MARK MY WORDS is a regular series on markjones.au sharing insights from some of the thought leaders and experts Mark Jones gets to speak with in the course of his work as a speaker, journalist and author. Here, we revisit an interview for his book, The Story for Leaders, exploring scenes behind the insights he speaks to audiences about: the stories we tell ourselves, the limiting beliefs that hold us back, and the courage it takes to rewrite them in an age of AI-driven change.
I first met Dr Renu Burr on stage at the Social Impact Summit, where she led a room of 300 people through a live, unscripted exercise in courageous conversation. I still remember the charge in that room. So when I sat down with her – one of ten leaders I interviewed while researching my book, The Story Code for Leaders – I knew we wouldn't stay on the surface for long.
Renu Burr is a director at Burr Consulting, a senior consultant at Corporate Evolution, a facilitator at Next 25, and an Associate Professor at the Centre for Social Impact at UNSW Sydney, where she built the Leadership for Social Impact course. She has spent three decades coaching leaders and teaching MBA and Executive MBA students through the messy, human work of transformation. Within minutes of starting to record, she'd already reframed a lifetime of purpose in a single sentence.
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MAKE THE OBVIOUS MORE VISIBLE
“My purpose has been, even as a small child, to hold space for the invisible to be made visible, and for the unspoken to be spoken, for the wholeness and well-being and flourishing of all,” Renu tells me. “But last week I had this epiphany: it's actually not to make the invisible visible. It's to make the obvious visible.”
It sounds like a small shift in language. It isn't. “We already have everything we need,” she says. “It's there. And then we get in our own way.” The work, as she describes it, is removing the “veils of transparency” – her nod to the philosopher Martin Heidegger – that hide our own potential from ourselves. Not building something new. Clearing the fog off something that was already there. It's a line that stuck with me long after we stopped recording – it ended up quoted, almost word for word, in the book itself.
Ask her how leaders respond when she puts that to them, and you get the honest answer of a woman who has spent thirty years in rooms with executives: “It depends. And this is my management consulting answer – it depends.” What it depends on, she says, is the level of consciousness a leader is operating from. “How wide is the aperture of the camera you're looking through the world from? I have a very simple definition of consciousness: it's what I can be aware of, what I can pay attention to, and where I can take action from.”
FROM EGO TO ECOSYSTEM
Renu set up the Leadership for Social Impact course at UNSW's Centre for Social Impact, teaching it in the postgraduate program and the MBA. The reaction from students, she says, is often disbelief. “Their eyes would fall out of their head when I said, you know what, you can't control anything. All you can do is create the conditions for the right outcomes to emerge.”
That idea borrows from Otto Scharmer's language of moving from ego to ecosystem leadership. Ego-system leadership, Renu explains, lives in the “I in me” – decisions run through self-interest. A step further is the “I in it”, and further still, empathic leadership, the “I in you”. But ecosystem leadership sits somewhere deeper again – “deeper down from somewhere in our belly, almost with an open will, about me being in service of the fields that I operate in, the space that I operate in. And that is a big let go.”
It's a let-go many leaders resist, because it asks them to stop believing they can think their way to certainty. “We still live at that level thinking we can think, think, think, and think our way out of stuff,” she says. “But I've got to invite all the parts of the system in. And this really kind of gives leaders the heebie-jeebies.” The wisdom of any system, she has found since the early 1990s, rests at its edges – not at the top.
Renu draws on developmental psychologist Robert Kegan's stages of adult development to explain why this shift is so hard. Most leadership, she says, runs on what Kegan calls the socialised mind – necessary, ego-protective, but oriented around external validation. “Am I safe? Do I belong? Am I worthy? We are looking for external validation. It's an outside-in view of life.” Growth begins at the point Renu calls the real inflection: “What got me here won't get me there.” From there, leaders can move into what Kegan terms the self-authoring mind – “where I start making decisions based on my values, and I take authority. I author my life.”
