Heidi Rundt has been CEO of Hyper Island since 2017, the Sweden-born creative business school that has spent thirty years training people who work in design, marketing, and innovation. Our conversation moved through the model that replaced teachers with facilitators and a global practitioner network, the redesigned Master’s program that pairs students with real organizational briefs mid-course, why she sees AI as a possibility rather than a threat to creative work, and what actually separates management from leadership inside a school built to keep changing shape.
Let’s dive in.
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A School Built Without Teachers
Hyper Island started in a small town in southern Sweden thirty years ago and now runs programs across Europe, the UK, Japan, and South America. But the detail that stopped me was this: the school has no teachers.
Instead, Hyper Island works with a core team of in-house learning designers and facilitators, backed by a much wider network of industry leaders who bring in what is actually happening in the market right now. It is a deliberate structure, not an accident.
“We actually don’t have any teachers.”
The reasoning is simple. What is relevant today will not be relevant tomorrow, so the school has to stay real world ready, and so do its learners. A fixed teacher, tied to a fixed curriculum, cannot do that. A network of practitioners can.
Learning Designed for a World That Won’t Sit Still
Hyper Island’s original methodology was built entirely around being in a room together. The pandemic forced a rethink, and Heidi described that shift as less of a crisis response and more of a long-overdue challenge to their own assumptions.
The clearest example is the school’s Master of Arts program, run for fifteen years with TSAD University. It used to be delivered on-site in Singapore, the UK, and Stockholm. Now it runs mostly online, for a year and a half, with one important exception: every cohort flies in for an intensive first week in Stockholm, called the Hyper Island Way Week. That week is where the group builds the trust it will lean on for the rest of the program.
It works. Heidi mentioned that American students in the program will get up in the middle of the night for online sessions, because the relationships built that first week make it worth showing up.
AI Is a Tool, Not a Threat
Whether AI is a threat or a possibility is the question everyone in the creative field gets these days, and Heidi’s answer was refreshingly unambiguous.
“Our point of view as an organization is that we definitely see AI as a possibility.”
But the more interesting part of her answer was what she thinks becomes more valuable, not less, as AI takes on more of the execution. Creative thinking, connecting human behavior to design, and analytical thinking are the capabilities she expects to matter most, precisely because an agent can now do a lot of the work that used to require a person.
The redesigned Master’s program reflects this directly. What used to be called Digital Management is now Digital Strategy, built with AI woven through it, and structured around real briefs from real organizations that students have to solve during the program itself.
Teaching People to Think, Not Just to Do
How do you actually teach creative thinking, rather than just talk about its importance? Heidi’s answer traced back to how Hyper Island designs a learning journey, not to what it puts inside one.
The ingredients she named: deliberately bringing in different perspectives, building a challenger mindset, and developing a high degree of self-leadership.
“They hold the whole learning process rather than just delivering content.”
That line, about facilitators rather than creative thinking specifically, is really the thesis for the whole conversation. Content alone rarely changes behavior. The structure around it is what does.
From Managing to Leading
Heidi drew a sharp line between management and leadership, and it is one I recognize from my own work with organizations. Leadership, in her framing, means staying clear and making decisions under uncertainty, having strong facilitation and systems thinking, and being able to build the capability for learning inside an organization rather than just directing it.
That distinction becomes urgent when Hyper Island works directly with companies on transformation, especially AI transformation. Heidi was blunt about a mistake she sees often.
“It cannot only be allowing the workforce to use ChatGPT. That is not AI transformation.”
Real transformation, she argued, is about the human side: what behaviors, culture, and leadership are needed to actually change how an organization operates, not just what tools it hands out. And none of that is simple.
“It requires both a lot of thinking and a lot of courage and change management.”
Facilitation as the Real Curriculum
We spent real time on the difference between a subject matter expert and a facilitator, and Heidi made a case I had not heard put quite this clearly before. An expert can be brilliant and still be a poor guide for other people’s learning. A facilitator’s job is to create the conditions for participation, reflection, and engagement, and then to help people turn what they noticed into something they actually do differently afterward.
Some people are naturally good at this. For most, it takes years of deliberate practice. Either way, Heidi sees it as the piece that is most often missing from formal education, even in institutions that are otherwise excellent.
The Nordic Thread Running Through It All
Nordic education systems are well regarded internationally, mostly for how they teach children. Two things carry over into adult learning at Hyper Island, in Heidi’s telling: room for reflection, and a real thread of playfulness.
But the deeper influence surprised me. Hyper Island’s methodology draws on a framework called Understanding Groups and Leaders, originally developed for the Swedish military. Thirty years in, it still shapes how the school thinks about trust, collaboration, and shared responsibility.
“We focus a lot on the trust building I mentioned, on collaboration and on shared responsibility.”
It is a good reminder that culture is not just an aesthetic. It is infrastructure.
Staying Entrepreneurial by Design
Some of Sweden’s best-known creative agencies were started by Hyper Island alumni, sometimes while they were still students. Heidi does not treat that as a coincidence. The school builds in constant prototyping, both internally and inside its learning journeys, and stays close to real business challenges rather than theoretical ones.
That closeness cuts both ways. If Hyper Island expects its learners to be entrepreneurial, it has to be intrapreneurial itself, constantly questioning its own model rather than settling into one.
“I need to be challenged as a leader.”
Heidi said that about her own nine years at the school, and she meant it as a compliment to the place, not a complaint.
What Education Still Has to Learn
What does the future of creative education actually need? Heidi’s answer was less about tools and more about a mindset shift the whole sector still has to make: from delivering information to building capability.
No program, however good, finishes someone’s education. The organizations and schools that will stay relevant are the ones that keep connecting learners to real, current problems, rather than teaching from models built for a world that no longer exists.
That same restlessness shows up in how Hyper Island runs itself. Even fully remote, the team holds a shared Monday session just to see each other’s faces, and a longer monthly session where they use their own facilitation methodology on themselves. Heidi called it eating their own medicine. It is, I think, the simplest possible proof that a school actually believes what it teaches.
To connect with Heidi Rundt, find her on LinkedIn. To learn more about Hyper Island’s programs, visit hyperisland.com.
