This article is part of No-Nonsense Advice from Leaders Around the World—a special series featuring written interviews with education leaders, capturing honest reflections and practical insights from across contexts.

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In your experience, what piece of leadership advice is overrated or ineffective? Why do you believe it does not work?

I’ll pick the idea that leaders find solutions to problems. It’s not that it’s wrong, but it’s incomplete and limited, and if taken too seriously, it can prevent leadership development.  

It’s such an attractive idea, and because the benefits are immediate and apparent, junior leaders get promoted to senior leadership if they succeed in this area (it was certainly true for me, so I do not underestimate the importance of the skill). But in some cases, a different approach is needed. And that’s where there really is no quick solution, when a problem is persistent and ill-defined, perhaps because it's a systemic issue, or when it's about hearts, minds and values.  

In these cases the benefits of addressing an issue may not be apparent or immediate, but the costs are. Anything done quickly simply will not work, and the role of the leader is to help the organization learn new ways to think about and understand an issue. That's fundamentally different to solving a problem, and requires a different skill.  

The approach has to be to name the challenge, let the issue ripen, and then not avoid but actively seek and regulate the inevitable conflicts in a productive manner.  

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As a school leader, what is one thing that keeps you awake at night?

For me, it's usually not the big organizational issues, where there is  a process or an approach in place to try to manage, and I can ‘outsource' my worries by trusting the process, and the team that's looking at it.

My late night thoughts have probably been shaped by my decades in the classroom, because it's the individual cases of students or colleagues, where I know they are facing a troubling personal issue, that stay with me. In these cases I'm usually not closely involved, and perhaps because of that, it's harder to stop wondering how things will turn out.

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What was the most impactful book, documentary, or podcast you engaged with in the past year? How did it shape your leadership perspective?

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I think it's Leadership on the Line by Marty Linsky and Ronald Heifetz. What I love about this book is the way it foregrounds the leader as a flawed person doing difficult things with multiple competing priorities, to the best of their ability, in the context they find themselves in. It's rather different to so many books that describe leaders (perhaps implicitly) simply as loci of technical skills, or as repositories of strategies to be operationalised in ways that maximise shareholder value, or some other such abstract goal. I've always felt that the leadership literature tends to ignore the person, with all their worries and failings - but this book addresses it.  

It really shaped my perspective by reminding that before we look at tasks, we need to look at each other as humans with our own hopes, aspirations, strengths, flaws, dreams and complexities, and remember that, as humans we create and are created by the culture in which we exist (we know this about students but we forget it about each other). So, pay attention to culture, as it exists symbiotically with individual growth and flourishing.

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Which three tools or software do you use regularly to enhance your leadership effectiveness, and why?

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Software can be great, but I'll leave others to write about that. I am a great believer in thinking tools that help structure an approach to complex issues,so I can mention three specific tools which I find helpful, though they are too complex to do much more than name here.  

The first is Heifetz and Linsky's distinction between technical and adaptive leadership and all that follows from it, and that was what I was getting at in my answer to the first question. 

The second is Bolman and Deal's Four Frames Model which provokes one to think about one's organization using four distinct metaphors - like a machine, a family, a jungle or a temple. Each metaphor - and again, all that follows - offers insights into different possibilities.  

The third is the Quinn and Cameron's Competing Values Framework which helps conceptualise the direction of organizational change, in ways that can guide decision making and leadership approaches.  

The danger of tools, of course, is that they tempt us to use them - and as the saying goes, to a man who has a hammer, everything looks like a nail - so we need to remember that none of them are the only thing. But they all offer ways to think better, and to think better as teams, not as individuals.  That has to be a route to better leadership.

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As you reflect on your leadership journey, what is one thing you plan to start, one you intend to stop, and one you will continue doing this year? Please elaborate on your choices.

During busy days, it is easy to forget the approach I mentioned in the first question, and default to problem-solving mode, so I am going to start trying harder to remember it.  I am going to stop skipping my daily exercise routine - in fact, the more intense the day, probably the more important it is not to miss it. 

