak Centralisation: A New Leadership Paradigm for Universities

Universities are facing an era-defining question: not what we do, but how we lead.

For years, our response to increasing complexity has been to centralise, streamline, standardise, and try to control. In theory, centralisation brought alignment, helped manage compliance, rationalised costs, and gave universities a coherent voice in increasingly competitive systems.

But today, there are signs that this model has run its course.

Innovation is stalling at structural boundaries. Entrepreneurial initiatives struggle to navigate internal processes. Bureaucratic layers are multiplying. Talented staff are becoming demotivated. Partnerships are becoming harder to manage. Public trust is eroding. We are "managing" harder and more, but achieving less.

We may have reached peak centralisation.

At the very moment when society is calling on universities to help solve urgent, complex problems from AI governance to climate adaptation to workforce transitions, our operating models are optimised for coordination, not responsiveness. For control, not creativity.

What’s needed now is a new kind of leadership. Not just better management of the institution, but systemic stewardship of the university as an evolving ecosystem.

From Managing Institutions to Stewarding Systems

In my work across universities, entrepreneurship centres, and innovation ecosystems, I’ve seen a recurring pattern: the most impactful work rarely originates from the centre. It emerges from the edges: labs, institutes, partnerships, student ventures, teaching teams. These are often entrepreneurial responses to unmet needs, social opportunity, or emergent demand.

Yet these efforts often struggle within institutions optimised for stability and accountability. They survive despite, not because of, the large organisational structure and resources surrounding them. What if we embraced this reality and saw the university not as a single organisation but as a federation of entrepreneurial actors?

Each node, be it a faculty, department, research centre, or co-curricular initiative, creates value in its own way. Leadership, in this context, is less about control and more about creating the conditions for alignment, learning, and system-level impact.

That is the core idea of systemic stewardship.

Systemic Stewardship: A New Logic of Leadership

Systemic stewardship is a governance logic and leadership capability designed for complex, fragmented, mission-driven institutions.

It shifts the centre’s role from:

• Controlling to enabling

• Directing to convening

• Planning to sensemaking

• Performance managing to mission curating

And it asks leaders to:

• Shape shared purpose rather than enforce uniformity

• Enable others to lead by building the infrastructure and trust that allows experimentation

• Coordinate across boundaries (disciplinary, functional, sectoral) rather than doubling down on formal hierarchy

• Hold tensions productively rather than prematurely resolving them

Where managerialism seeks clarity and control, stewardship embraces complexity and invests in adaptive capacity. It is a more mature, more relational, and more fit-for-purpose approach in the modern context.

Three Dilemmas Every University Faces—And How Stewardship Helps

Here are three common dilemmas that systemic stewardship can help reframe:

1. Declining public funding vs mission integrity. Universities are under sustained financial pressure. Public investment has plateaued or declined. There is growing reliance on international student fees, commercial activity, and philanthropy. But these income streams can distort institutional purpose or generate new forms of dependence.

Stewardship lens: Stewardship reframes income diversification as purpose-led alignment. It focuses on generating revenue through initiatives that reinforce public value, e.g., engaged research, regional innovation, and capability building, rather than just expanding and commodifying offerings. It treats legitimacy as the foundation of sustainability.

2. External demands for "employability" vs academic freedom. Governments and employers expect universities to deliver job-ready graduates. Academics rightly resist reductive models of education that marginalise critical thinking, civic learning, or disciplinary depth.

Stewardship lens: Steward leaders hold both aims in view. They enable co-designed programmes that integrate employability and inquiry, create space for transdisciplinary learning, and develop shared narratives that reconcile economic and societal contributions. Stewardship protects academic freedom while making it legible to external partners.

3. Interdisciplinary missions that don’t “fit” existing structures. Societal expectations are shifting toward mission-driven work: decarbonisation, digital inclusion, Indigenous knowledge, and health equity. Yet most university structures, including budgets, promotions, and governance, are anchored in faculties and disciplines.

Stewardship lens: Stewardship makes space for cross-cutting platforms that don’t replace faculties but complement them. These platforms are empowered with legitimacy, convening authority, and the connective tissue to translate insight into systemic action.

Leading a Federation of Entrepreneurial Actors

If we accept that the university is not a single entity but a living system, then leadership must evolve accordingly.

The University Executive Team's role becomes one of:

• Narrative strategy: aligning diverse efforts around shared purpose

• Platform building: investing in infrastructure that supports others to act

• Relational authority: building trust across internal and external boundaries

• Mission coherence: connecting distributed innovation to long-term public value

• Leadership development: cultivating stewards at every level - students, academics, and professional staff

A Path Forward for Executive Teams

What might systemic stewardship look like in practical terms? Here are three starting points any university leadership team could adopt:

1. Map your entrepreneurial system

Look beyond the formal structures of portfolios, faculties, and departments. Identify where new value is truly being created in research centres, community partnerships, cross-faculty initiatives, and student-led projects. What conditions allow them to thrive? What holds them back?

2. Reposition the centre as an enabler

Shift central units from gatekeepers to conveners. Repurpose strategic planning into sensemaking and storytelling. Build infrastructure - data, communication vehicles, policies, so they support experimentation. Let "many flowers bloom," and tolerate and learn from failures.

3. Invest in steward leadership

Develop a leadership approach across campus that builds capabilities in systems thinking, political agility, cross-boundary collaboration, and public engagement. Stewardship is not intuitive in legacy institutions; it must be learned and practiced.

Stewardship as a Post-Centralisation Strategy

We are approaching an inflection point. Centralisation may have helped universities weather the challenges of the past decade or so, but it is not fit for what comes next.

What the moment demands is a new logic of leadership that honours complexity, supports distributed initiative, and builds public legitimacy through shared purpose.

Systemic stewardship is already visible in pockets where leaders curate rather than command, where partnerships flourish, and where boundaries blur creatively. (If you want to find such a pocket, the university's entrepreneurship centre is often a good place to start looking!) The opportunity now is to build on the success and learning in these pockets and make it central to how we imagine, structure, and govern the university.

The question is no longer whether universities should be entrepreneurial. It is whether we can lead it in a way that allows its entrepreneurial actors to create enduring public value.

If we do, we may find that beyond peak centralisation lies not chaos, but renewal, and a new form of institution and leadership that is fit for ongoing uncertainty.

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