Richard Gerver

Richard Gerver – Change, Leadership & Education & Curiosity Speaker

Richard Gerver came to prominence when, as a headteacher he turned around a failing school in the UK in under two years. Winning plaudits globally, Richard was referred to as “The Walt Disney of The Classroom” by the UK media, and went on to win a multitude of international awards including a UNESCO award for leadership and innovation, Global Gurus Top 30 Thinker, and The National Teaching Awards, Headteacher of the Year.

Richard Gerver works with the world’s most demanding organisations on the problem that nobody else is solving: how to give your people back the curiosity, courage, and creativity their education and their industry trained out of them. He doesn’t run change programmes. He doesn’t sell frameworks. He doesn’t hand your leadership team a system they can file away and quietly ignore. He walks into a room and reawakens something — the instinct, the energy, the capacity for genuine inquiry — that your organisation hired and forgot it had.

The organisations that have worked with Richard describe a consistent experience: their people leave differently than they arrived. Not motivated, in the temporary sense. Reawakened. The difference matters, because one lasts for a conference and the other lasts for careers.

In 2001, Richard Gerver was given a school that was failing with some commitment. Grange Primary in Long Eaton, on the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border, sat in the bottom 5% of national rankings. Fewer than half its pupils were achieving benchmark grades. Parents covered their children’s uniforms on the way home. The community had been told, for decades, what it would become — and had agreed.

Richard arrived with three words and a refusal to add any more: living, learning, laughing. He built Grangeton — a simulated town inside the school, run entirely by the children. A council with an elected mayor. A shop that turned a profit. A radio station that broadcast three times a week. A museum open to the public. A newspaper with full editorial independence. A café conducted in French.

When Richard left teaching and walked onto the global corporate stage, he took one thing with him: the proof that the method worked. What he had built at Grange was not a school story. It was a human story. And human stories, he quickly discovered, travel.

He has since delivered keynotes at TED, WOBI, the RSA, and the Festival of Ideas in Mexico City — where he walked onto a concert-sized stage to Kings of Leon in front of several thousand senior executives who had been expecting something considerably more institutional. He gave them something better: the hour in which they realised the problem wasn’t the market, the competitors, or the technology. It was that their organisations had spent twenty years training the curiosity out of their best people.

His clients have included Google, Microsoft, Visa, Deloitte, Morgan Stanley, Telefónica, England Rugby, Harvard Business School, Cisco, Olympic federations, and governments on multiple continents. Every booking is rebuilt for the room. The spine does not change.

His three keynotes — Reawaken Curiosity, Reawaken Change, and Reawaken Simplicity — are each anchored in a book and each built around the same operating principle: your people already have what you need. The work is to give it back to them.

RICHARD GERVER SPEAKING TOPICS

Some of Richards keynote speeches include –

Reawaken Change

For the last decade we’ve been told change is a programme, a strategy, a transformation initiative. A thing leadership does TO the organisation, and the organisation endures.Then came AI. The pandemic. Hybrid work. Generational reset. Geopolitical whiplash. Markets reorganising in months instead of decades. And every change framework your organisation has built in twenty years has stopped working.

This keynote is how you stop managing change — and start authoring it. The organisations thriving today are not the ones with the best change-management frameworks. They’re the ones whose people stopped seeing change as something done to them — and started seeing it as something they get to write.

WHAT THE AUDIENCE MOVES THROUGH

• When did Change start to feel like Something Done to you?
• Change is the only constant. So why do we keep being surprised by it?
• You cannot lead change you don’t believe in yourself.
• From the bottom 5% to the top 5% in two years.
• Stop asking how. Start asking what for.
• Change is a community sport. Stop trying to win it alone.
• The legacy of change is not what you did. It’s what you passed on.
• Built around your business, your sector, your moment.

Re-Awaken Curiosity

Your organisation is full of people who were once five years old. They were curious. They were creative. They had courage. Then they went to school, then to university, then to work — and somewhere along the way they were taught to stop.Now you’re asking them to innovate. To adapt. To lead through complexity. To outpace AI. To stay human in a world that’s accelerating faster than any of us can comprehend.

This keynote is how you give them back what was taken.The organisations thriving today are not the ones with the smartest people in the room. They’re the ones where people feel safe enough to wonder, challenge, play, experiment — and learn.

WHAT THE AUDIENCE GOES THROUGH

 A keynote is a journey, not a download. Here’s the path I’ll take your people on — drawn from the chapter spine of Curiosity and tailored for your organisation, your industry, and the specific moment your business is in.

• Are you still curious?
• Living in an age of uncertainty.
• Learning from the five-year-old you used to be
• “This school’s famous and I made it famous.”.
• Risk, resilience, and the courage to ask.
• Questions every leader leaves with.
• The courage to stay curious.
• Built around your business, your sector, your moment.

Reawaken Simplicity

Every organisation says it wants to move faster, decide better, and respond to a world that won’t slow down. So it adds another framework. Another OKR cascade. Another tool. Another committee. Another transformation programme.Then AI arrived — and revealed what your people already knew. Your organisation is drowning in complexity that nobody can name, nobody designed, and nobody can unwind. The systems were supposed to make things simpler. They made everything heavier.

This keynote is how you stop hiring more complexity to manage the complexity you already have.

The organisations winning today are not the ones with the most sophisticated systems. They’re the ones whose people know which questions actually matter — and which complexity is just noise dressed up as work.

WHAT YOUR AUDIENCE MOVES THROUGH

A keynote is a journey, not a download. Here’s the path I’ll take your people on — drawn from the ten-chapter spine of Simple Thinking and tailored for your organisation, your industry, and the specific moment your business is in.

• When did “simple” become a thing you had to apologise for?
• Don’t employ anyone over five years old.
• Most of what you call “problems” are someone else’s bad habits.
• From the bottom 5% to the top 5% in two years.
• Your strategy is whatever your people pay attention to on Tuesday.
• Plain language is a leadership act.
• Simplicity is not fragile. It is the only thing that survives stress.
• Built around your business, your sector, your moment. 

EDUCATION

Why does education leadership matter?

The future depends on our learning and education system not only being efficient but dynamic. If our core moral purpose is to prepare emerging generations for the challenges of their future, then we need to ensure that, as leaders and educators, we are cognisant of the challenges that that future may hold and be ready to evolve the system to meet not only the changing demands in terms of knowledge, but in behaviours, attributes, attitudes and skills. As leaders and as educators, we need to ensure that we develop cultures that are open to change and to us broadening horizons, to being prepared to be challenged and to challenge ourselves, so that we continue to provide a system worthy of our children and one that reflect the opportunities of the future as well as anchoring the achievements of the past.

As organisations beyond the formal education sector, creating a culture of curiosity, education and learning, will be the defining characteristic of sustainable success as we head into the complexity of the 22nd Century.

His impactful and sustainable leadership philosophies and strategies for change, have seen him work with iconic brands, organisations and individuals including Google, Microsoft, Deloitte, Visa, and GSK, President Obama, The Dalai Lama, Steve Wozniak and Eric Schmidt. He has spoken to audiences worldwide, including in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China, Russia, The UAE, Mexico, Chile, Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, Brazil and Spain.

BOOKS:
A leading global figure in the field of education, human leadership and organisational transformation, Richard’s books draw on his lived experiences as an educator and consultant to business and organisations worldwide. His four non-fiction titles, help individuals, companies and organisations think in new ways about the people they know and the places they work in.