This week I had one of those conversations that leaves you both energised and unsettled in equal measure. Ninety minutes with a leader doing extraordinary work on environmentally ethical, sustainable business — not because it's fashionable, but because she understands the sheer power and influence businesses wield, and what our future generations are owed because of it. We traded specialisms — mine organisational culture and design, hers sustainability — and somewhere in that exchange, a few uncomfortable truths surfaced.
Here's one. DEI's biggest failure was nuance, or the total absence of it. Somewhere along the way, the agenda made white, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class men feel like an existential threat had arrived at their door — lumped into a category apparently also inhabited by the devil and his dozen. That was never going to land well, and it didn't. Sustainability, by contrast, largely avoided demonising a single group of people. That's not an accident. That's a design choice, and it's one DEI never made.
Both agendas, though, share a different affliction — the gotcha. The if-I-didn't-see-it-it-never-happened school of thought. I've watched genuinely intellectual leaders, sharp in every other room they walk into, refuse to act because they're waiting for proof. Then the proof arrives, and suddenly they're combing the internet for the nearest crackpot willing to debunk the truth with lies and fantasy. It's not that the evidence is thin. It's that some people have already decided which evidence they're willing to believe.
And then there are the unintended consequences — my favourite kind of chaos. Nudge representation targets towards more women without ever articulating what you expect for other groups, and lo and behold, other groups quietly decrease. Order leather luggage tags instead of paper ones to save the planet, and they arrive shrink-wrapped in plastic. Good intentions, sloppy execution, same result: you've solved for the headline and broken something underneath it.
There's a leadership problem sitting underneath all of this, too. Power on these topics is so often held by people who've never lived the experience — and may not even believe it's real. Or worse, the only voice given a platform is the advocate, the true believer, the zealot — handed a microphone but never a strategy. Passion without a strategic mindset burns bright and changes nothing. The leader I spoke to this week is trying to fix exactly that problem.
But the biggest enemy in both spaces is media. Say "environment" to someone my age and the pictures that surface are whales, Greenpeace, protesters snarling up traffic, a handful of tents outside Westminster, and a warning not to use spray deodorant because you're personally tearing a hole in the ozone layer. Say "inclusion" and the story is dominated by negativity and whatever headline is most salacious that week. Neither topic is being reported by people who actually understand what the story is. We don't have a facts problem. We have a storytelling problem.
Despite all that, this isn't a hopeless piece. There's a way through, and it's not complicated.
Fact-check first. Know the facts before you speak, then speak with conviction — not hedging, conviction.
Share what you know. Knowledge that stays in your head helps no one.
Assume positive intent. You don't have to have lived something to believe it's real for someone else. Stay open to the possibility.
Challenge the nonsense. Stop waiting for someone else to say the thing or do the thing. Brexit taught us exactly where that instinct leads.
Stay humble. Life is a journey and so is learning. Nobody has all the answers — but the right questions get you closer.
So where do I fit into all this? Over the next year, I'm researching leadership perspectives and experiences across what might be the most tumultuous decade any leader has faced — crisis lurching into crisis, change moving at something close to the speed of light. The goal is a playbook. Not for the version of leadership we inherited, but for the one this moment actually demands.
Mother Earth never needed a villain to make her case. Maybe leadership doesn't either.