This paper analyzes the connection between a university's curricular reform and the creative ways in which actors position themselves to respond. The study takes place in a Colombian university that underwent an institutional competency-based curricular reform. This context allows us to question the ways in which different actors perceive and interpret the curriculum. Utilising curriculum enactment and policy enactment as analytical frameworks, this research distances itself from technical approaches that view reforms as merely a matter of implementing the official curriculum in a linear and technical manner. Instead, it examines the transformations and the ways in which actors such as students, faculty, and academic leaders experience, adapt to, and interpret the curriculum as a dynamic artefact. A comparative case-study underpinned the methodological approach to understand the challenges and singularities that emerged from curricula transformation in three different departments. Interviews, focus group, a class project carried out by students and document analysis, were used to understand the various forms of creative deviation and opposition displayed by actors towards technocratic discourses on innovation, evaluation, and accountability. Findings evidence that opposition to the curricular reform process came from a resistance to adhering to global discourses of competency-based education. However, findings also show that there is a misalignment between the decision-making process of the curricular reform and the demands of the job market. Therefore, any curricular reform should be critically examined from multiple perspectives rather than solely through a technical lens.