The Joke I Wish I Could Take Back

I made a joke about school shootings once.

I grew up in Texas so I thought it was fair game. It was at the Wild Rover, on Karl Johan's gate in Oslo. Friday night, around seven. Not an open mic. A proper comedy night, paying crowd, lights up.

The bit was about growing up in Texas, learning to shoot before you learn to drive. The punchline was that gun violence in American schools is a problem.

It did not land.

I felt the hair go up on the back of my neck. My teeth clenched. Somewhere in my stomach a small knot formed and stayed there. I kept going. Straight into the next bit, no attempt to save it. You learn that on stage. You do not pour good time into a dead joke.

Here is the part I am less proud of.

In the moment, I told myself it just did not land. Wrong room, maybe. Wrong night. It was only later, watching the recording back, that I saw what actually happened. The joke was not unlucky. It was distasteful. I had reached for the edge and grabbed something I did not mean.

The silence was right. I was wrong.

The stage tells you the truth for free

Comedy is the only room where I have almost no power.

The crowd can heckle me. They can leave. They can sit in total silence and watch me sweat, and there is nothing I can do about it. I do not outrank anyone on a comedy night. I am a guy with a microphone hoping strangers agree the world is absurd in the same way I do.

That powerlessness is a gift.

When a joke dies on stage, you know instantly. The feedback is immediate, honest, and brutal. No one protects your feelings. No one laughs to be polite. The silence is real data, delivered in real time, by people who owe you nothing.

Most leaders never get that.

The classroom does not give you a recording

I teach. I also do the same thing in a lecture hall that I do at a comedy night. I reach for sarcasm.

I have made sarcastic comments about the "lack of poverty" in Norway, the kind of line that only works if everyone hears the irony.

The trouble with sarcasm is that it hides. From the outside, edgy and sincere look identical. A student cannot always tell if I am performing a view or holding one.

And here is the difference that matters.

In that room, I have the grade. I have the mic. I have twenty years of letters after my name. When my joke lands badly in a lecture hall, no one's hair goes up on their neck where I can see it. No one heckles. No one walks out. They file it quietly and they move on.

I get no recording. I get no silence I can read. I get nothing.

The stage taught me to hear a joke die. The classroom is built to make sure I never do.

A joke from the top is never just a joke

Every article on humour at work says the same three things. Use it carefully. Read the room. Avoid sensitive topics. All true. All useless. Because the careful, de-risked, focus-grouped humour they are describing is not humour at all. It is a performance of being approachable with the actual risk surgically removed. Your team can tell. They always can.

Real humour costs something. You offer a piece of how you see the world and you risk it not landing. That risk is the whole point. It is the same risk that builds trust, because the only way to say "I am in this with you, I am not above it" is to be a little exposed when you say it.

That is the version most leaders are too scared to use.

But there is a darker version, and it is the one that should worry us more.

Some leaders use humour perfectly well. But the fatal flaw is they use it to punch down. The joke that makes one person the butt. The "relax, it was just a joke" when someone flinches. That is humour working exactly as intended, for someone who wanted distance and dominance and found a socially acceptable delivery system for both.

A joke from someone who outranks you is never just a joke. It cannot be. The power gap is in the room whether you acknowledge it or not. When I make a wise crack in a lecture hall, the laugh I get might be agreement. It might also be a whole bunch of people who cannot afford to not laugh.

I do not always know which. Neither do you.

What to actually do with this

Stop trusting the laugh.

When you are the most senior person in the room, the laughter you get is the least reliable signal you will ever receive. People laugh up the hierarchy for reasons that have nothing to do with whether you were funny. The silence you should fear is not the awkward one. It is the polite one.

So go looking for the feedback the room is built to hide from you. Ask the person who did not laugh. Ask them later, privately, when the grade and the mic are not in play. Watch the recording, metaphorically, of your own jokes. Notice when you reached for the edge and grabbed something you did not mean.

I made a joke about school shootings to a room that owed me nothing, and they told me the truth for free.

Your team owes you plenty. They will not tell you anything.

P.S. I still do stand-up. Partly because I love it. Partly because it is the only room left where no one knows my credentials, and a roomful of strangers will tell me, instantly and without mercy, when I have got it wrong. Everyone in a position of power should have a room like that. Most of us spend our careers making sure we never do.

