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 equality, diversity and inclusion for about 25 years. My first degree was in European philosophy, where I studied things like the construction of gender and race as a social discourse. I then went on to do a master’s in critical social theory, looking at power dynamics in social spaces and how things like race, gender and disability shape the environments we live and work in. At the time, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to do with all of that, but it became incredibly useful later in my career.

I started my career working in community development, doing a lot of work around race equality. In the UK, the Macpherson Report fundamentally changed the landscape in terms of how we approached legislation and notions such as institutional racism. I spent a long time advising government and various institutions around this work. At the same time, there was a strong model of social integration in the UK. We were seen as a model for multiculturalism, with communities supposedly connecting, sharing and bonding.

Then something happened in the summer of 2001. Our northern towns erupted into riots, and everyone was taken aback. Communities that we had originally thought were integrating, sharing and bonding had, beneath the surface, some radical tensions. We did a whole bunch of research into what was happening, including work by Professor Ted Cantle, who was asked by the UK government to investigate the root causes of the riots.

One of the fundamental findings was that, while our communities were extremely diverse on the surface, people were actually leading parallel lives. There was no bonding, no interconnection and no real sharing between some communities. People might live in the same towns, but they would go to different schools, socialise in different places and interact in completely different ways.

A few years later, when I came to London, I saw an almost perfect example of this myself. I was living in Islington in a basement apartment and, every morning, I would leave my flat and walk down the high street on my way to work. On one side of the road were the relatively affluent kids, wearing their fancy school uniforms and heading off to school. On the other side of the road were kids from the council estates. They were physically incredibly close to one another, but they were doing completely different things. They went to different schools, took part in different activities and hobbies, went on different types of holidays and interacted in different ways. They were literally on different sides of the road, but never the twain shall meet.

That experience has stayed with me because, after more than 20 years of working with corporates, I believe there is one fundamental thing we are missing from the diversity and inclusion conversation: the notion of corporate cohesion. We can have as much diversity as we want and as much process, policy and structure around inclusion as we want, 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.

This question of how organisations move beyond representation to create genuine connection will be explored further at FAIRER Conference London on 22 October, where leaders from across HR, DE&I, L&D and wellbeing will come together to examine what more inclusive workplaces need to look like in practice. Find out more about FAIRER Conference.

Diversity and inclusion are not the whole picture

When we think about diversity, representation is obviously important, and we must keep our foot on the gas. We are not where we want to be in terms of having people in and progressing through our organisations based on gender, ethnicity, disability and other aspects of identity. Alongside that, we have rightly focused on making our corporate spaces safe, with principles around psychological safety, belonging and inclusion.

But what I’ve started to observe is that the structures designed to promote organisational inclusivity are not necessarily structures designed to bring people together. In fact, there is an irony in the fact that some of the frameworks we have created can separate us out. We have employee resource groups for women, people of colour, LGBTQ+ groups and other communities, and those groups are incredibly important. We should not get rid of them. As a gay man myself, I want a space for my tribe and my people. Those spaces can make people feel safe.

What I am saying is that if we do not also start to develop structures where we strategically bring groups together, we will continue to have people leading parallel lives at work in the way that they do outside work. We have to be very intentional about making that happen, because without intentionality, it simply will not happen.

This is where FAIRER’s work on conscious inclusion and inclusive leadership supports organisations to move from simply having inclusive policies and structures towards creating the behaviours and conditions that enable genuine connection across difference. We’ll take a closer look at this at FAIRER Conference London, with conversations focused on the practical challenges leaders face when trying to build connection, trust and inclusion across increasingly complex workplaces. 

The rise of conflict and strategic silence

It is particularly important to look at what is happening outside our organisations. The rise of identity politics is something we have to take very seriously, because we cannot ignore what is happening in wider society or how it might affect our internal spaces.

I’ve been looking at research around the rise of conflict in organisational cultures, and there are some really interesting findings. Conflict is escalating in all sorts of ways, and diversity-related conflict is increasing significantly. There are also particular disparities when we look at experiences of conflict among different groups, including disabled people, while race discrimination claims have also increased significantly over recent years.

There are obviously many root causes of conflict, and it is complicated, but one issue I think we need to take particularly seriously is values-based conflict. Diversity and inclusion are in my bones. It is not just a job to me; it is fundamental to who I am. It is my value. But I also know that there are lots of people who are radically opposed to some of what we fundamentally stand for.

People are coming into work and saying that they do not agree with diversity and inclusion anymore. They may feel that identity should not be talked about at work, or that organisations have overcorrected. They may be asking where they fit into the picture and what happens to them. That pushback is creating conflict, and it can play out in everything from overt discrimination to microaggressions.

