The Authority Podcast — Expert Insights and Fresh Ideas for Education Leaders

TAP 44 Richard Gerver

Ross Romano: [00:00:00]

Welcome in everyone. You are listening to the Authority Podcast on the B Podcast Network. And before we begin today's episode, I just wanted to give a quick thank you to all of you listeners, who have been loyal to us over the past several months. We're getting close to a year now of publishing the show and we've seen, some great growth.

Ha, it's some nice. Milestones recently. And, it's been a real pleasure to bring you conversations with some of these wonderful guests. So we really appreciate you, the listeners, and we hope to continue bringing you some great content moving forward. And without further ado, we have some of that today.

So my guest today, Is Richard Garver. Richard is one of the world's leading [00:01:00] thinkers on human leadership and organizational transformation. Since the success of his first book, which was focused on his experience in frontline education as a head of school, Richard has devoted himself to advancing society's thinking on learning change and how best to realize our full potential.

He's been named the UK Business Speaker of the Year three times. Right now he is two of the most popular. LinkedIn learning courses in the world, which anybody here can check out. He has also written several books on leadership and innovation, including the best sellers Change and Simple Thinking and Change.

Learn to love it. Learn to Lead. It is what we're talking about today. Richard, welcome to the Authority.

Richard Gerver: Wow. What a, what an intro. Thanks Ross. No pressure there. Then I just hope that I can maintain the standard for everybody.

Ross Romano: Well I'm, I'm going to keep the pressure up and I'm gonna ask you this question. What is change?

Richard Gerver: Oh my word. That's an unbelievable question. It's almost diff it's, that's almost like asking somebody what is breathing, right? It's [00:02:00] something that happens all the time, whether we are conscious of it or not. It's the evolution of. Our world and, and we can look at this in a very granular or a very grandiose way, right?

We're physically changing every microsecond of every minute of every day, right up to the fact that the world is turning in new ways. You know, whether it's, the impact. Of artificial intelligence, whether it's the way the world is shaping up environmentally, right the way down to that moment where your child comes home at the end of a day at school, throws something on the table and rocks your world, right?

Or, an email comes in and tilts the access. So, Change is something that is inevitable. It's there every minute of every day, whether we like it or not, whether we embrace it or whether we don't. And in many ways, for me, the whole thing around change is what can [00:03:00] we do to feel more in control of it more of the time, because, so often, The way we feel about change is really dependent on how much of a victim we feel to circumstance and how much we feel in control of it.

So long-winded answer, and I probably didn't even answer the question.

Ross Romano: No, I, I think, you know, it's, it was, even though it's a big, broad question, it's important to start there because. It can mean so many different things to so many different people. It looks a lot of different ways. There's iterative change, there's Transformative change, there's superficial change,

there's the endless debates around things like, can people change? And some people say nobody changes. And my opinion is people can change themselves. You just can't change other people. But you know, there's also even within that, the question of, okay, well, Did somebody or something just become the thing it was always going to be under the surface?

Or did it really become something? [00:04:00] There's all, this debate around what changes and what either makes us attracted to it or afraid of it. What makes change meaningful to you? I mean, and I think a great example of this and we were. Talking a little bit about the, chaos of the last few years, before we started the recording here.

But the pandemic, right? It necess it a lot, necessitated a lot of change, but some of it was strictly surface level. Some of it was the kind of stuff that maybe had the potential to be lasting and meaningful, but because maybe we didn't want to see it as. Real change. We were very quick to say, okay, whenever this is over, we can discard this thing.

But there's other things that I think are here to stay and are really transformational and it almost, almost required, that. Force beyond all of our control to kind of make us [00:05:00] do the changes, that we could have been doing before that. But, you know what, when you define change, that's truly meaningful and that's really, meeting the standard for what we need to invest in and see through what, factors come

Richard Gerver: I mean, I, I think if we just take that step back into the pandemic, for example, you know, one of the lasting, impacts of. Around change that we've seen is that actually we are all capable of far more than we ever believed we were capable of prior to 2020. So for example, if somebody had said to us in 2019 there's gonna be a global pandemic that in 24 hours of, kind of governments really trying to get their heads around this stuff, entire countries will be shut down, schools will be closed, systems will be, thrown on their head.

Business communities around the global stop being able to trade with one another, we would've all gone into meltdown. And similarly, on a slightly more micro level, if we'd been told you won't be able to see friends and [00:06:00] family, you won't be able to go to the supermarket necessarily. We would've gone into complete meltdown and believe that we, there's no way on earth, on a personal individual level, there's no way I would've thought I can survive that.

