What happens when diversity doesn't bring us together?

In his keynote at the 2026 d&i Leaders Global Workplace Inclusion Forum, Corporate cohesion as the new frontier of inclusion management, FAIRER Consulting MD Dan Robertson explores a challenge facing organisations today: how to create genuine connection across an increasingly diverse workforce. Drawing on more than 25 years of experience in equality, diversity and inclusion, Dan examines why representation and inclusion alone are not enough, and why organisations need to be more intentional about creating opportunities for people to connect across difference. Watch Dan’s keynote in full, or read his insights below.

I’ve worked in the field of ED&I for about 25 years. I finished my first degree in European philosophy, which was slightly academic then and it’s slightly academic now. I was studying things like the construction of gender, that race is a social discourse, so it started to become useful later on in life. Then I did a master’s in critical social theory, and the thing that I was studying was the power dynamics in social spaces. How does the high street have a power to it based on things like race and gender and disability?

I left all of that and started my career working in community development, doing a lot of work around race equality, particularly around the Macpherson Report. The Macpherson Report fundamentally changed the whole landscape in terms of how we approach UK legislation and notions of things like institutional racism. I was an adviser to the government and various institutions around that for a long time, and we were working in a really great way.

One of the things that was layered on top of that was a model of social integration in the UK. We were seen as a model for multiculturalism. Our towns from the south to the north were connecting and sharing and bonding. Then something happened in the summer of 2001. Our northern towns sparked in a sea of riots. Those communities that we originally thought were integrating, sharing and bonding, under the surface there were these radical tensions that kicked off big time, and everyone was completely taken aback.

We did a lot of research around that, and there’s something that you must read. It’s called the Cantle Report. There was somebody called Professor Ted Cantle who was asked by the UK government to investigate what the root causes of these summer riots were. He found one fundamental thing: while on the surface our communities are extremely diverse, what we’re all doing is leading parallel lives. There’s no bonding, there’s no interconnection, there’s no sharing. Those on that side of the road go to this school, they hang out in this way. Those on the other side of the road do something else. It was a fundamental principle in terms of how we get integration going.

I was doing all that work for a couple of years and then I came to London. Back in the day I was broke, so I moved to Islington. Islington is fascinating from a social mobility perspective. I was living in one of those tall London houses. I had a basement apartment and my basement apartment actually had a shower in the kitchen, which I think was illegal. But I loved it.

What I remember is every morning I would leave my dodgy shower in the kitchen basement apartment and walk down the high street going into work. On one side of the road was all the posh kids, the rich kids, in their fancy school uniforms, going to school. On literally the other side of the road were the kids from the council estates.

I used to observe something every single day. These kids would go to a certain type of school, they would do certain types of exercises and hobbies after school, they would go on these sorts of holidays and they would interact in this sort of way. And these kids would do completely opposite things. They were literally on different sides of the road, but never the twain shall meet. It was a perfect example of communities leading parallel lives.

The reason I’m sharing these stories is because, even though today we talk about the importance of diversity and inclusion, there’s one fundamental thing that I believe we are all missing, and that is the notion of corporate cohesion.

We can have as much diversity as we want and we can have as much process, policy, structures around inclusion, but if we are not strategically intentional about bringing communities together within our corporate spaces, we are at risk of creating sparks that we will not be able to control.

Diversity and inclusion are not the whole picture

I think it’s important because right now, if we look at the landscape outside, it’s bubbling under again. This rise of identity politics is something that we have to take very seriously and it’s something that we can’t ignore in terms of what’s going on outside and how it might affect our internal spaces.

For me, the work that I’m doing with my clients is saying, when you think about diversity, obviously that’s about representation, and we must completely keep our foot on the gas. We are not where we want to be in terms of having people in and up our organisations based on gender, ethnicity, disability, and so on.

We’ve focused heavily on representation and, as we’ve done that, we’ve had a parallel activity focused on making sure our corporate spaces are safe. We have these principles around psychological safety and belonging, so we have to layer up in terms of inclusion and belonging.

But what I’ve started to observe is that the structures which are designed to promote organisational inclusivity and are doing a decent job, are not structures which are designed to bring people together. In fact, the irony of the legal framework separates us out.

We have things like ERGs for women, people of colour, LGBT groups, and so on. And for me, those ERGs, we should not get rid of. As a gay man myself, I want a space for my tribe, for my people. They make me feel safe. So I’m not advocating that we should disband those.

But what I am saying is, if we don’t start to develop structures where we start to strategically bring groups together, we’ll still have people leading parallel lives at work in the way that we do outside. When you’re thinking about your strategic agendas, how are you actively doing that? Because if you’re not doing that, you’re going to continue to have that separation.

We have to be very intentional to make it happen, because without intentionality it won’t happen. That’s part of the thinking behind the work FAIRER does around conscious inclusion and inclusive leadership, and it’s something we’ll explore further at FAIRER Conference London.

