On 22nd November 2024, Fearless Futures launched our latest White Paper, DEI Disrupted: The Blueprint for DEI Worth Doing. Read Hanna Naima McCloskey’s keynote from the event.
Good morning everybody. My name is Hanna Naima McCloskey, my pronouns are she/her and I’m the Founder and CEO of Fearless Futures. It is wonderful to see so many friendly and familiar faces this morning, along with new people I don’t know yet. Welcome to Fearless Futures’ 10-year anniversary and the launch of our powerful White Paper – “DEI Disrupted: The Blueprint for DEI Worth Doing”.
When I founded Fearless Futures in 2014 I used to say to people that my ambition was that we would be redundant in a decade. Now we all need optimism, don’t get me wrong, but I think we can all agree – and the world has indeed proved – that Fearless Futures might need to be around a little longer. And while at one point that would have been a source of regret or disappointment, with our White Paper out into the world, I feel infinitely more hopeful.
So at this 10 year milestone for Fearless Futures, I wanted to take the opportunity to look back over the last 10 years, take stock of where we are and then of course, turn to the Fearless Future that we must forge ahead.
In the years running up to my decision to quit my job in investment banking, and set up an organisation ostensibly selling services, believe it or not, that aren’t in high demand by the masses, I had been involved in DEI related endeavours. This was actually in the days before the I and the E, and for any of you that can even recall that far back, it was the days of ‘Gender diversity’. Now of course, it didn’t even mean a diversity of Genders, it actually just meant the Gender binary. It very much was a conversation about Men and Women.
I have since joked that I didn’t realise the path to justice was paved with canapes until I worked in the corporate world. What I mean by that was that despite the best of intentions (including my own) – ‘events’ while having a place – were the start and end of the work. There were more councils and committees than you could shake a stick at. And through the un-impactful albeit highly visible, busyness of this singular lens of the Gender binary I queried: if my mother, an Arab, Muslim, formerly colonised, migrant Woman was here – if she could even access this company – what of her? Whose concern would she be? The answer: she would be at the margins of both a conception of who we mean when we say Woman and at the margins of organisational power – in all likelihood. Because Woman, in this instance, and in so many instances, across the West, means a Woman who is White, Middle Class, Cis, Heterosexual and so on.
And so, the business context I was operating in was beginning to appear very limited. In the face of this frustration, and sadness, I took to introspection and to books. Because my approach in all areas of my life, when I feel deeply about a thing, is to read. I was reading ferociously. I read hooks, Crenshaw, Hill Collins, Baldwin, El Sadawi, Spivak, Butler, Chomsky, Davis, Ahmed, Fanon, Fraser, Friere and many others thereafter too… These and countless other scholars are the giants on whose shoulders the work of Fearless Futures rests.
While reading I felt very strongly – due to the specific work of bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress who has had the strongest impact on my life and the story of Fearless Futures of all these scholars – that it is possible to build up people’s capabilities to understand how the world is organised and structured oppressively with the particular goal of enabling them to think and act differently, to disrupt it. And that’s what I set out to do.
And so Fearless Futures was born and in the first instance worked with Girls in schools in London, Manchester, Birmingham and Newcastle – on the premise that if we had material of worth, such that kids didn’t tell you you were rubbish, we would have an offer ready for adults. Some of those girls, with whom I’ve stayed connected, are now adults in the workplace themselves, and a few are here today: Jada, Phoebe, Saamiyah – thank you for showing up 10 years on and being foundational to this journey.
Developing our programming with young people in those early days, we iterated and innovated the learning theories of Jack Mesirow, Paolo Friere and bell hooks – which we detail in chapter 6 of the White Paper so you can implement transformative training in your workplace too. When it comes to learning about inequity and how it functions, senior leaders and 15 year olds have more in common than that which divides them.
And what is absolutely true is that across the many 100s of company leaders I’ve personally facilitated over the years, and the many 1000s Fearless Futures has educated around the world – specifically with respect to our flagship programme Design for Inclusion – what I know without a shadow of a doubt, is that people can and do shift their frames of reference, transform how they come to interpret the world around them, and reorient themselves with respect to the difference they wish to make. People have done this, and they will always do this, and that is a source of deep hope for me and our team.
So, why this White Paper and why now?
This White Paper emerged from our concerns, fears, and frustrations about DEI at this juncture in a world where ethnonationalist forces and right-wing populism are gaining pace and traction around the globe and where DEI has been manufactured into a ‘wedge issue’ within the fabricated ‘culture wars’. Coupling this with the 9.4 billion dollars spent each year in DEI without much evidence of effectiveness in many of the common practices deployed, we worried that the model of diversity that Angela Davis describes as: “the difference that makes no difference, the change that brings about no change” was turning into a self fulfilling prophecy.
We therefore, under the brilliant leadership and intellectual prowess of our Lead Author and Researcher, Rubie, we wanted to dig in, and create the space and time, to explore whether the dynamics we were experiencing and witnessing existed beyond our specific vantage point.
