Ultimately, all the rules that we face in this world are man-made rules, which mean
man-made rules can be challenged.
It's just whether you have the courage to be able to do that.
So I can walk into an auditorium of 3,000 people at speech night and they will all stand
to their feet without me saying a word, and that is powerful.
It's completely illusionary.
Hi, I'm Sally Patton, editor of BOSS from the Australian Financial Review, and welcome
to 15 Minutes with the BOSS, a podcast about success and failure and everything in between,
and along the way, we're looking to get some great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is Dr. Bryony Scott, the principal of Winona School.
Hi, Bryony, how are you?
Thank you very much for coming in.
Thank you so much.
It's wonderful to be here.
Now, Bryony, you're the principal of Winona, an independent girls' school situated in
Sydney, which happens to be a stone's throw or about that away from our building.
So thank you for coming down the hill.
The school has nearly 1400 students from kindergarten to year 12 and a staff of about 500, divided
fairly evenly between permanent and casual employees.
And you have been there for nearly 14 years, but this is your last year.
Are you sad about that?
I'm a great believer in repression and denial, and at this point, I'm not sad about it because
I'm just focusing on the day to day, but I will be towards the end.
Fair enough. Denial.
There's got a lot going for it.
Got a lot of denial.
Well, as advertised, we've only got 15 minutes.
Let's start our 15 minutes right now.
So Bryony, let's start with your morning routine.
What does it look like?
What time do you get up?
Quite early, reluctantly.
I have a gym session three mornings a week at 5.30 in the morning.
My husband and I both get up out of bed at about 10 to 5 and head off there.
And then we come back and we're pretty much straight into the day after that.
And do you do a weights thing or is it a running thing?
For me, it's two sessions of weights and one of cardio.
And the expectation is that I will make up the additional cardio in my own time on the
And I'm in negotiations about that at the moment.
With your gym instructor or your husband?
No, no, he's got his own challenges he's got to focus on.
So no, this is just for the trainer.
And how long does that go for?
Only half an hour.
So it's still near six o'clock.
What happens at six o'clock?
We argue over who's having the shower, first shower, it depends on who's leaving first,
who's got the first appointment, but we're out the door by six thirty seven o'clock.
And do you do breakfast?
No, you're not a breakfast person?
Schools are very funny places because it is fairly relentless from the moment you get
there in the morning.
So you eat when you can and you don't have lunch breaks or breakfast breaks as such.
So it's a fairly, it's fairly full on.
Yes, I can imagine.
OK, Briony, my next question is, tell me about a pivotal moment in your career that somehow
changed the trajectory of what you were doing or changed you as a leader.
I had done a number of things before teaching, but I was fairly disheartened with the education
profession here in Australia.
And then we spent some time living in America and my husband was studying and we had two
little kids and I was staying at home looking after them.
But it allowed me to go to university at night time and do some evening courses.
And I was exposed to an approach to education that I hadn't experienced here.
Now I think we do have it here now, but at the time it was around education and anthropology
and sociology and how education can genuinely change the trajectory of the paths of people
who are born into circumstances where that's not easy to break free.
When I'd gone into teaching here, there'd been this mindset that you do it if you're
not very bright or if there wasn't something else you could do.
And so I was kind of disheartened by the lethargy of it all and the fatalism of it
But I went there and I got to experience people talking about agency within education and
the power of individuals and groups to be able to make a difference.
And that's what I fell in love with.
So when I came back, I carried that with me and I would have left education if I hadn't
have experienced that.
So at that point, what did you think you wanted to do in education in Australia?
What role could you see yourself playing in order to make the changes that you had seen
I think that it was a sense of it's so easy to go woe is me and to get very defeatist
about people who know nothing about education making decisions on behalf of educators.
And I learned that if I wanted to bring about change, I couldn't be fatalistic about it.
I needed to speak up and to speak out.
And that is largely what I've done since then.
I'm very cognisant that particularly in Australia, a lot of other people who have never stepped
foot in a classroom other than their own experience, personal experience or the experience
of their children are dictating how we behave, what we do, how we go about it.
And I really push back on that now.
And I think I can trace that back to my experience in America.
But I do appreciate that we all have constraints.
We all have bosses.
We all have issues.
There are many educational environments and workplaces that do it incredibly tough.
But if there is something that you can do, some difference you can make, then you should
do it and not sit back and give up about it.
Don't be fatalistic.
Don't be fatalistic.
Ultimately, all the rules that we face in this world are man-made rules, which mean
man-made rules can be challenged.
It's just whether you have the courage to be able to do that.
That's very good for both your students and for young executives.
Don't be fatalistic or defeatist.
Okay, Brani, my next question.
What is the best piece of career advice you've ever been given?
For me, it was a retiring head who said to me hasten slowly.
And I love that idea because I have a tendency to be fairly fast moving and fast thinking
It's a reminder that there's a lot of benefit by also pausing and thinking and reflecting
And is that benefit for you to make sure that you're making the right decision and that
you're going in the right path?