The rise of conflict and strategic silence

Recently I was reading some research by Acas and, if you haven’t read it, it’s really fascinating. They’ve just produced some research around the rise of conflict in our organisational cultures. Just in the last 12 months alone, 44% of working adults have experienced conflict at work. What Acas are saying is that conflict is escalating massively in all sorts of ways.

But what they’ve also found is that diversity-related conflict is radically snowballing. We’ve seen diversity-related disputes at work doubling in the last 12 months and Acas believe that’s going to get higher.

If you look at the data around disability, people that define their disability as having a major impact on their day-to-day life have experienced 68% of work-related conflict, in comparison to 44% of everyone else. Race discrimination claims have tripled from 2017 to 2024.

Why is this happening? Some people who may be in our in-group or may be in our out-group, who are not in our tribe, now feel emboldened to say, ‘You may be into this D&I thing and you may think that your identity is important, whether it’s based on race or gender or disability, but for me it’s not, and you need to stop talking about race and disability at work.’

The root causes play out from overt discrimination to microaggressions. And that is what we’re experiencing. We’re experiencing two radical and almost contradictory things at the same time, and the root cause is what's called values-based conflict.

D&I is in my bones. It is so fundamental. It’s not a job to me. It’s so fundamental to who I am. It’s my value. It’s my breath and water. But what I also know is that there are lots of people that are radically opposed to what we fundamentally stand for. They’re coming into work and saying, ‘I don’t agree with you anymore. You’re all talking about this DEI thing and it’s not something that I value. You’ve overcorrected. What about me? Where do I fit into this picture? I’m not having you saying we want to appoint somebody because they’re female, because they’re Black.’ They are pushing back and they’re feeling emboldened to be vocal about their view, which is radically different from ours, and that is creating conflict.

That’s one observation. The other observation, which is the complete opposite to that, and which makes this very complicated, is while we’re seeing this uplift of conflict, we’re also seeing this huge conflict avoidance. How do we get conflict and conflict avoidance at the same time? The reason for that is because we have a lack of fundamental confidence and competence amongst the people that need to be our allies.

When we have people coming to work saying, ‘This whole D&I thing is not for me,’ we should have people standing up and say, ‘This is why we’re doing it.’ People talk about the idea that it doesn’t matter whether you’re gay, straight, Black, White, if you work hard enough, you will make it in life. We know that’s not true. We know when we look at the data there’s systematic discrimination. That’s what we’re all trying to challenge.

But because of this noise that we’re seeing outside and the noise that’s permeating our cultural spaces, our corporate spaces, a lot of people are now not psychologically safe. So they’re saying, ‘I’m going to stay silent.’

After George Floyd, we saw corporate leaders speak up and say, ‘We must tackle institutional racism,’ and that was the right thing to do. Now what we’re seeing is what I call a strategic silence. And that strategic silence is going to cause us problems later down the line when more people get emboldened.

We need to layer up, not replace

For me, now is the time to layer up our approach to D&I. Let’s remember that we’re not replacing anything. We’re saying we must continue to focus on representation. We must additionally continue to focus on inclusion as well. But if we don’t have strategic intent to bring people together, it’s not going to work.

Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice is the primary source of our understanding of how human beings operate. He’s one of the greatest psychologists ever around. He says there’s one magic thing that works, and it's called positive social contact. When you get people hanging out together, chilling, gossiping, talking, having tea, or if you’re like me, having a glass of wine, those kind of things break down stereotypes.

It’s not rocket science. The psychology says when we hang out, we lose the gap of difference. What we don’t have in our corporate spaces is positive social contact. We have inclusion strategies which work to pull people together, or rather, in silos. We’ve got to focus on the positive social contact. We’re always talking a lot about wellbeing, and I think that’s important because when we don’t do this, wellbeing at the organisational level and the human level goes down. This is impacting all of our mental health.

We have to radically redesign our structures, our policies and our processes, because if you have a strategy right now which is focused on diversity and inclusion without cohesion, you’re going to get problems later down the line. Leadership at the top of the organisation is also critical, but we are all responsible for this. All of us can play a role in positive social contact and all of us must play a role in terms of challenging myths.

Finally, don't do initiatives. Social contagion means do it every day; it's those nudge principles. If you do one tiny thing every day to build positive social contact, the magic that we need will happen.

At FAIRER, this thinking feeds into our work across DEI auditing, strategy, conscious inclusion, unconscious bias and inclusive leadership training, helping organisations think about how their structures, policies and practices can create more inclusive workplaces.

Continue the conversation at FAIRER Conference 2026

Want to hear more from Dan? We’ll be continuing the conversation around corporate cohesion at FAIRER Conference. Join us on 22 October in London, where leaders across HR, ED&I, L&D and wellbeing will explore how organisations can create more inclusive, fair and sustainable workplaces.