BETTER 2040: An Action Lab on Traversing the Complexity and Crisis of AI in Higher Education is an immersive, highly participatory workshop designed to support higher education leaders, educators, and professional staff in navigating the ongoing disruption generated by generative AI. Framed through a future‑focused fictional scenario (the University of Banford) participants are invited into a hyperreal institutional setting that mirrors the strategic, ethical, and epistemic tensions currently shaping the sector. Through guided sense‑making, collaborative discussion, and time‑pressured changehack activities, participants actively engage with competing narratives of innovation, tradition, humanity, and automation in teaching and learning. The action lab prioritises co‑design and peer learning, drawing on the diverse experience in the room (and the experiences from senior leadership of Banford who are from Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom) to interrogate assumptions, surface critical tensions, and generate plausible strategic responses to AI‑enabled transformation. Participants work in small groups to develop future‑oriented plans that operationalise a balanced relationship between AI capability and human judgement, values, and care. Participants will leave the session with a deeper understanding of how complexity and crisis shape educational leadership and technology adoption, alongside concrete strategies they can adapt within their own institutions. The workshop foregrounds agency in the context of of global crises, equipping participants with practical insights, shared language, and renewed agency to lead responsibly and creatively in uncertain futures.