For our organisation and the field overall, it felt crucial for us to contribute insights and recommendations for how we take DEI into the next phase of growth, such that it is defined by robust evidence, expertise-led best practice and a clear vision – necessary ingredients for any profession but extremely important when lives are at stake.
We have poured the best of our expertise, experience and 10 years of operations into this White Paper so that as many people as possible can implement our transformative recommendations in service of marginalised communities. We want to know how you use it, where you find success, what difference you make – which is why we are also launching the DEIDisrupted community that you’ll be able to sign up to later this morning.
Across the 100 pages – yes you heard that correctly – you will likely see many critiques and criticisms of this field and profession. While there is much we recommend that we part ways with, including endeavours that you may well be leading in your organisation right now – this is categorically not an attack on any individuals. We are in this work with you. As ever with our approach at Fearless Futures – this White paper is about turning our attention to the systems and wider forces at play and how they produce these faltering outcomes.
And so it would be remiss not to mention capitalism, which in particular creates challenging conditions for any of us committed to a fair and just world. The profit motive is probably the single biggest barrier to mediate, manage and navigate to do this work meaningfully. This work often takes significant financial resources, which is a threat to profit. It takes time, a threat to profit. And no matter what McKinsey’s many reports since 2013 claim: exploitation will always be more profitable than ‘diversity’. So that’s that.
And yet resignation in the face of such a powerfully destructive economic system isn’t an option. Audre Lorde said in her 1982 speech at Harvard University: “To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it”.
In the early years of FF, during what Sara, our Chief Learning Officer and I refer to as our days in ‘the ice box’ because of the freezing tiny office space we were kindly gifted to work from: we were one of the first – if not the first – organisation in the UK to engage the word ‘privilege’ in our training. We have over the years, it goes without saying, received and still receive, countless rejections from companies for whom our approach is ‘too radical’. But yesterday’s radical is today’s mainstream. No one bats an eyelid at the word privilege now. And this is how change happens. Too often adults in workplaces are infantilised and coddled, masquerading under demands for checklist-style practical actions or celebratory events, instead of technical equitable redesign of internal structures. But these feel-good short cuts – are false economies – they almost always fail. There is little evidence to support these approaches. And the only way to resist this is with ambition. Ambition for ourselves and others. DEI work is entirely about pushing the boundaries of what is considered acceptable and respectable with respect to the dominant status quo.
Needless to say, we can’t just pursue the random and reactive activities that characterises much DEI work when we push, we do need to push intentionally and in the right direction. And it is not the case that something is always better than nothing. Something that compromises on the fundamentals is something that shouldn’t happen. And we cannot concede ground that leads to compromising any group’s humanity. Conceding that some people shouldn’t use a particular public bathroom for example to curry favour with someone powerful or get something else over the line, is never a concession that can be made because we must be entirely clear: it’s never about the bathroom.
While I’ve never seen the slippery slope to too much equity; history has definitely taught us about the slippery slope to repression, segregation, and eradication.
The challenge then is to know when we can be creative and tactically flexible and when we must be immoveable. For that, we need principles that are unwavering. We cannot be swayed by the wind changing direction. Because winds will always change. And we will become dizzy.
So we need to confront the varying personal risks we must take as we are guided by principles. A principle is a basic truth and a directive of what to do. This might sound quite zealous or dogmatic to some of you. And while it might well feel like that immediately, it’s actually in reality, quite freeing.
We have offered our own DEI principles as a template in the White Paper so you might use them too. And to see how this works, in practice, I want to take a principle that we have, that there is no hierarchy of oppressions. This principle guides how we respond in the face of manufactured clashes and competitions between marginalised groups that takes up so much energy and time in company contexts and elsewhere. For example, the manufactured clash between Cis Women and Trans Women, or Palestinians and Jewish people, or East Asian people and Black folks, or Working Class people and People of Colour.
When we can analyse systems of oppressions to reveal their roots and mechanisms, we know that there can be no hierarchy, and we can see the fabricated competition for what it is. Divide and conquer techniques that serve as a distraction to stop us from turning our gaze towards the systems of oppression that benefit some over others and that it is our job as DEI practitioners to interrupt at every turn.
Our research in this White Paper – started as an exploration – but has become our declaration.
- A declaration for honouring and leaning into complexity over simplicity, because if we do not confront the challenge with the right tools, we will fail
- A declaration of principles over purity, because humans are messy and our solidarities will always be so
- A declaration for intersectionality and material issues over identity alone
- A declaration of risk over reticence
- A declaration of courage over conceding ground on the fundamentals
- A declaration of our direction of travel to our north star – workplaces characterised by less harm and more equity – so that whether with Fearless Futures’ direct support or not – with this blueprint you too can do this.
DEI is but one tactic, so let’s make it count.
Thank you.
