Abstract:

Generative AI is rapidly reshaping how decisions are made, how expertise is distributed, and how organizations coordinate action. For leadership and educational management, this creates a distinctive challenge: not only faster change, but more indeterminate futures where prediction, linear planning, and “best-practice replication” become less reliable as foundations for strategic action. Leadership education therefore needs pedagogies that help participants work productively with uncertainty—without reducing it to premature certainty.

This paper examines scenario-based strategy work as an active and experiential learning design for cultivating strategic imagination: the capacity to explore multiple plausible futures, surface hidden assumptions, and translate uncertainty into shared orientation and action. We draw on empirical material from leadership education programs involving more than 200 participants across cohorts. Scenario thinking was embedded as assessed learning activity, where participants developed structured scenarios and produced reflective outputs on sensemaking, decision-making, and strategic orientation under AI-related uncertainty.

The findings indicate that strategic imagination can be developed as an explicit, learnable leadership capability through systematic scenario work. Participants demonstrated strengthened ability to:
(1) articulate and test underlying assumptions,
(2) coordinate collective sensemaking and alignment under ambiguity, and
(3) generate robust strategic options across multiple plausible futures rather than optimizing for a single forecast. Importantly, participants reported transferring scenario practices into their own leadership contexts as a practical compass for navigating AI-driven strategic ambiguity.

The paper contributes to leadership and educational management research by operationalizing uncertainty as a productive learning condition and by specifying scenario-based learning as an assessable approach to future-oriented capability development. It offers actionable implications for leadership curricula and professional development initiatives seeking to prepare leaders to manage and lead effectively in AI-uncertain environments

Keywords:

Leadership and Educational Management, Teacher Professional Development, Active and Experiential Learning, Scenario-Based Learning, Strategic Imagination, Sensemaking, AI-Driven Uncertainty, Leadership Education.