Right. But we did. And not only. Did we survive that? But our systems and structures evolved to deal with them. So let's, take education for example, right? For 30 years or more, we have been dancing around technology and dancing around what technology really means to education, how we use it. Rather than just seeing it as a kind of substitute to do what we've always done, for example, interactive whiteboards that basically just replaced chalkboards in most classrooms for most teachers, right?

And, all of the anxieties that went along with, the advent of tech, technology and education for so many people. If again, somebody had said to you, in a week's time, go back to 20. In a week's time, you will be [00:07:00] delivering all of your lessons virtually using, platforms like, zoom or Teams or whatever, right?

Again, most educators would've gone into Meltdown, but we did, and so, the first and most important lesson for me about change is we are all better at it than we think we are. So take another step back. Why is that? Well, in many ways, none of us are educated to raised to live in a world of change and uncertainty from a very young age. We, our lives are predicated on the belief that our job, our journey is to find something we're good at or at least stable at. To work through that process, get our heads down, and then create around us an environment that is all about stability, is all about certainty. You go through the education process and we could debate on another show all about that, so much of the education system is [00:08:00] set up basically as a filter to filter people into the right route for them to find their stability at whatever level that might be, right? Whether it's, blue collar, white collar, whatever the job might be. Once you, and once you get it, once you get it, boys and girls, the job is to get your head down, earn that living, make yourself invaluable, build a pension pot, earn enough money to get a mortgage, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So, Our lives are all about that. And our parents, we are raised, and then we as parents raise our children along the same philosophy. Let's find what you're good at and then encourage you to go down that route as c- So an example, my son, I said to you before we started recording left college last year.

He's our youngest, which scares the life outta me, frankly. Cause it, it means my useful life appears now to be over apart from being a bank. To my children. And when he left college last year, he decided to get himself a job working in data management, right? So he's a data [00:09:00] analyst working in the sustainable energy sector.

So my wife and I looked at each other and went, hallelujah. Our job here is done Now we've created. An opening. My son has now built a life for himself, which is sustainable. He's got certainty, right? In a career that frankly can only go in one direction. He then turned around to us, he and his girlfriend recently, and announced that actually they're both kicking their jobs into touch in a few months time to go traveling, and of course my wife and I went into semi meltdown, but that's, that to an extent is what the pandemic has done, particularly for younger generations. I think it was coming anyway, I think we've lived in a time of accelerated progress transformation because, Our children's generation don't see the world we the way we did.

They're the first generation to break out from that frame of got a lockdown certainty and actually their lives are predicated on we'll survive whatever the world throws at us. And [00:10:00] so fundamentally for me, I think that's the great challenge around change and potentially. Some of the subconscious stuff we've learned around change, we're better at it than we thought we were because we weren't educated to believe we could be any good at it.

That we could deal with uncertainty, transformation, and change. And weirdly enough, our children's generation are leading the pathway and saying, look at us. Life's okay. We'll be fine.

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Ross Romano: Once you, Have clear evidence that behaving conservatively, with a prioritization on stability and lack of change. Once, once you realize that that's not. It's still not going to be in your control. The incentive to do that changes something like a pandemic makes that clear to a lot of people to say, you know what, no matter what I do, there's always something I can't control.

And there's these different cohorts of students, right? [00:11:00] Particularly depending on what time you. Graduate, enter the workforce. What are the economic conditions at that time? Do you go into a, job that feels like it's worthy of you and then you're what you did, or are you overqualified? And and there's been studies done on even just the long-term effects of how that doesn't really, if you graduate into a very poor job market, for example, On average, you never catch up to your peers who graduated into a booming market when they started out at this salary and you started out unless, You break the cycle, right?

And you have to say, you know what? Now my incentive is I need to change something. I need to take some risks. I need to do something new because going with the flow isn't taking me anywhere. And even, this book, listeners if, you haven't read it, it was published 10 or 11 years ago, but there's stuff in here, right?

Um, here's a direct quote from the book that [00:12:00] relates exactly to what we're talking about. "I think we have reached the tipping point where technological advancement has led to such a rapid continuum to change that we are powerless to direct its course. We're living in the first age where we no longer determine the rate of change" That was about how quickly technology was advancing and changing things.

If you've been, Around lately, you may be hearing about ai. You may have heard about crypto. These, technologies that, you know, some of which seem to come and go as quickly as they appear. Others that, if you wanna talk about a technology that we're powerless to control ai, and the mentality that it takes, right?

To say, look, I'm either going to be. In leading some change here, I'm either going to be finding opportunities or I'm going to try to avoid it, at which point I probably can't. What are you seeing now as far as

Richard Gerver: Well, I mean, let me.

Ross Romano: Yeah.

