Al Pisano, Assistant Teaching Professor
Faces of Leeds Snapshot
Name: Al Pisano
Title: Assistant Teaching Professor of Organizational Leadership and Information Analytics
Hometown: Long Island, New York听
What motivated you to pursue a career in academia?
I was drawn to academia because it gave me space to work at the intersection of how people learn, how systems shape behavior, and how ideas translate into practice. I鈥檝e always been interested in how individuals make sense of complexity, including how experiences, environments, and technologies influence the way people think, decide and act.
You describe yourself as a 鈥淣eoteric Thought Leader.鈥 What does that mean to you, and how has this appeared in your teaching at Leeds?
To me, being a Neoteric Thought Leader means working deliberately at the edge of what鈥檚 emerging without confusing novelty for progress. It鈥檚 about questioning assumptions, testing ideas in real contexts, and resisting the urge to oversimplify complex problems.
In my teaching at Leeds, this shows up through a consistent focus on student agency, reflection, and sense-making, particularly around AI, leadership and organizational change. As a co-faculty advisor for the Student AI Club and a contributor to co-leading AI integration across curricula, I work closely with students and faculty to explore not just what AI can do, but what it should do and where human judgment still matters most.
What are some of the key global challenges you hope to help students understand and feel empowered to influence?
Across my teaching, curriculum design, and leadership work, I鈥檝e spent years working with leaders and students as they navigate innovation, organizational change and the integration of emerging technologies, particularly Ai. What I鈥檝e seen repeatedly is that successful innovation is rarely a technical challenge. It is a leadership challenge shaped by culture, trust, incentives, and how decisions are made under uncertainty.
听听What matters most to me is helping students develop a realistic understanding of what leadership looks like in these moments of change, including making informed decisions without perfect information, balancing competing priorities, and taking responsibility for the cultural and human consequences of innovation.听听