The DEI Backlash Is Doing Real Damage. Some Of It Is Also a Receipt.

I built part of my career on something my own data now calls into question.

Here's what happened. We ran a study. 780 working adults in the UK. We wanted to know why people freeze when they see something unfair at work. For example, a colleague talked over, a concern brushed off, a joke that lands wrong and the room goes quiet.

I expected the usual answer. People freeze because they're scared. Or they don't care enough. Or they don't notice.

The data said something else.

The people who froze cared exactly as much as the people who acted. Same values. Same good intentions. What separated them was small and unglamorous. The actors had a script. A specific thing to say in the moment. The freezers didn't.

People with a script acted 85% of the time. People without one acted 27% of the time.

Then came the part that got under my skin.

We asked everyone what would most help them speak up. The top three were seeing a leader do it first, knowing the company would protect them, and trusting a colleague to back them up.

Training came fourth.

Fourth. Out of five.

The thing my industry sells the most. The thing I have stood at the front of rooms and delivered. Awareness. People ranked it near the bottom of what would actually help them.

I have been part of the problem in more ways than one

Let's be clear about what that means for someone like me.

Yes I've made my fair share of mistakes and fuck ups.

But for two decades, I and the inclusion industry has sold awareness. Workshops. E-learning modules. The annual unconscious bias session you click through before lunch. The promise was transformation. The product was a slide deck.

I have been in those rooms. Some of them I was facilitating.

And here is the uncomfortable middle of all this. The anti-woke backlash is loud, and a lot of it is in bad faith. People using a real frustration as cover for something uglier. I'm not going to pretend that part away.

But underneath the noise, some of the frustration is a receipt.

It's the bill arriving for inclusion work that was performance. Compliance dressed as culture. A workforce got managed instead of led, and they could smell it. You cannot run people through a mandatory module on respect and expect them to feel respected. They feel processed.

When the work is theatre, people notice. And some of the backlash is just people who noticed, saying so badly.

The methods failed, not the goal

The goal was never the problem. Most everyone can agree that we want fewer people frozen out of conversations, more people backed up when they speak, and teams where the quiet ones get heard. None of that is under attack by the data. The data loves that goal.

The method is the problem.

We measured the wrong thing for years. Most organisations check their allyship by asking people if they support fairness. Almost everyone says yes. That number tells you nothing. The gap was never in what people value. It's in what they do when it counts.

We trained awareness when people needed a sentence. We ran sessions on why exclusion is wrong, to people who already figured yeah of course it's wrong. We aimed at the head when the gap was in the hands.

That's not an ideology failure. That's a design failure. And design failures can be fixed.

What leaders cannot just ignore

If you lead people and you've gone quiet on this because the climate scares you, I understand the instinct. Saying nothing feels safe.

But the reality is, saying nothing isn't safe.

The data says your people aren't waiting for a position paper or another mission statement. They're waiting to see you do the small thing in the small moment. The colleague gets talked over, and you say "hang on, she wasn't finished." That's it. That's the green light. Permission, modelled by someone with authority, beats any learning and development module you can buy.

When you go silent, you don't avoid the argument. You hand it to the people making it in bad faith. They're happy to fill the space.

So the thing you cannot ignore isn't the DEI backlash itself. It's the real grievance buried inside it. Some of your people have sat through inclusion work that insulted their intelligence. If the only thing you offer next is more of the same, louder, the backlash was right about you.

Do it better, and it wasn't.

These are early findings. First wave of a three-year study, and we're opening the full dataset so anyone can check our work.

P.S. The student who taught me the most about this never sat in one of my workshops. She marched down from the back of an auditorium with a notebook full of everything I'd done wrong. I wanted to put her in her place. Instead I shut up and listened. Turns out that's the whole skill. Not a module. A sentence, and the nerve to mean it.

The Sin I Committed at a Networking Reception

Last year I stayed silent. And I want to tell you it was complicated but it wasn't.

I was at a reception. Drink in hand, small talk, the usual. I was chatting with two people I'd just met. A man and a woman. The man made a joke, something about women vs. men.

The woman's face changed. Small, but I saw it. She was uncomfortable.

And I awkwardly tried to move the conversation along.

I could have been clear. The joke was inappropriate. Full stop. I didn't need a speech. I needed one sentence. Instead I let a few seconds pass, and then I changed the subject. Smooth. Painless. Cowardly.