Richard Gerver: Let me be controversial for a [00:13:00] second, so in, my home space of education, I've seen the world go into meltdown over the last couple of months over programs like chat, GPT and the fact that we've suddenly cut. What I love by the way, is the fact that we, as, and I say me, us as a generation, we're so far behind young people now, right?

So we suddenly about. Five months ago hit the aha moment that this stuff meant that young people could write essays, using ai, right? And we all went into meltdown. Going. Right. That's the end of education. Then as we know it, what's the per boy can't do it anymore. We asked the wrong questions, right?

What we should be saying is, okay, so if AI is now capable of doing that, what must we be doing to educate young people differently? Because is educating young people to write essays really relevant anymore? Or actually what does that open up as a new opportunity? And [00:14:00] I think for me, sometimes that's, the way we see change depends on the way we pitch, the questions we ask of the change we're experiencing.

So going back again to your initial question about what, has happened because of, say, the pandemic, well, one of the really interesting things to play out has been the way people have started to ask new questions about the way they lead their lives, right? Their work life balance, working from home versus working in an office.

What that means in terms of the cultural structure of an organization. Taking that down to another level, what impact that has on management and leadership, and does management and leadership look the same now as it did three years ago? And will it continue to look the same? Because one of the instincts, sadly and dangerously we have, is always to say, how do we lock down that change?

How do we pull it back? How do we reverse engineer what that means and what that does? You know, if you look again controversially at the, global [00:15:00] policy, Loop of education. We keep coming back to, but how do we always do what we've always done more efficiently, rather than actually asking how do we use this to transform the system?

We keep going. Yeah. Well, we can't really push the boundaries, can we? Because we've still gotta be, doing well in the International Pizza League tables, for example, right? So that's like turning round to one of the world's most innovative chefs and saying, what we want you to do is invent something new.

And just as she or here about to go off to their laboratory to create some Frankenstein food, we pull them back Just at the moment, they're about to go out the door excitedly and go, yeah, but before you go, whatever you create has to look and taste just like this chocolate cake. Well, what does that mean?

We do, innovation goes out the window and what we do is we just go and make the chocolate cake we know we'll look and taste just that. That to an extent is the challenge we are facing in terms of [00:16:00] how, we don't just cope with, but thrive in what are increasing times of change and uncertainty. You know, I remember, as I'm sure you do, Ross, Back in 2007, 2008, we had the global economic crisis.

And everything went into meltdown and we thought, oh, if we can just survive this, everything will get back to normal. Then we had a global pandemic, a decade or so later. And we went, oh, if we can just survive this, everything will return to normal. Then we had a war in mainland Europe, right?

And we are going, oh, if the globe can just survive this, and the repercussions of what it means to the energy industry, what it means to food production around the world, we just survived. This will be okay. Now we've started the narrative around ai, right? If we can just control ai, we'll be okay. Maybe what we should be saying is, The inevitability is we are never gonna live in an age where things change slowly.

Again, what we have to do [00:17:00] is think about asking different kinds of questions and turning the fear into a sense of, but what could be the opportunity?

Ross Romano: You, wright about how right the fear of change is often just related to the imagined consequences rather than the reality. What's wild about it is that it's in such conflict with. How we realistically react to change after it's occurred. Our minds have this tremendous plasticity around it and kind of to just adapt to the new world in the book.

You wrote the example of the internet in your first exposure to it in the early nineties and thinking, yeah, I don't know, is this really valuable? And now, by the time the book was written, I couldn't imagine. I mean, think about how much, have mobile phones changed in that time?

How mu you know and how, much has everything changed? And even though you lived most of your life without that technology, do you even remember what that was like? [00:18:00] Right. Other than when you're being intentionally nostalgic. I mean, we just change and grow and, and life becomes something new

Richard Gerver: yeah

And that's exactly the point. And you know, we can go back right to generations before. When the birth of rock and roll in the 1950s, everyone thought this would spell the downfall of humanity. Elvis Presley was banned from the waist down on global television, right?

Because we thought this was gonna be the moral time bomb that was gonna destroy us all. Television, the birth of television, the birth of, radio, going back even further to Caxton and the the printing press, right? And we thought, oh my god, this, because at that point, knowledge and the written word had been the preserve of religious leaders largely right?

And then the printing press comes along and all of a sudden every woman and every man has access to printed media. And we thought that was going to not transform society for the better. But begin its downfall. And I [00:19:00] suppose if history teaches us nothing else, it's that, that our instinct is always, oh my God, this is terrifying.

Why do we think that? Because we don't understand it and therefore we don't feel we can control it. So our first instinct is to pull it back and actually what we need to do is start to engineer future generations. Out of that instinct and start to get them to think, yeah, but what are the possibilities, right?

