Diversity was never the issue. Complexity was.

I write about leadership as a set of capabilities. Each month, I explore one capability in depth, breaking it down into patterns, decisions, and practices you can actually apply. This month I'm exploring sense-making, the ability to hold a situation that doesn't resolve into one clear answer.

This is a collaboration between Elina, who writes about leadership as a set of trainable capabilities, and Phil Duncalfe, who writes about cultural intelligence and how to make the most of diversity.

When discussing this collaboration, we spoke about cultural diversity and how to manage it within organisations. But it quickly became clear that diversity is broader than just national cultures, and that the concept itself is going through a challenging time, when there is more scepticism about its benefits, and still little practical understanding of how to work with it effectively. So, we landed on three questions, which we answered in turn:

1. - How do we see diversity conversations showing up in the workplace?

2. - How do we make sense of what’s behind it?

3. - What can leaders practically do to manage diversity more effectively?

If you’ve managed a team that spans more than one culture, or a team with strong characters with opposingly different views on things, you know that managing diversity in real life is not the same as writing a policy document about it. Diversity sits on the wall as a value, you know it’s proven to drive innovation, but nobody ever told you what to do with it in that heated meeting when two good people are talking “different languages” and you’re the one meant to sort it out.

At the same time, the language around diversity and inclusion has been going quieter: since the start of 2025, only 34% S&P 500 companies still used the term “DEI” in their corporate reports, down from 90% the year before (source Harvard Law School’s Forum on Corporate Governance). Without going into the why, the practical effect is the same: less training, less budget, less appetite to even use the word in a meeting.

The world you’re managing hasn’t simplified overnight and cultural diversity isn’t limited to different countries and ethnicities. The diversity isn’t going anywhere just because it’s less fashionable to name it. And this leaves a real risk: when language describing complexity disappears, but ambiguity doesn’t, the instinct that fills the gap is to simplify, control, fix. This leads to polarisation and oversimplification, which is not suited to deal with the reality we are facing right now.

Elina: Several years ago, I was leading a diversity and inclusion chapter in the EU region, tasked with building training on microaggressions, a new term that everyone had started using without quite agreeing what it meant. My executive sponsor had an idea to invite someone from a minority background from global HR, explaining what a microaggression was and what not to say. I pushed back strongly: putting one person in front of the room to represent an entire category of experience, felt like assigning the roles (victims /aggressors) and giving the prescribed answer.

So instead, I put together a research document on the topic, trying to collect reliable sources and expert opinion. We read it in the meeting and discussed it for 1 hour as a facilitated group discussion, not a lecture. The dilemmas surfaced, but nobody pretended to have all the answers, only opinions and doubts. It wasn’t even a debate, but an exploration. It took me time to understand that this was exactly the success criteria. The point was not to offer a clean answer, but to create a space to sit with the complexity. Nobody left with an answer, but everyone left a little more aware, without needing to get defensive about it. Sometimes that’s the right outcome.

Phil: There is no such thing as a team with a single culture. The moment you have more than one person working on a task, is the moment diversity becomes an issue. In my experience, the majority of organisations will recognise some level of diversity by encouraging personality profiles with Myers-Briggs, Strengthfinder, or one of the many other many tests that are designed to help improve team dynamics. However, a problem with many of these psychometric tests is that their reliability can be severely affected by culture. Whether it is the way results are interpreted or the fact some cultures bias towards certain answers, if culture isn’t recognised, the usefulness is limited.

As an example, one person may answer in a way that highlights they are less likely to engage in open debate or speak up in a large group. A manager in one culture might see this result shows someone who is overly submissive and should be encouraged to be more assertive. In another culture it is seen as respectful and shows healthy deference to leadership and humility in not rushing to speak first.

This isn’t to say that psychometric tests are unhelpful, there is research and experience to show they have been helpful and accurate in many global organisations. It can only improve their usefulness when culture is recognised, and Cultural Intelligence becomes a part of the culture of an organisation. Instead of judgements of “weakness” and “strengths” there should be space for discussions on how results of these tests and consequent behaviours are interpreted by colleagues and how they fit within the culture of the organisation.

Elina: Underneath, we are dealing with a fundamental anxiety that can take multiple forms: anxiety of not being accepted in the group, or of losing control of the group, anxiety of facing views unfamiliar or hostile to our own. Anxiety pushes us to deploy defence mechanisms, defending our own positions harder, avoiding conversations, pushing for a fix that will simplify and move on, putting labels on people and situations. But this is just the way to fix the complexity that diversity of views represents. It is not allowing us to manage it, to extract the valuable nuggets from it. We need to figure out how to create a container for diversity that is more spacious, one that allows enough creativity and goodness to show up, before it’s contained and shaped.

Phil: People operating in high-stress environments are more likely to use default biases, have limited cognitive flexibility, and restricted ability to adapt behaviourally. Cross-cultural interactions require humility and vulnerability to not be defensive when biases are challenged, cognitive flexibility to hear other perspectives, and a desire and ability to adapt behaviour to better connect with others.

The first part of the Cultural Intelligence model by David Livermore is CQ Drive, “your level of interest, persistence, and confidence during multicultural interactions”. Where there are high levels of stress, interest (aka. curiosity), confidence, and persistence will be minimal.

In agreement with Elina, even in high-pressure environments, space needs to be carved out to provide the capacity for a team to engage with the impact diversity is having on their performance. The return on investment for teams that have created this capacity shows that it is worth the effort.

Elina: Giving space doesn’t mean we shouldn’t just stay passive in the face of complexity or wait for confusion to resolve itself. For the leader it means building a different kind of capability than the one most of us were trained in.

• Stay with uncertainty a little longer. Resist the instinct to fix or control what you don’t understand or what differs from your own view. Staying with it, rather than simplifying and editing it out too quickly, opens space for more sophisticated and innovative solutions to emerge.

• Practise taking perspective. Learn to see your own view as a position among others, not the only accurate way of seeing the situation.

• Run safe-to-fail experiments. Build shared sense-making with the group and run experiments, stay open for alternatives and change of direction, rather than imposing rigid norms or premature fixes.

Phil: I completely agree with Elina’s points, each of these will build the psychological safety required for taking Cultural Intelligence (CQ) beyond awareness into behaviour change. As additions I would recommend the following:

• Make use of Cultural Profiles. When using psychometric tests, include cultural profiles as part of the process. These can be found in the most basic form for free or more comprehensively for a fee.

• Give time for CQ Strategy. David Livermore highlights that CQ Strategy requires three things: anticipating how approach, topic and situation are affected by diverse contexts; an awareness of self and others (i.e. Emotional Intelligence); and

  reflection or checking that what was experienced was what was expected.

• Develop CQ Action. Action can only occur where a team has prioritised getting to know how each other communicate and operate and how culture plays a part. Can each member of the team adapt their speech, tone/volume, and nonverbal behaviours to better communicate with others? If so, then you are well on your way to a high performing, culturally intelligent team. If not, then invest in coaching that will help your team recognise behaviours that can be adapted to improve team performance.

Between the two of us, the recommendations point in the same direction: staying with complexity long enough to actually understand it, rather than resolving it too quickly. This is different to the old diversity training approach. It requires a different mindset and skills for leaders to develop.

We’d like to hear where you land on this, what’s your instinct when you encounter diversity of cultures or views that have no simple resolution?