Boundary spanner. Collective catalyst. Educator.#
Dr Kerry Elliott is a Menzies Senior Research Fellow in the Leadership and Complexity Lab at the ANU School of Cybernetics. She also holds positions as a Senior Research Fellow in Leadership, School and System Transformation at the Australian Council for Educational Research, and as a Board Director of the Victorian Academy of Teaching and Leadership. Kerry works across boundaries between disciplines, organisations and sectors, bringing people, ideas and perspectives together around complex challenges.
Kerry is interested in leadership as a collective practice: something that emerges through relationships, shared purpose and the capacity to act together. Her work explores how individuals and collectives make sense of complexity, navigate uncertainty and create the conditions for meaningful transformation.
Across a career spanning more than 25 years, Kerry has worked in teaching, leadership, research and academic roles. Her career has taken her across schools, universities and research organisations, shaping an enduring interest in how ideas move between research, policy and practice and how people across different contexts can build shared capability and create lasting change.
Working nationally and internationally, Kerry collaborates with academic, government, and industry partners to design, implement and evaluate approaches that strengthen leadership and collective capacity. She is particularly drawn to the intersections between people, technologies and environments, and to the role leadership can play in shaping safer, more sustainable and more equitable futures.
Her approach combines systems thinking with systems doing: noticing patterns, relationships and feedback while working with others to turn insight into practical action. A collaborator by instinct, Kerry is most at home in the spaces between established roles, fields and institutions. She enjoys convening diverse groups, creating the conditions for productive dialogue, and helping people build shared understanding across difference, particularly when the way forward is uncertain and no single person, organisation or discipline holds the answer.
She holds a PhD and a Master of School Leadership, a Graduate Diploma in Special Education, and bachelor’s degrees in Teaching and Arts.
Kerry is happiest when the work is complex, the boundaries are blurry and the answer needs to be built together.
Areas of expertise: Boundary-spanning; Leadership in complexity; Systems Thinking and doing; Organisational and system transformation; Leadership capability development; Collective efficacy and collaborative capacity; Strategic sensemaking; Professional learning; and Qualitative research methods.