Diana Renner

Why organisations work with Diana Renner

• Her book Not Knowing (CMI Management Book of the Year, translated into 15+ languages) makes a specific, counterintuitive argument: that the pressure to project expertise and have answers actively impairs leadership in genuinely complex situations. This is a diagnosis most leadership development programmes avoid, and a conversation senior leadership teams rarely have with rigour.
• She works at the intersection of three distinct bodies of knowledge – adaptive leadership, adult development theory, and process oriented psychology – a combination that addresses not only what organisations need to do differently, but how leaders must develop as people. This is not available from single-discipline practitioners.
• Her guest faculty roles at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and the University of Texas LBJ School of Government confirm that her frameworks hold up in rigorous, peer-reviewed executive education settings alongside practitioner application.
• Through the Uncharted Leadership Institute and programme partnerships with Melbourne Business School, Monash Business School, the University of Adelaide, and the Australian Institute of Police Management, she has built and tested leadership development approaches across commercial, government, and community contexts at scale.
• Her personal biography – leaving Romania in 1987, professional reinvention across law, refugee advocacy, and leadership development – gives the Not Knowing framework lived authority that purely academic treatments of the same topic cannot match.

Biography highlights

• Co-author of Not Knowing: The Art of Turning Uncertainty into Opportunity (LID Publishing) – CMI Management Book of the Year 2015; translated into 15+ languages
• Co-author of Not Doing: The Art of Effortless Action (LID Publishing, 2018)
• Director and co-founder, Uncharted Leadership Institute (est. 2016); creator, Not Knowing Lab
• Senior Lecturer, Monash University; adjunct lecturer, University of Adelaide; associate, Melbourne Business School
• Guest faculty, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and University of Texas LBJ School of Government
• 2017 Monash University Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award (Global Challenges Honours Program teaching team)

Biography

Diana Renner’s book Not Knowing: The Art of Turning Uncertainty into Opportunity, co-written with Steven D’Souza, won the Chartered Management Institute’s Management Book of the Year in 2015. Its thesis is direct: the pressure to project expertise and certainty is often what makes complex adaptive challenges harder to navigate, not easier. Translated into more than fifteen languages, it has become a reference for leadership development practitioners and senior teams working with genuine strategic uncertainty.

The book draws on a distinction most leadership frameworks collapse: technical problems can be solved with existing expertise, while adaptive challenges require new thinking and development. Renner’s work through the Uncharted Leadership Institute, which she co-founded in 2016, is built around helping senior leaders recognise which they are facing – and develop the capacity to engage productively with the latter.

Her practice draws on three distinct disciplines: adaptive leadership, adult development theory, and process oriented psychology. Together, these address not only what organisations need to do differently, but how leaders need to develop as people to lead well in conditions of genuine uncertainty. Programme partnerships with Melbourne Business School, Monash Business School, the University of Adelaide, and the Australian Institute of Police Management have tested these frameworks across commercial, government, and community contexts.

Renner holds a Senior Lectureship at Monash University and has served as guest faculty at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and the University of Texas LBJ School of Government. Her second book, Not Doing: The Art of Effortless Action (2018), extends the Not Knowing argument into the territory of executive effectiveness – examining how excessive busyness and compulsive doing undermine the quality of leadership in complex environments.

Key speaking topics

• Adaptive leadership in uncertainty and complexity
• Not Knowing – leading beyond expertise
• Not Doing – effortless action and the limits of busyness
• Distinguishing adaptive from technical challenges
• Adult development theory and leadership growth
• Deliberately developmental organisational cultures
• Complexity theory and strategic resilience

Ideal for

• CEOs and C-suite executives leading organisations through complex change or strategic inflection points
• CHROs and heads of leadership development designing senior leadership programmes
• Senior executives and leadership teams in government and public sector organisations
• Board-level strategy and scenario planning forums

Audience outcomes

• A clear distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges, with practical language for applying it in real organisational conversations
• Greater self-awareness about how the pressure to have answers shapes individual leadership behaviour and team dynamics
• Practical frameworks from Not Knowing and Not Doing for leading through uncertainty without forcing premature resolution
• A more explicit understanding of how adult development theory applies to the daily practice of leadership
• Approaches to building team and organisational cultures that can hold complexity and sustain productive engagement over time