And I will continue to remind myself that while the work is often focused on difficult issues to address, education for a better world is not a job, but a commitment and that the difficulties are actually why it is so important.

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What is one professional or personal experience that every school leader should attempt this year? What makes it so valuable?

I am rather hesitant to make a recommendation for everyone, as what works for one person in one school may not work for a different person. But still, in the spirit of the question, what's an especially valuable experience?  I guess I would say anything that jolts us from the usual routines, that broadens our perspectives, and allows us to re-see the familiar as strange, or at least as one option among many. 

This applies to personal and professional matters - so travelling to a very different country, visiting a very different school, being a student for the day, moving to another country, making a friend with a different cultural background, having a baby (!)..  it could be anything. I had some significant surgery in 2025, and while I couldn't actually recommend it :-), once I had gotten over the discomfort, I found that my home rest  and the subsequent recovery gave me a rather different perspective on things.  

It's easy to mistake the familiar for what's necessary or good, but these are distinct concepts, and anything that helps us remember that has to be a good thing. 

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What opportunities do you see with artificial intelligence (AI) in education this year? How do you envision AI transforming the future of schooling and education?

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Here I draw on the European Commission's recently published report, Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Learning, Teaching, and Education, which argues that AI may enable new ways of teaching and learning.  This is an exciting prospect especially if we can find ways to ensure AI can enrich the human capacity to learn as much as writing, books, and digital technologies have done. The theme of transformation has become commonplace; however, far from creating new futures, it's also true that AI may lock us into the past. 

As the report says: as AI scales up, it can effectively routinize old institutional structures and practices that may not be relevant for the future...Instead of renewing the system and orienting it to the needs of a post-industrial economy and knowledge society, AI may increasingly mechanise and reinvent outdated teaching practices and make them increasingly difficult to change.

The dangers are implicit in the very system we have. It is easy to sell products that solve existing problems, but it is very difficult to sell products that require changes in institutions, organisations and current practices. To avoid hard-wiring the past, it would be important to put AI in the context of the future of learning.

(More thoughts: https://nickalchin.com/we-need-some-art-in-dealing-with/)

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What is the most underappreciated professional development avenue for upskilling or reskilling in the field of education in 2025? Why should more leaders consider it?

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Again, I am reluctant to generalize but I would advocate for quiet reflection when paired with deep reading and discussion with a trusted thought partner. It's quite a contrast to the more obvious workshops, conferences, and online courses, which of course have their place, but can sometimes feel superficial or disconnected from the deeper challenges we face. 

I find great value in quiet contemplation and deep engagement with ideas. So, I would advocate for regular, protected time for reading educational or business literature, philosophical texts, fiction or poetry, not with a view to skimming articles (though I am certainly guilty of that) but rather to  immersing ourselves in the material and allowing it to resonate. 

Equally important is having a thought partner to bounce things off. The aim is to generate and explore new insights and make connections between disparate areas, drawing on and prompted by great historical and contemporary thinkers. For me, I find it very rewarding and even relaxing (while also strangely exhausting!).

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If you were to choose a dish or a drink that symbolizes Global Citizenship Education (GCED), what would it be and why?

I am tempted to say a complex fusion dish with spices from around the world; but on reflection, I would say a glass of clean water for two reasons. Firstly because some 2 billion people do not have ready access to what seems so basic to so many of us privileged folk. And secondly, because one can learn a lot about citizenship if one considers carefully what it takes to produce drinkable water on tap for a nation. 

I'm not just talking about the science here, important as that is. I'm talking about the governance structures that control public investment; the taxation that funds it; the codes that determine how clean the water must be; and the institutions and ministries that need to exist to make it happen. In a time of governance crisis in some countries, consideration of these matters shows the dangers of ill-conceived and ideological attacks on the very things that have allowed developed countries to even become developed in the first place.

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Please share a quote/message that reflects your philosophy on education and educational leadership

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

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