Simon Sinek calls it the Infinite Game, leadership measured by the willingness to keep showing up and stay curious. It is not so much a grand idea as a daily practice, a way of being with others.
Dr Geoffrey Fisher wouldn’t describe it that way. He doesn’t speak in frameworks. The word “leadership” rarely appears in his stories. He’s far less interested in institutions than he is in people. Conversations with him are about the joy of seeing others find their way.
But this is what it looks like – a life lived in the infinite game.
what stays, what shapes
A long-time educator and school head, Dr Geoff has led schools through seasons of change across Europe, South America, Africa and Asia. He didn’t start out wanting to teach, though. “I discovered that I didn’t want to be a research scientist – too many dead rats,” he says with a laugh. But once he found his way into education at 24, the fit was immediate. “I naturally fell into it and found it was where I was meant to be.”
Education was the family business on both sides of his family. His mother’s grandparents worked in Africa as part of the Colonial Office, building schools to serve local communities. His father, grandfather and uncles were all educators. Conversations around the dinner table or on drives were rarely about cricket or the weather. They were about education.
More than four decades later, Dr Geoff still lights up when he talks about his work.
“I enjoy the company of young people,” he says. “They’re naturally aspirational – whatever it may be about. You see these bright-eyed, sparky young people,” he says, “and they become a little more mature, reflective, and complex… That’s what I love. That transformation. That sense of becoming.”
the measure of a life, not a lesson plan
If you ask him what he values most, he won’t list academic metrics. He’ll talk about a student who is thriving at a cross-border development agency. Or the one who became a teacher. Or the one who wasn’t expected to succeed but was accepted to a good university. The thousands of relationships built over years of walking through school corridors, listening closely. “I love it when I receive an email from one of them. It’s wonderful for me that those things happen.”
This mix of self-deprecation and quiet conviction defines Dr Geoff’s presence. He doesn’t need to convince you of anything. He shows up, curious and wholly present, and invites you to do the same.
“It’s not just about academic outcomes, which are important,” he says, “but about what people end up doing with their lives. Whether someone has become a bit more thoughtful, a bit more human, because of their time with you.”
For Dr Geoff, leadership is about enabling others to develop: teachers and students alike. “If you can help them develop into more complex people, ready for life’s challenges, then you’ve done the job you’re expected to do.”
on being led, and learning to lead
Dr Geoff tells a story from his sixtieth birthday. A friend from school, a very successful businessman, flew in from Australia to be there. “I asked him why he came all this way,” Dr Geoff recalls. “And he said, ‘Because I learnt something from you in school that has been invaluable to me my whole career: how to manage up.'”
It stayed with Dr Geoff, too.
In school leadership, managing up is as critical as managing down. It’s one of those invisible skills, rarely taught and often overlooked, that define how institutions work.
“People in positions of authority are often just as uncertain as everyone else,” he says. “The trick is not to pretend otherwise. It’s to have a meaningful relationship with those above and beside you. That’s how trust is built.”
As a head of school, he sees his role as beside teachers. “Teachers carry the greatest responsibility,” he says. “Not me. They do the real work, and that deserves deep respect.”
the moral weight of compulsion
If there’s a central principle in Dr Geoff’s leadership, it’s paying it forward. “I’m privileged to be at a point in my career, or in my life, where there’s more joy to be found in seeing others grow than in striving for myself. It’s become easier to be less ambitious for me and more ambitious for others.”
One of his favourite educational quotes comes from Kurt Hahn, the German educator behind Gordonstoun and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award: “Personal renewal in the young is not possible unless voluntariness is supported by compulsion.”
Dr Geoff believes in that balance. “There are some things students must experience -whether they want to or not,” he says. “That’s the job of a school. To insist on exposure. To nudge someone into a play, a hike, a debate, a failure.”
Because without risk, there is no growth. Structure is what makes freedom possible.
“You may never do it again. But it’ll have changed you. That’s enough.”
same species, different soil
Everywhere he’s worked, from Argentina to India, Dr Geoff has seen the same human patterns in different cultural packaging. He says teenagers, in particular, are more alike than different.
“Whether it’s Argentina or India, the core needs remain: companionship, aspiration, curiosity, some room to rebel,” he says. “What changes is the expression, not the essence.”
In Argentina, his students would go out dancing at 2AM. In India, they’re asleep by 10. In both places, they’re trying to understand who they are through music, fashion, late-night conversations, and classroom experiments that fail gloriously.
“Culture is just the top layer,” he says. “Underneath, it’s all human.”
And humanity, in his experience, responds best to gentleness, to structure without rigidity, and to adults who model what it means to learn.
