Leadership Without Saviours: Judgement, Agency, and Competing Futures in Digital Education

This chapter is a critical synthesis of the roundtable discussion that concluded Open University Malaysia’s inaugural Annual Public Lecture Series, from which the preceding chapters are derived. Drawing on a full transcript of the recorded session, it traces the arguments that emerged when the five contributors were brought into direct conversation on leadership, judgement, and the competing futures of digital education. The discussion foregrounded distributed leadership as a practice to be actively assumed rather than passively awaited, while exposing the structural and contextual conditions that constrain it. What the roundtable made clear is that reclaiming digital education futures demands not a single model of leadership but a shared commitment to the values that orient it.