THE FILING CLERK WHO BECAME A PROFESSOR
Renu tells her own story often, in workshops, because it is the clearest proof of everything she teaches. She arrived in Australia at twenty, newly married, halfway through a psychology master's degree in India, where she'd finished in the top ten of her undergraduate cohort. None of that counted here. “Only my high school quals were recognised. So I start from the bottom.” Her first job in Australia was as a filing clerk in the second basement of the tax office in Perth – now the site of the Duxton Hotel. “The best experience I've ever had,” she says, without irony.
From there: personnel, then HR, then the first strategic HR plan for the department's management board in the late 1980s. Then the glass ceiling. Then, as a single parent of two young children, back to study – a postgraduate diploma that became a master's, then a PhD at UWA Business School, teaching in the MBA since 1992. “I'm very, very grateful to Dr Ron Cassidy. He took me on without a recognised undergrad.”
The PhD took seven years – she fell pregnant with her third child the day she enrolled. She finished in 2001 and landed the job of her dreams: a tenure-track leadership position at UWA Business School. And she kept adding. Committees. An ARC research grant that took her to abattoirs around the country. Three children. The board of her daughters' school, chairing its strategic planning committee. “I cooked 600 curries at their fete. Can you feel this woman?”
What she couldn't feel, until it was almost too late, was an allergy building quietly in her own body to common anti-inflammatory drugs – ibuprofen, Nurofen. She had passed out more than once and shrugged it off. The last time, she ended up in the emergency room at Charles Gairdner Hospital. “I ended up... seeing my life going through my eyes, which was such a wake-up call for me.”
“For me, it was that I had to prove I belong,” she says of the years that led there. “I had to push myself. I did the worst statistical PhD – I don't have a single numerical bone in my body – but I had to do it, to prove that I could be as good as anyone.” The value driving all of it, she now understands, was autonomy – fierce, independent, allergic to asking for help. “It had an accelerator. It completely got me to where I wanted to go. I could push boundaries, I could take on the hardest projects, I could do anything.” It also had a brake: “I don't ask for help. I don't collaborate that well either.”
WHEN THE MIND WON'T HEAR THE BODY
The near-death experience wasn't the end of the reckoning. Around the same time, Renu's daughter gave a birthday speech and, amid the warmth, said: “I don't know if I can ever be as good as mum.” Renu remembers thinking, “Holy cow – how am I showing up as a leader in my family?” She didn't want her three daughters comparing themselves to a “harried superwoman myth” she was still, at that point, trying to live out.
Then came two rounds of breast cancer – the first in 2015, the second in 2017, unrelated to the first. “There are 23 types, and I was the lucky one to get another one.” She is now seven years clear. “We have to have some disruption to the status quo to make these shifts,” she reflects. “It just doesn't happen because it's a good thing to do.”
What strikes me most is how deliberately she refused the identity of victim or survivor. “I never associated my identity as a cancer victim, survivor – none of that. It was an illness, and I was going to go through the illness.” The first time, she treated chemotherapy as a kind of reset: “I just said, okay, this is a great chance for a DNA reset. I'm going to come out a different person.” She'd be decimated for a week, then back at work in a wig and heels for the other two of each three-week cycle – “it was nice to put a bit of lipstick on and get out there.”
The second time, the story she told herself was different again. “I said, okay, I didn't learn enough the first time – so what's this one here to do?” She chose a double mastectomy, which she now frames not as loss but as offering: “That was an offering to heal anything in the feminine line in my ancestry, and for my girls, to heal that. And so I was completely at peace.”
The tools she leaned on through it all – mindfulness, meditation, journaling, embodiment practice – are the same ones she now teaches leaders. “A lot of the time we are just talking heads in organisations,” she says. “The job of our mind is to keep us safe, to remember the past and bring it forward. And it can be quite limiting – it'll say danger, danger, fear, fear, don't go there. But our body knows.” Every trigger, every upset, became something to examine rather than suppress. “It's a bit like peeling the onion. You peel off a layer and there's another one. There may be some tears.”