In the book, the whole stimulus for the book actually, Came from my days as a frontline educator, and I always worked in elementary education, very fortunate. And I always worked in elementary schools that had early years units too. So we had kids as young as two and a half, three years of age in our nursery units in the schools I worked in.

And as I got older, it, increasingly fascinated me that young people, very, very young children are change machines, right? They don't bulk at change. They, they don't pull back from it. Their curiosity is relentless, as we all know. [00:20:00] They'll pick up everything, stick their fingers sometimes in the wrong places, but they'll stick their fingers everywhere They ask questions relentlessly right to them.

Making a mistake isn't a bad thing. It's something they laugh about, learn from, celebrate, and move on from. And I'm yet, by the way, to meet an 18 month old child who is going through therapy cuz they can't cope with the rate of change in their lives. Right. I remember when I was training to be a teacher, one of my lecturers saying, and I dunno how you percentage it, but the sentiment is very powerful.

Always has been to me that we learn somewhere between 70 and 75% of everything we learn in our lifetime. Before, we're five years old right now, not talking about the, acquisition of knowledge that comes with experience, but I'm talking about the fact most of us in that period of time learn to walk and talk.

We learn to understand vocal intonation, facial expression, body language. We learn to make sense of the sensory world around us, right? If we are [00:21:00] born into a multilingual home, We pick up every language spoken in that domestic environment. We are extraordinary learning machines capable of not just dealing with but embracing change.

Yet the older we become, the more that arc starts to diminish, to the point where as fully formed adults, we try to avoid change. As much as we, even to the point of looking down a menu in a restaurant and going, nah, that looks unfamiliar. I'll stick to what I know. Right? I mean, the number of times I go into a new restaurant and go, I'm gonna, I'm gonna have something new and I always end up ordering the burger.

Why? Cuz I know I like the burger. Right? And, and I think that that to me, Is fundamental. One of the fundamental questions we have to ask is how do we reverse engineer what we do to ourselves and each other from that extraordinary early years development through to adulthood? How [00:22:00] do we su start to see the possibility in some of the things that are changing around us and to us, rather than always the reflex being, oh my God, this is gonna be bad.

Ross Romano: Yeah. And if you're questioning the rate of change in young kids, let's say for example you have a, child who's one or two, go ask the parents of a child who's a couple years older, some questions about what you should be doing at that A and see if they remember at all, because everything happened so fast and you just.

Go through it, and then you have to remind yourself, oh yeah, I, know that this happened. I don't totally remember it. I know that this child had colic and would just cry for hours on end, and you would, I would just hold them, and I just wouldn't, it wouldn't stop. And yet I don't, really remember it.

I just know that it happened because things just happen. Our minds change. We adapt, and at a certain point you [00:23:00] realize, What was happening before no longer matters because what's happening now is important and what's going to happen next is important. And if we're trying too much to hold too much stuff in our brains right about the things that we've evolved from, we're failing to apply it forward.

And, one of the things that, that stood out, I went through and I was reading just some of the user reviews about the book and see, you know, over the course of the time, people are still reviewing it today, right? It's still resonating with them. But one of the things that stood out, and you referenced this, is that so much of it is based on your own experience, where there were some people who said, this was kind of marketed in the, self-help category.

And so I expected it to be kind of, that sort of thing. But what was different about it was there were personal experiences in here and it wasn't just kind of platitudes and even, one of the people who you know, [00:24:00] commented more, Negatively toward it, what it was based on the same thing.

Basically saying, well, this is really based on his experience as an educator, and I don't work in education, so I don't know if that's irrelevant to me, which I, I don't necessarily agree with, but our listeners are educators. So I wanted to talk about that change in your own life. I mentioned earlier in the intro, right, that you were a teacher and a head teacher and you're now three time business speaker of the year.

Right. Um, that most educators wouldn't necessarily foresee that path happening. And yet I think it, it is a, testament to what can happen when we don't limit ourselves or we don't, misplace the word, but, and say, Well, I would love to do that, but I'm only this, or I'm only that, or I'll, nobody will ever give me the opportunity.

Well, why, why not? And, and that change has continued to occur, I think over the past decade. [00:25:00] I'm sure.

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Richard Gerver: It's really interesting. I think firstly, I, I lived through my childhood as, many people do in what I suppose you would describe as an, unstable family unit, right? So my father, and mother split when I was very young. Now you've gotta remember I'm in my mid fifties. So the idea of divorce and stuff going back, it's interesting how life changes, how insistent, right?

But, then it was still kind of a taboo thing, but. My parents split. We kind of lived in a series of scenarios. So I suppose my childhood was filled with change in transformation, which I refer to in the book. I think that I had the stability of an extraordinary mother who was always, and again, one of the examples I give in the book is people are prepared to walk in space if they know they're tethered to the spaceship, right?