Or is the benefit in that you have to take other people along with you and they may take
longer to get the message and to be comfortable to follow you?
So the second one, definitely, because there is a respect, we're very easy to justify
our own approaches to life and to our own approaches to leadership.
And it took me a long time to recognise that actually people who are slower to engage in
change actually bring an enormous benefit to different organisations, as long as they're
not being recalcitrant and doing it without thinking.
So yes to the second one.
The first one is, I don't know that it helps me make a right decision, but I think it helps
me make wiser decisions, particularly in education.
Education is a very complex ecosystem and there are rarely right or wrong answers.
There's a lot of complexity and ambiguity.
And you want to be able to, without getting gridlocked, make sure that you're not leaping
on the simplest answer that is presented to you.
And so it's very easy in education to land on an answer and go, if we just taught our
kids how to read, if we just did this, if we just did that, everything would be fixed.
Well, actually, it's a little more complex than that.
But once you've engaged with the complexity, then you can often come up with, OK, here
are the things that we're going to try.
So do you find yourself wanting to make a decision really snappily, but then having
to force yourself to hold back and say, no, slow down, think about it some more?
It's a lot easier for me now because I've practised over decades.
Every time somebody whispers in my ear about something, it makes sense.
So I have to make sure that I'm not just listening to one person or one perspective or one idea.
I need to be able to do it.
But I've also got to be able to do that quickly, because in business, you can't gridlock
down because you're analysing every single permutation.
And that's why I kind of go, it's really a right decision or a wrong decision.
It's which is the wisest decision to make at this particular time.
Well, Bryony, on that note, the wisest decision for us to make right now is to take a short break.
But don't go away.
We're going to come right back and open the chatterbox.
Welcome back to 15 Minutes with the Boss.
I am here with Dr Bryony Scott, the principal of Winona School.
Now Bryony, this is our section called the Chatterbox.
Now Bryony, in front of you is what we like to call our random question generator,
otherwise known as the Chatterbox.
There are about 20 questions inside today.
Have a fish and please pick out a question, which, of course, I'm going to ask you to answer.
If you had time to learn a new skill, what would it be?
At the moment, it would be Italian.
It would be a language.
And that's predominantly because we are raising a generation of young people who are very globally aware
and connected more broadly.
And I'm forever saying to them, being able to speak a second language or understand a second culture is a gift.
Make sure you develop it.
So is that a message that you really instil in all the students?
Learn about a second culture.
There are two messages.
One is, yes, it's a big world.
And to be able to just speak English in a world where we're expecting everyone to be able to adapt
and to get on, it seems a little outdated in terms of a mindset for me.
The second aspect about it is that as you get older, our ability to learn diminishes if we don't actively stretch it.
And the best example of this is if a young child is learning how to walk and they fall over,
they might cry, but they pick themselves up and they dust themselves off and they just run again.
If I fell over now at my age, I would be so embarrassed.
If I'd broken my leg, I would probably leap to my feet and go, no, no, I'm fine, I'm fine.
I don't want to be publicly embarrassed, right?
And one of the things I love about learning a language is that I am embarrassed.
I cannot speak, but I want to keep learning.
There's no reason cognitively why I can't keep learning.
It's just the ego that stops.
Now, we're then turning around to our young people and say, you need to learn how to fail, fail off and fail forward.
But I'm not going to.
So there's an integrity issue there.
And young people and young employees are always looking to older and wiser people for cues as to how to behave.
And if what they learn is you don't fail and if you do, you cover it up or you lie or you minimize your risk of anything,
then that's what they'll do.
So be prepared to fail.
Be prepared to be embarrassed, because actually it's not embarrassing at all.
Keep on learning and take feedback and just keep going.
Be that three year old child who falls over and just gets themselves up.
Yes, if that's what you're expecting other people to do.
Yeah, that's good advice.
OK, next question.
Have a fish in the box.
Oh, who is a person dead or alive whom you would like to have dinner with and why?
I would love and she has died is my sister.
She was born with significant disabilities and died recently, but she was acutely aware of when people were speaking down to her
and when people were speaking well to her, even though she was often difficult to understand.
And I would love her to come back with the capacity to speak clearly and honestly about what she experienced,
because I do think core to our humanity, but particularly in school communities, is the ability to sit back and listen to people tell their stories.
It's fundamentally what we do.
So by the age of five, a young person can usually give a description of who they think they are, the color they like, you know,
And watching that develop over time into voice and agency over the course of, you know, 12 or 13 years is probably one of our core things.
So I can't determine where a child will go.
I can't determine if they will be a hairdresser or a doctor or a plumber or a minor.
I don't know. It's not my job.
The only thing I have control over is investing in them and empowering them to be able to speak and to use their voice.
So getting your students to have a voice is important.
To recognize their voice.
And this is every workplace, right, particularly in workplaces where there are really strong hierarchies.