THE TADPOLE HAS TO LOSE ITS TAIL
Renu's method for guiding others through this kind of change draws on Otto Scharmer's Theory U, developed at MIT's Presencing Institute. “The first realisation is that I cannot shift the outer world without doing the inner work,” she says. The process starts with a purpose, individual or collective, then moves through what she calls seeing the system clearly – quoting systems thinker Peter Senge: “A system cannot transform until it can see and sense itself.”
From there, leaders are asked to suspend their assumptions and let go of whatever no longer serves them – an old belief, an inherited assumption, something carried from the past that may no longer be true. “The tadpole has to get rid of its tail to become the beautiful frog,” she says. At the bottom of the U sits a kind of stillness, where the real question surfaces: who am I, and what is my work? From there, a new way forward can crystallise – tested through small experiments before it embeds in the system. “I can do this in five minutes in a coaching conversation. I can do it in a meeting. I can do it over a couple of years with an organisation – it's called awareness-based systems change.”
With her Corporate Evolution colleague Lisa Doig, Renu also uses the image of an iceberg to explain why change is so often superficial: behaviours sit above the waterline, visible to everyone. Thoughts and feelings sit just below it. Deeper still are our values and beliefs. And at the very bottom are our needs – met or unmet – echoing Maslow's foundation: am I safe, do I belong, am I worthy? “Different people have different centres of gravity in those three areas,” she says. “The ‘am I safe' one, right at the bottom, shows up as people who absolutely have to be in control. I always look with compassion when I see people so obsessed with control – what is it they're feeling out of control about? That's the story.”
LISTENING AS THE FIRST ACT OF COURAGE
“Courage comes from the root koa, which means heart,” Renu tells me – she describes herself as a word nerd, and it shows. “So my sense is: listen to your heart. Listen to the wisdom of your heart.” It's here that our conversation lands on something I've been circling in my own work: the difference between a decision and a choice. “A choice is from here – it's off the heart,” she says. “A decision is from here – the mind.”
For Renu, the work of leadership – and of rewriting our own stories – comes down to listening. Not performing openness, but practising it. “How do I listen to my story, myself, that I'm telling myself? Is it really true?” She talks about a concept gaining ground in leadership circles: fourth person knowing. First person is me. Second person is you and me. Third person is the observer's view. “Fourth person is actually listening to something that's bigger than us, that's in the field. We all know that it's there. I think at this time, in this place, in this moment in our world history, it behoves us to really start listening to something that is calling us to do.”
She's candid that most leaders she coaches are better at extending compassion than receiving it. “There is not much self-compassion. We can be compassionate to others, but we're not really that compassionate to self. We're hard on ourselves.” And she is unsentimental about the alternative to doing this work at all: “If we don't shift our level of consciousness, we're going to get what we've always got. We're living in a fantasy if we believe we can get there the way we're going right now.”
SHAKE OFF LIMITING BELIEFS
Her one next step for any leader listening is deceptively simple. “Even if it's just listening to your own stories – are they really true? Where are they coming from? What's my limiting belief? Who would I be if I didn't hold that limiting belief? Being just curious with yourself.”
Renu isn't on social media – by choice. “I just refuse to be anywhere near it,” she says. “What we're doing is we're kind of selling our soul to that external whatever it is. I call it the curated self.” In a world now layering AI on top of that curation, the point lands harder than when she first made it. The self we present isn't the self that transforms. That work happens somewhere quieter – in the listening, in the letting go, in the choice made from the heart rather than the calculation made by the mind.
As we wrap up, Renu offers a line that could stand as the epigraph for this whole series: “That's for me one of the key qualities of leaders – that I'm as human as you are. And we're all trying to get to that highest future possibility together. So that's the humility here.”
It's been lovely to have a different conversation, Renu told me at the end of our interview time together, and “I hope a provocative one!” It was both. Her story is a reminder that the inner work isn't a detour from leadership. It is leadership. And in an age of AI-driven change, when it's tempting to outsource our thinking and our courage alike, that might be the most useful reframe of all.
Onwards.