Walking in space without the spaceship, little bit more scary. So I was always very fortunate that I had a mother who was [00:26:00] remarkable. Is remarkable. And provided that stability. But I think I'd always lived in, a world of change. I suppose through my life, I had always kind of encountered those moments that make us shaky and uncertain.

And I suppose without realizing it, subconsciously, every time you overcome something like that, you put a little bit of self-confidence in the locker, whether it's conscious or subconscious. I eventually found my way into education, and I honestly, Ross thought that was it for my life. I had found my life's calling, I had found my epiphany, whatever you want to call it.

That was where I was gonna be for the rest of my career. And when I made school principal and was lucky enough to be part of a community that. That truly transformed itself. I honestly thought that, I remember there were days, I'd sit there, walk around the campus and say to myself, this is it.

This is everything I could ever have dreamed of. And then inevitably more change started to happen. The school's profile meant that I was being pulled from Pillar to post, [00:27:00] to go and talk to people about what we'd done and how we'd done it. Now I want to be very clear with people cuz I really identify with that thing, particularly in education, where we all just think we are only.

The number of times I hear teachers say, I'm only a teacher, or I'm only a, an assistant, or, I'm only this, or I'm only that. Right? It, I never hear it as much in any other walk of life or profession as I hear it in education and I thought I was only doing my job, Ross, and I thought everybody else must be doing it as well, if not better.

We were just doing it in, our way. I was very fortunate because as I started to travel more and more, and see more and more, I suppose my confidence in my own narrative grew that I had stories to tell and people to tell those stories to when I left. My job as a principal, I still thought that my job would extensively be around education.

And it was only because I was, an [00:28:00] agent found me and, decided they wanted to represent me. I didn't even know. So most of my career for the last, decade and a half, has been working as a professional speaker. I didn't even know that was such a thing, right? I didn't know there was such a thing as a professional speaker.

And an agent picked me up and what was really interesting was his team started to encourage me and say, look, actually, you know, a lot of your story is generic. A lot of your story has relevance and resonance way beyond education change, transformation leading people in difficult times. And I was that, are you crazy?

And I remember. Very clearly one of my first professional gigs was to go and speak to, the senior leadership teams at the Royal Bank of Scotland in Edinburgh about six months after the global financial crisis. Right. I have never been more terrified in my entire life, cuz there I am an elementary school teacher walking into, at the time, what was probably the heart of the global lions den.

And it was really [00:29:00] interesting. I suppose one might argue, okay, I have the courage to walk into that den and open my mouth, and I started to learn very quickly a number of things that I hope will resonate in answer to your question. The first is that actually a lot of what my own experiences had been were generic.

And that taught me that because too often I think too many of us live in a bubble of our own experience, our own context. And we all think the challenges we're facing on a personal or professional level are unique to us or our situation or our community or our employment or whatever else it might be.

And and you start to realize the more you, you travel the world and see places and things that actually so much of it is, Generic. That's the first thing. And so that started to give me confidence that actually some of my experiences did have value beyond. Education in that context. And the second is this, and I think it really relates to that, thing about, but I'm only a teacher, right?[00:30:00]

What I've come to realize over the last decade and a half, and by the way, I am nothing. I was nothing special as a teacher or as a school principal. I did my job. But what I've realized is the best educators are the best human leaders on earth, right? We just don't realize it. So not just me, every teacher out there that walks into a classroom any day of the week and inspires her pupils to. Learn something they didn't think they could or they didn't think they were interested in. Or helps a young person come to terms with a domestic situation they find themselves in or the context of their lives and they help them to aspire to different or bigger or believe they can.

Those people are not just. Only teachers. They are outstanding human leaders. And my entire career over the last decade and a half has really been predicated on what would a teacher do on a wet Thursday afternoon with a class of, [00:31:00] arsey teenagers, and, What you realize is teachers educators are bigger and better than they believe they are.

They have a right to speak up, not just about education, but about transformation and about the future of humanity. And actually, I think part of my next decade is to give my own profession the confidence to take more control of what we do and how we do it.

Ross Romano: Yeah, I mean, especially what you said about, becoming a professional speaker and not having even really, known that was a thing. That's backed up by my very limited own little research. But it was something I was thinking about recently, particularly as I was thinking about my own career and, thinking about people that I've been coaching on their careers.

And I even put out a little poll on LinkedIn and said, you know, ask people based on like with the career that you're in now, Which of these [00:32:00] buckets does it fit into? It's the thing you always wanted to do, always planned to do. It's something that at some point you made an intentional change and went to this, or it's something that you, you never knew existed.

And 60% or something people said, I never even knew about this. Right? And it doesn't necessarily mean that you left a certain profession, but it means that. If you're open to the possibilities of what's out there, that none of us at 15, 16, 18, 22, 25 really know the full scope of what's out there or how we can apply our skills.