I write books about this. I teach leaders how to speak up, how to role model inclusion. And there I was, at a party, doing the exact thing I get paid to warn people about.

I know the framework. The framework didn't save me.

For years I've taught the 7 Sins of Inclusive Leadership. Silence is one of them. Staying quiet when you should speak.

I could walk you through all seven. I'm not going to. You'd nod, you'd file it away, and nothing would change. That's the trap with frameworks. They make you feel informed. They rarely make you act.

Here's the thing about that night. I wasn't ignorant. I had the knowledge. I had the words. I had every tool I sell.

And I still chose the easy option.

That's the part I keep coming back to. Not that I didn't know better. That knowing better wasn't enough.

Why the easy option was easy

Here's what I've stopped believing. That the sin was mine alone.

Walk it back. Why was silence the easy option? Because speaking up had a cost and silence had none. I'd have made a stranger defensive. I'd have made the room awkward. I'd have been the guy who can't take a joke.

The room rewarded silence. It punished the alternative. So I did the rational thing.

Now scale that up. Put it inside an organisation.

A leader watches a colleague get talked over in a meeting. Says nothing. Cowardice? Or a workplace where interrupting the senior person gets you frozen out?

A manager takes quiet credit for a junior's idea. Ego? Or a promotion system that rewards individual visibility and ignores who actually did the work?

We call these personal failures. We send the person on a course. We fix the human and return them to the same building.

The sin is a symptom. The system is the disease.

The treadmill that's hard to name

I'll try to put a name to it. It implicates me because I'm part of the system.

Most inclusion training treats the sins as personal flaws. Fix the leader, fix the problem. It's a good business model. People keep needing fixing, because you keep sending them back into the conditions that broke them.

That's a treadmill. Run hard, go nowhere.

I've sold time on that treadmill. So have most people who do what I do. We get leaders better at inclusion in a classroom. Then they walk back into a system that still rewards the sin. Six months later the pattern is back, and someone books another workshop.

Training reduces the frequency. It does not remove the incentive. Only the organisation can do that. And the organisation is usually the one paying the trainer, which makes it the one question nobody in the room wants to ask.

Can inclusive leadership be taught? Yes. I've built a career on it.

But teaching it while the system rewards the opposite is like teaching someone to swim and then throwing them in a pool with the current cranked to 11. They learned. The water won.

What I actually owed that woman

So back to the reception. I know what you might be thinking. Easy fix. Just speak up next time.

That's the individual fix. It's real, and it matters, and I should have done it.

But here's the harder question, and it's the one I'd put to anyone who commissions training or runs a team. I had everything I needed to speak up and I still didn't. If knowledge plus skill plus a literal framework wasn't enough for me, what makes you think a half-day workshop will be enough for your people?

Maybe the work isn't getting them braver.

Maybe it's building the kind of room where speaking up costs nothing.

What it cost me, and what I'd want you to sit with, is that I had been trained for that exact moment by my own work. And the room still won.

P.S. I went looking for that man afterwards to say something. He'd left. The sentence I owed is still sitting in my mouth a year later. Some sins you don't get to fix. You just get to not repeat them.

I won the argument and nobody cared.

We had split the room in two.

One side of the floor for agree. One side for disagree. The teacher would read a statement out loud, and you walked to the side that matched what you believed.

This was a Norwegian class. All of us immigrants. All of us learning the same language at the same broken pace. Nobody in that room could say what they meant. We were all reaching for words a child would have.

Then the statement came. Something about gender equality in Norway. Whether it had gone too far.

Three men crossed to "disagree." And they started talking.

Feminism had overcorrected. Men were struggling now. Look at the suicide numbers. Look at who's failing in school. Nobody talks about the boys.

I knew that script. I've read the research it's stolen from. I've watched the videos it's laundered through.

And something in me lit up.

My time had come

Here's what I need you to understand about that moment.

I am an immigrant in a beginner language class. Most days I am the one struggling. Most days I am reaching for the word and missing it. I sit with the discomfort of being less articulate than I am in my own head. Every single day.

But not today.

Today the topic was the one topic I have a doctorate in. Today I had fifteen years of stage training and a body of research behind me. The Norwegian was broken for all of us. I just knew how to swing a broken language harder than they did.

So I swung.