At the same time, we are seeing something that appears almost completely contradictory: huge levels of conflict avoidance. We have a lack of fundamental confidence and competence among some of the people who need to be our allies. When people challenge diversity and inclusion, we should have people who are able to stand up and explain why we are doing this work and why the evidence tells us that systematic discrimination still exists. But because of the noise we are seeing outside and the noise permeating our corporate spaces, a lot of people are no longer psychologically safe enough to engage. They decide to stay silent.

After George Floyd, we saw corporate leaders speaking up and saying that organisations must tackle institutional racism, and that was the right thing to do. What we are seeing now is what I would call a strategic silence. That strategic silence is going to cause us problems later down the line if more people become emboldened to express views that go unchallenged.

FAIRER’s inclusive leadership training helps leaders build the confidence and competence to navigate these difficult conversations, challenge exclusionary behaviours and create environments where people can engage with difference rather than retreat into silence.

We need to layer up, not replace

For me, it is really important that when we think about our approach to diversity and inclusion, we now need to layer up. We are not replacing anything. We must continue to focus on representation, and we must continue to focus on inclusion and belonging. But if we do not have strategic intent to bring people together, it is not going to work.

One of the things that I think is particularly important here is the work of Gordon Allport and his research into the nature of prejudice. There is one fundamental thing that can make a real difference, and that is positive social contact. When you get people hanging out together, talking, sharing experiences and getting to know one another, you start to break down stereotypes. The psychology tells us that when we genuinely interact with people, we reduce the gap of difference.

The problem is that we do not necessarily have enough positive social contact in our corporate spaces. We have inclusion strategies that can, in some ways, pull people together into their own communities, but we do not always have structures that deliberately bring those communities together. If we want greater cohesion, we need to think strategically about how we create those opportunities.

We need to learn to disagree well

Positive social contact does not mean that everyone is going to agree. In fact, one of the things we need to get much better at is disagreeing well. We are terrible at disagreement, and perspective-taking is something we need to adapt.

There are still a huge number of myths around diversity and inclusion that we need to challenge. I continue to hear arguments suggesting that someone will be given a job simply because they are female, Black or from another underrepresented group. We know that this is not how the work operates, and we know from the evidence that there are still systematic forms of discrimination that affect people's experiences and opportunities.

We therefore have to be prepared to challenge those myths while also understanding that people may have very different perspectives. That requires confidence. It requires us to be able to disagree without immediately shutting down the conversation, and it requires us to continue explaining why we do the work that we do.

Leadership needs to be distributed

Leadership at the top of an organisation remains really critical. We have heard repeatedly about the importance of sponsorship, and senior leaders must continue to provide that direction and support. But I also believe strongly in distributed leadership. All of us have a role to play in creating positive social contact, challenging myths and contributing to a more inclusive culture.

This cannot simply sit with the DEI team, HR or a handful of senior leaders. Every person within an organisation has the ability to influence the culture around them. Managers have a particularly important role because they shape the everyday experiences of their teams, but colleagues can also create opportunities to connect, challenge assumptions and understand experiences that are different from their own.

If we want corporate cohesion, it has to become a collective responsibility. It needs to be something that is embedded throughout the organisation rather than another initiative that sits alongside everything else.

Don't just do initiatives

The final thing I would emphasise is that we need to stop thinking only in terms of initiatives. Social contagion means that behaviours spread, and that means we can create change through the small things we do every day.

If people do one tiny thing every day to build positive social contact, to challenge a stereotype, to listen to someone with a different perspective or simply to spend time with people they would not normally interact with, the cumulative effect can be significant.

For me, this is the challenge. If we have a strategy that is focused on diversity and inclusion without cohesion, we are potentially storing up problems for later. We need to radically think about how we design our structures, policies and processes so that they not only support representation and inclusion, but also create opportunities for people to come together.

We need to continue focusing on representation. We need to continue creating inclusive and psychologically safe workplaces. We need to continue supporting employee networks and the communities they create. But alongside all of that, we need to be strategically intentional about positive social contact, about disagreeing well and about creating connections across difference.

For me, that is the next challenge for diversity and inclusion: moving from simply having different people in the same organisation to creating the conditions where those people genuinely connect. At FAIRER, this sits at the heart of our wider work to create fairer workplaces. From DEI auditing and strategy through to conscious inclusion, unconscious bias and inclusive leadership training, we work with organisations to turn inclusion from an ambition into everyday organisational practice.

Continue the conversation at FAIRER Conference 2026

Join us on 22 October for FAIRER Conference London, where leaders across HR, ED&I, L&D and wellbeing will explore how organisations can create more inclusive, fair and sustainable workplaces.