And if we look at what we can do, we all can do a lot of things and know a lot of things that are valuable to other people. In context that we might not be familiar with. It kind of leads to that, that unknown, the fear of the unknown. And to me, I mean, I think [00:33:00] about it a lot as not just the unknown of what change will bring.

If I do this thing differently, I don't know what's going to happen. But I think so often it's the unknown of how. Others will react to what we do and particularly people in positions of authority. So, you referenced right childhood, so how are my parents going to respond to this? If we have parents who are good at helping us navigate changes in turmoil in our lives, we start to develop more of a confident relationship to change in the professional.

Workplace, certainly whoever's the, boss, so to speak, the leader. How does that person respond to things as they're happening and changing? That's certainly going to affect the rest of the staff. Whether or not they're people who are comfortable taking risks, comfortable doing things new, or they're going to play it very conservatively.

But ultimately, the subtitle of the book, learn to Love It. Learn to Lead It. I think the first part of that [00:34:00] is a, is prerequisite for part two. Can't lead change unless you love it. You embrace it, you don't just deal with it, but you say, look what are like, let's see it as an opportunity, right?

Richard Gerver: Yeah, absolutely right. One of the stories, I told in the book, Was about, a legendary soccer manager from the 1970s, Rinus Michels And the fact that, he revolutionized the way soccer was played globally. He took a tiny unfashionable soccer nation, the Netherlands, to two World Cup finals, right?

He uncovered the greatest player of a generation, a guy called Johan Cruyff who went on to become, if you like, the dominant figure for modern football soccer managers today. And one of the things that he was really passionate about was making sure that everybody on the team understood everybody's issues, everybody else's issues, everybody else's perspective, and therefore he made every single player train in everybody else's position so that they weren't just training in [00:35:00] their own.

Why? Because A, it broadened their horizons and understanding of what other people were dealing with. It made those players understand how their role functioned within a wider sphere and a wider team, and therefore, how their actions and reactions could influence things beyond their own orbit. And I think for me, there was tremendous courage in that for reish.

He was persuading world class professional athletes that actually they now needed to learn how to play a different, Role in, in the team, et cetera. But also it was that understanding that the more you broaden people's horizons, the better you become. The more aware you become, the more able you are to deal with change, uncertainty, and difference.

And I think for me, What that said about Reish Michaels as a leader was he wasn't scared of change himself, and he will have transmitted that into the players he was coaching. So [00:36:00] although it may have felt alien for them to do what he was asking, because he resonated that confidence, it will be okay, trust me, I'm passionate about this.

It's o I'll take responsibility, whatever else it is. Those around him went, okay, we'll give it a go. And what happened? They turned themselves into one of the greatest forces in global soccer. Right? So, I think for me, that whole idea about loving change is vital. I think it's vital as an educator, by the way, because if what we are doing is trying to prepare young people for this world of change and uncertainty that's accelerating around us, we ourselves have to be prepared to step outside our comfort zone more often.

We have to take risks. You know, one of the things I talk about in the book, Is every so often doing something that scares you. Doesn't have to be grandiose, but do something that worries you. Do something that unsettles you do it regularly. You know the number of times when I was an educator, I used to walk [00:37:00] into the staff room.

And hear colleagues say things like, I'm fed up in my class of students, because when I ask them a question, nobody volunteers an answer. Nobody puts their hands up, nobody's prepared to take a risk. And with all due respect, I'd look at some of those educators and think that's because you don't, you have set your classroom up the same way you do now for 20 years.

You've taught the same lessons in the same way for 20 years because it's the way you like it. You've created the environment and culture to be the same as it's always been. Because it makes you comfortable, and I think you are right. As leaders, as educators, we have to, as Gandhi said, we have to be the change, right?

We have to. We have, we can't project change onto others if we're not prepared to do it ourselves. You know, going back to what you said before, I deliberately wrote my book in a very personal manner because I think telling people to be better at change, as an intellectual or academic exercise or as an expert telling you to do [00:38:00] something.

I think in this instance, what I was trying to do, Was by telling the stories of my own personal, experiences, was trying to get people to understand this was very human. It was very real, and it was about each and every one of us, including me, stepping out of our comfort zone, occasionally screwing up and getting stuff wrong, sometimes getting stuff right, but never moving away from the understanding that actually it's a learning experience and we should never stop learning.

Ross Romano: That's a great point, and one of the words I would use to describe the way the book is written is seamless, right? It's very personal experience. Very matter of factly kind of transitions between one story and another kind of mirrors that continuous learning journey. But also very interesting to read it back, a decade after it was originally published.