It's how do you develop your voice?
How do you develop your agency in that?
And it's not where you're bossing everyone around telling them what to do, but it is also recognizing you actually do have power.
So in year 12, we talk with year 12 students before they leave about power and the fact that it is so intangible, but it is so real.
So I can walk into an auditorium of three thousand people at speech night and they will all stand to their feet without me saying a word.
And that is power. It's completely illusionary.
If anyone chose not to stand up or to get up and walk out, I couldn't stop them.
And so recognizing that that power, especially when it's imposed against us, actually has limitations, but it doesn't feel like it.
So if we can encourage our young people to practice speaking truth to power, challenging power, questioning the power.
Do I agree with what's happening here or do I not agree with what's happening here?
Then that's their voice. That's their agency to be able to go.
You know what? I actually no longer want to work in that place.
I appreciate it. It's just not my scene.
I'm going to go and do something different.
Yes. No, I love that. It's very good advice.
OK, Bryony, back into the box.
Would you like to have another forage around?
Bryony, how do you manage your array of stakeholders?
I guess in your case, we could say, how do you juggle running a business at the same time
as you have to run a really vital education institution?
It is a juggle because most education people don't want to talk about the business side of things.
But every school is a business of some description.
Every school requires money to pay workers, people who are working there.
Every school requires enrollments to be viable.
For me, there is I have to be able to walk the nexus between the two,
but recognize that what people want and what they're after is different according to where they're coming from.
So one of the things that you develop very early on or you have to develop early on
and you then learn regularly is that you simply cannot make everyone happy.
So it is a constant trade off between meeting what are often mutually exclusive demands.
But there has to be viability and these young people have to thrive.
So do you take the view that if everybody is a little bit unhappy, you've probably got the right decision?
Yeah, or that most people are 80% happy the other way around.
And then there are times when you do deep dives into areas, right?
And in school environments, what we're trying to do is particularly since COVID,
the emotional and cognitive load of what is being in the emotional load that's now being placed on principals
and on senior leadership is extraordinary.
And so we know that if we can streamline our processes and develop even more efficiencies
in areas where the relationships are not core, then that frees up our brains and our hearts
for those things that we actually can't control.
So one of the books that areas that I've asked our staff to look at recently is a book by Atul Gawande
called The Checklist Manifesto.
The concept of the checklist manifesto recognizes that if you can reduce the cognitive load in these complex ecosystems,
then that actually does free you up to develop your expertise in your professional areas with what is left.
And he particularly refers to doctors in the healthcare system, but also airline pilots.
Just the sheer complexity of planes now mean that no one pilot can make a decision about whether a plane is good enough to fly.
You have to have these checklists and work through.
So it's working on different fronts, but for the same outcome, which allows our professional staff,
our academic staff to have the cognitive space to deal with the increased expectations that are being placed on them.
But they need to have the processes in place on one side in order to free up their minds.
It's exactly like Barack Obama when he said he laid out all his clothes for the week
so that when he would wake up in the morning, he wouldn't have to make a decision about anything.
And you think, OK, being president of the United States is a very complex job.
What he was doing was reducing his cognitive load so he could go ahead and make these decisions.
Briny, well done. Congratulations.
On that note, you have passed the famous chatterbox test.
I now have one last question, which actually I'm going to modify in your case too.
You are leaving Winona at the end of the year.
What are you planning to do?
Are you planning some amazing travel, for example, or anything amazing that you've always wanted to do?
So I have always wanted to go and see the Northern Lights.
So come the end of the year, I'm heading there with my husband.
And one of our children who just happens to be passing through the Arctic at the time, apparently,
and is going to join us to see the Northern Lights.
And that's my goal.
Fantastic. And is there any other travel?
Are there any other hobbies or things that you have always wanted to learn or to places you wanted to go that you might do as well?
I've made a decision, obviously, that I'm not going to go straight back into work.
So I'm going to take off until Easter.
I work in a boarding school, so it's 24-7.
And for those who work in school communities, you're actually on call every day.
So if something happens, even in the middle of the holidays, you're very much responsible or a part of it and taking care and looking after people.
And so there will be a period of time where I just, yeah, I'll just travel, I guess, and read a lot and maybe write a little bit.
I'll just see. I'm in denial, really, about the fact that I'm going.
So I've kind of business as usual for as long as I can.
And then I'll give some thought to it.
Brian, on that note, our time is up.
Thank you so much for coming in and chatting to us today.
I really love your advice to speak out, to use your voice.
And if you really can't do that, then it's time to get out.
Just don't be fatalistic.
As an adult, don't be afraid to fail or to be embarrassed.
Just get out and do it.
I love the way that you say that you should never force others to do what you won't do.
And the fact that power is illusionary.
Don't forget that.
Anyone can walk out on you at any time.
You've got to earn the power.
So, Bryony, thank you so much again for coming in and allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
Thank you. It's my pleasure. It was wonderful.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
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The Australian Financial Review.