🌴85. Why a former school principal is tackling the future of work head-on feat. Dr Paul Browning OAM
I had the pleasure of chatting with Dr Paul Browning, an educator-turned-founder who’s spent decades in school leadership and is now taking on a much bigger challenge: redesigning education to actually prepare students for the real world.
Paul is the founder of Vivedus, a company focused on helping schools teach, assess, and report on creative thinking — the one skill students (and employees) desperately need but are rarely taught.
We talk about why creativity gets conditioned out of us, how compliance is crushing the love of teaching, and what trust really looks like in a school or a workplace.
We also cover:
- Why school leaders often get stuck in old ways of thinking
- What employers really want from graduates
- The power of teaching for impact, not just assessment
- Paul’s reflections on leadership, culture, and the cost of bureaucracy
Dr Paul Browning was a school principal for over 25 years. His passions are leadership, organisational culture and creativity. He believes that trust is the fundamental resource for successful leadership and a healthy organisational culture and creativity is the future of education.
Paul has spoken at numerous conferences, both nationally and internationally, and lead workshops on leadership, teacher improvement, school culture and improvement to well in excess of 4000 school leaders and CEOs across several continents.
He is the author of “Compelling Leadership: The importance of trust and how to get it” (Apple iBooks), and “Principled: 10 leadership practices for building trust”
Paul has been listed amongst the top 50 most influential people in education in Australia, awarded Australia’s best non-government school principal, and awarded an Order of Australia Medal for services to education.
Paul is currently the Managing Director of Vivedus, a Learning Activation Model revolutionizing education by unlocking students' creative intelligence. In collaboration with the University of Melbourne,
Vivedus provides schools with an AI-powered, SaaS-based framework integrating pedagogy, assessment tools, and teaching strategies.
As the only Learning Activation Model with a digital AI-enabled platform, it empowers educators to teach and assess creative intelligence while giving school leaders real-time insights into teaching quality.
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