And look at some of these points that Whether they're ahead of their time or timeless or whatever, you know, and then [00:39:00] you just referenced, Dutch soccer and total football, everything comes back around. I'm sure we have some listeners who watch the show, Ted Lasso. That was a big plot point on the season, right?

It just keeps coming around where, when you recognize these ideas and their relevance and what they illustrate, they become these timeless examples of. What changes, what it can be, what open perspectives are. Richard, before we wrap, I wanted to touch on a couple of points from your, LinkedIn learning course, overcoming complexity, which has a lot of relevance to this as well, and it's something our listeners can check out.

It relates to kind of how we navigate things, right? And deal with complexities. And I think the complexity can play into our relationship to change or desiring change or organizations, right? We just went through this whole complex restructuring, you know new product lunch or whatever.

I think your point around it is that the complexity is artificially [00:40:00] creative, right? We're making things more complicated than they need to be. It's really simplicity. I thought your point about the cq, the curiosity quotient and the type of thinking that stimulates was worth.

Touching on, and, how that of course is differentiated from iq, eq, you know, all the queues, but to, basically say if we think about things in this way, we can sort of cut through those barriers we put up for ourselves.

Richard Gerver: Yeah, I mean, I, I think it all stems, back to the idea of self-confidence and belief, right? So, LinkedIn course, just to give people a context, the LinkedIn course on overcoming complexity actually was originally, Based on my follow up book to Change, which was called Simple Thinking, and that was, as I was writing and researching change, there was this whole new angle coming out for me, which was this thing about over complication.

And the first story I tell both on the course and in the [00:41:00] book was about queuing up at the world's first Starbucks in Seattle. And being quite excited about the prospect of ordering a coffee from the World's first Starbucks. Not for me, but for my daughter, who, I thought this would be an Instagramable moment, which would raise my credibility with her and her friends.

Anyway, as I was in the queue. Got a very long story short, people were ordering, as everybody knows, 15 things they wanted done to a hot cup of liquid. None of it sounded like coffee. They wanted a breve half and half twin pump, caramel, soya milk latte, something extra hot, right? Which, no, I still don't understand.

Extra hot. But anyway. I drink my coffee black, right? And I got to a point where as I was walking along this queue, which went back for an awful long way, I dunno if anyone, any of the listeners have been to the world's first Starbucks in Seattle, but it's a bit of a tourist destination, right? Most of the locals, of course, don't go to Starbucks in Seattle.

They go to local coffee houses, but, there's the cues going back as you got closer, you could hear what was going on in the store and people [00:42:00] were yelping and cheering and what a great order and awesome. And I was getting close to the front thinking in a minute I'm gonna go in there and ask for a cup of black coffee and a medium size cup, please.

And I could feel the disappointment. And the point is, I ran away. I was terrified, and as I ran away, That was the moment I thought to myself, when was it exactly our perception of value was things had to be complicated. To be clever. To be right, to be good. Okay. Because I was intimidated by the fact I just wanted a black coffee and I thought, my God, these other people are gonna judge me because they all have this complexity in their cup.

And I suppose for me, part of that link, back to some of what I was observing and seeing in education and in industry where people were putting together complex change programs, right? So they'd bring in all the big management companies and they'd run, Complex change programs or an education, we'd hire people for training days who would completely confuse us in the language they were using and the complexity of what they were talking about.[00:43:00]

And actually, when you stripped it back and you stripped it down, The biggest barrier to change was the complexity that had been created around it. Often because if we are leading or managing something, we think in order to justify it, we've gotta sound clever. We've gotta sound clever than the people we are pitching to.

And actually, when you strip it back, So much of the challenge and the problem around that change comes from the complexity, the way we weave it, right? So teaching, for example, now I am not decrying the incredible explosion in knowledge of how the brain works in cognitive science. All of the things that have been the buzz stuff around education for the last few years.

But when you strip it back, In my mind, what made a great teacher 50 years ago still makes a great teacher today, right? Do you know your children? Do you know what they need? Are you planning to that need? Can you prove it works? Now when you talk to young teachers about [00:44:00] stripping back all the stuff they're seeing on social media and the complexity of the language and the new pitch and the new idea, whatever we call these things, cuz they're always the same rebranded often, right?

When you strip it back, the fundamentals are actually far more simple, and it's the same with an organization. When the global financial crisis hit, those companies that had spent millions of dollars on change programs realized it was good for nothing. Why? Because it had overcomplicated process, and the one thing it had forgotten to do was transform the way human beings felt and thought about themselves, their colleagues, and the situations they were in.

So for me, a lot of the point of the overcoming complexity course, as with simple thinking is to tell people to take a breath, take a step back, and have the confidence to actually look at what they, at the simple first and often, by the way, that starts with their instinct, right? I think one of the things to wrap a lot of what we've talked about [00:45:00] today, young children are instinctive, right?