And that, he says, is one of the key tasks of education: teaching young people how to build positive, productive relationships with their world. “That’s difficult to do; many adults haven’t mastered that, let alone children. But young people have great insights.”
on phones, populism, and the pressure to be perfect
Dr Geoff has a complicated relationship with technology. He’s not anti-AI – far from it. But he is wary of what uncritical adoption has done to children’s capacity for reflection, risk, and rest.
“We just accepted smartphones. Bought the latest model. No one gave any thought to impact,” he says.
He speaks of shortened attention spans, one-dimensional visual fields, children who scroll endlessly, and a generation exposed to more with fewer protections. “We’ve removed all the bumps from childhood,” he says, “but it’s the bumps that teach you how to walk.”
And he doesn’t just mean physically. “There’s the explosion of anxiety and depression, particularly among young people. Sure, the pandemic contributed, but the root is this constant intake of fragmented, unthinking, often inaccurate information. That’s how social interaction happens now – through these snippets.”
AI, and the art of confronting your own mind
He believes AI will shape the next 20 years, and schools must engage with it meaningfully. “If you use it to avoid thinking, it becomes anti-learning,” he says. “The joy of struggling through an idea… of writing something badly, at first, then iterations that get better… It’s a process that challenges you and helps you confront your own humanity.”
That loss of process, he warns, is dangerous. Especially in a world already confused about truth. “I worry deeply about the rewriting of history. The erasure of nuance. The rise of leaders more interested in spectacle than service.”
school as a space for risk
Growing up, Dr Geoff and his brothers would disappear for the day, into fields, up trees, through national parks. “We were told to be back by dark,” he says. “No phones. No trackers. Just trust.”
One reason he believes in outdoor education is that it teaches people how to take risks safely, think critically, fall and get back up.
He believes modern schooling has become too insulated and too curated. “We’re producing children afraid of mistakes,” he says. “And that’s heartbreaking because mistakes are where the learning lives.”
In his mind, school should be the safest place to fail and the first to forgive.
traditional schools will be standing. Still.
There’s no grand theory here. Just a quiet conviction that school will remain necessary, because relationships will remain necessary.
“Whatever AI does, whatever jobs disappear, humans still need each other,” he says. “True happiness, according to researchers, requires something purposeful, something that benefits others, and relationships. If you have those three, you can lead a fulfilled life. Whether you’re building a nuclear power station or working on a social farm, it’s about being human.”
To him, school is less about preparing for a job and more about preparing to be human. “A good teacher can teach in a field,” he says. “Because what matters is care. That’s the one thing AI can’t simulate.”
equity as ethos
Dr Geoff has worked in some of the world’s most prestigious schools and settings where students shared a single mobile phone with their families.
He doesn’t romanticise either. But he does return, again and again, to equity.
“The biggest barrier to education is teachers,” he says bluntly – skilled, supported teachers who care enough to show up every day, over and over. “There’s a global shortage. India alone has a million vacancies. That’s 30 million kids not learning.”
And pay matters. “No one becomes a teacher to get rich. But they shouldn’t have to fight to survive either.”
One of his proudest memories comes from a school where half the students were on scholarship. “Millionaires’ kids and rickshaw drivers’ kids learning together. That was part of the education.”
He tells the story of a boy who turned down an iPhone in favour of two Nokia handsets – one for himself and one for his roommate. “That’s what we’re trying to teach,” he says. “That kind of generosity. That kind of thinking.”
the long road home
Dr Geoff doesn’t consider himself a transformational leader. He’s more comfortable with words like “support” and “stewardship”.
When asked about managing change, he shrugs. “Don’t consult to the point of paralysis. Make the best decision you can, move forward with the plan, and hold the relationships close so you can adapt.”
He believes in aspiration, not ambition. In asking more of yourself. He has helped establish professional networks across Latin America and India, spaces where heads of schools can support one another. “The IB Heads Association has been wonderful for me. There’s great strength in having a community of people who understand your place. Headship can be lonely. The buck always stops with you.” His greatest joy remains the people. “I’ve made good friends. That’s the real win.”
the infinite job of leading
What would he say to his younger self?
“Don’t think so much,” he smiles. “The world’s more complex than you think. So temper your certainty with curiosity.”
There’s a pause before he speaks again. The kind that only comes from someone who has taken the long road, made peace with its bends.
“I think we all suffer from that sense of early certainty. There’s nothing like experience to teach you to be more humble.”
Then he adds, “It’s an infinite job, this. Teaching. Leading. Living. You never quite arrive.”
And maybe, that’s the point of it all.