They don't mistrust their instinct. They don't see it as an immature trait or something that's frivolous. They act on instinct. And as we get older, we tend to think that acting on instinct is a sign of immaturity. What we seem to forget is that as, as we grow, our instinct evolves, and our instinct is actually based on our lived experiences.

And all of the complexities and the joys, the miseries, the mistakes, the successes that, that those things bring. And actually, we often talk ourselves out of our instincts because we think, oh, it can't be that simple. But how many times in our lives if we talked ourselves out of doing something because it was instinctive or it was what we thought might be right, gone and done something different.

And at the end of that journey going, God, you know what, I should have trusted my instinct cuz I was right in the first place. And so for me, it's. It's a lot of that. It's about the way we see and perceive ourselves and think about what we're capable of.

Ross Romano: Yeah. [00:46:00] And so often the people who are able to have most influence or who are, frankly the best teachers, right, are the people who are able to take the complex and make it simple. And that doesn't mean, that we should, Oversimplify ideas or, ashew nuance, right? In descriptions.

But to say that sometimes complexity in my experience is used to create a barrier, or it's used as almost a strategy, right? Like I've worked with, for example, web developers. You know, we're working on websites and things, and some of them make the backend, mechanics of a site.

Intentionally complex basically is a strategy so that you're going to have to keep hiring us to work on this because nobody else can figure it out. Guess what? It doesn't work in my experience because I get frustrated by that and say, look, I want it simple. And guess what? If somebody does it simply, I'm [00:47:00] happy to keep hiring them to do it things.

But the person who's, saying, let me, use a bunch of, Jargon and, complicated language here so that I sound smart and nobody knows what I'm saying. They don't have any influence.

Richard Gerver: Sorry to intro. You're right. You just reminded me. My favorite example of that was, when Steve Jobs introduced the first, iPod and, of course what he put. Some people may remember pre iPod days. And the first. MP3 players weren't produced by Apple. Right. But if you wanted an MP3 before Apple produced the iPod, the experts would tell you about the size of the data, hold the bit quality of the sound, the.

You know, blower. And then I will never forget the day job stood up at the Cupertino launch of the iPod and all he said was, from tomorrow morning you can have 400 songs in your back pocket right now that what that did. And why did the iPod and why was he such a genius? Because what he did was he took the [00:48:00] complex, stripped it back, and made it simple.

And actually, why did the iPod suddenly outsell every other MP3 player on the market? Cuz suddenly you didn't have to be a technology expert. Expert to understand the value of having an MP3 player, and it's that kind of skill. And let's simple doesn't mean easy actually, to create simplicity can often be the act of genius, right?

Steve Jobs was a genius because he took the complex and made it simple.

Ross Romano: Yeah, I think that's a great, illustration there. Richard, what else are you working on or what else? Should our listeners check out?

Richard Gerver: Oh my goodness Me. Well, I'd be very honored if they checked out my other books. Simple Thinking. The two books that were fundamentally about education. The first one, creating Tomorrow's Schools, and the last one I wrote, education and Manifesto for Change, which was really my view of education, having.

Spent 15 years out of it and seeing and trying to argue we need a greater bridge, a greater connectivity between [00:49:00] education and the world beyond education. My two LinkedIn courses would be brilliant. If anybody ever wants me to come to America and shout an event, I'd be delighted to do that. And what I'm working on now is pretty much talk about change Ross and risk taking.

So, I'm writing my first ever children's fiction book, and it's one of those things where you think I want to do something new. I wanna pull myself slightly outta my comfort zone. So I'm writing my first story book for children between the ages of seven and 12, and finding it both. An extraordinarily uplifting experience and terrifying and equal measure because by the time you reach your mid fifties, it's not often you tread into a space you have no skill and experience of, and I'm finding it just fabulous to do that too.

Ross Romano: Excellent. Well, yeah, listeners look out for all of that. You can find change and, all of Richard's other books at Richard Gerbert. Dot com. Of course also Amazon and everywhere else, but we'll put the link below to [00:50:00] Richard's website. I'll also link to these LinkedIn learning courses. For those of you on the platform, check those out.

They're free. You can view them in about an hour and get some more thoughts on all of these ideas. Also, send us any feedback on this interview if you're positive enough. Maybe someday we'll arm wrestle Richard into coming back, cuz I think there's a lot more to talk about. Please do subscribe to the authority for more in-depth author interviews like this one and visit B Podcast Network to learn about all of our shows.

Richard Gerber, thanks so much for being here.

Richard Gerver: It's been an absolute. Honor Ross, thank you so much for having me.