I told them they were sadly mistaken. I walked them through it. I was sharp, I was fast, I was right. I had the better argument and I used all of it.

The men went quiet.

And I felt good. I want to be honest about that. I felt the small clean hit of winning in front of a room.

Then the class ended

Everyone picked up their bags.

And the men who had walked to "disagree" walked out the door still disagreeing. Nobody had moved. Not one person crossed the floor. The bodies were exactly where they started.

I had won the argument and changed nothing.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand what happened in that room. For a while I filed it under "I was right, they weren't ready." That's the comfortable version. That's the version where I'm still the hero.

Here's the truer version. They didn't go quiet because I changed their minds. They went quiet because I out-performed them. I met a worldview with a takedown, and a takedown doesn't open anyone. It just finds the loser of the exchange and makes them wait for it to end.

I didn't reach those men. I beat them. There's a difference, and I missed it because winning felt too much like working.

Your town hall is that room

Now move this into your building.

You have felt the manosphere arrive at work. Not as a banner. As a tone. A comment in a meeting about how you can't say anything anymore. A "just playing devil's advocate" in a workshop. A quiet vote with the feet when the diversity session shows up on the calendar.

So you respond the way good organizations respond. You hold a town hall. You bring in the articulate person. You run the panel in the brave space. Someone stands up and makes the case beautifully, and the room nostalgically claps, and you feel like the culture got addressed.

Watch the feet at the end.

Did anyone actually cross the floor? Or did the people who came in skeptical leave skeptical, having now learned only that this topic is one they will lose in public and should therefore stop raising out loud?

Because there is a version of "addressing it" that just teaches people to take it underground. You didn't change the belief. You changed where it's safe to say it. That's not a win. That's a worse map of your own culture.

The part I keep forgetting

I perform on stage for a living. I know that nobody changes their mind because they got out-argued. I know stories move people and arguments make them defensive. I know a laugh opens a door that a fact slams shut.

I know all of that. And in that classroom I forgot every word of it, because being right felt better than being useful.

There's a quieter thing I forgot too. Some of the people in these rooms can't fully argue one way or the other if they'd wanted to. Not because they have nothing to say. Because the room ran in a language they were still building. The same is true of your town hall in English, or in German, or in whatever your dominant language is. The people your inclusion work is supposed to serve are often the exact people least able to speak in the format you chose to serve them in.

I don't have the clean answer for you. I'd be lying if I pretended I did.

What I know is that the answer is not a better argument. We have all the arguments. The boxes of evidence are full.

The answer is closer to the thing I do on a stage and abandoned in that classroom. A story instead of a rebuttal. A laugh that lets someone stay in the room instead of bracing to leave it. A question I actually want the answer to.

Winning the debate is easy. I do it all the time.

It just doesn't move anyone's feet.

P.S. If your last culture conversation ended with everyone exactly where they started, you didn't have a culture conversation. You had a debate, and debates have losers, and losers don't convert. They just get quieter. 😶🌫️

The Taxi I Should Have Argued In

The driver said the immigrants were destroying his country.

He said it about ten minutes in. Then he said it again, with "the Muslims" added.

I was in the back seat. Airport to a spa. Long travel day. Speaking job on the other side of a short vacation. I was tired in the specific way that makes you compliant.

I did the hundred-yard stare out the window. When he caught my eye in the mirror I forced a small smile. I made the noises. Mm. Uh huh. Ok.

I did not take out my phone. I told myself I was staying alert in case he got more aggressive. That part was true. About five percent true.

The other ninety-five percent was that I had a massage booked. I had a robe waiting. I did not want to be the foreigner in the back seat lecturing a local guy about his own country at the end of a fourteen-hour day.

So I made the noises. And he kept going.

The math of who was in the car

He picked me. Not for the ride. For the audience.

White guy. American accent. Coming from the airport. Going somewhere expensive. Of every passenger he could have had that afternoon, I was the safest person in his city to say that to. He read me in three seconds and decided I would not make him uncomfortable.

He was right.

That is the part I want to sit with. He was right about me. Before I said anything. Before I made the noises. He looked at me and saw a man who would not push back. And I confirmed it.

What I was practicing

I have a vocabulary for what I did in that taxi. I have a whole industry's worth of it.

I was regulating my nervous system. I was choosing peace over being right. I was observing without judgment. I was setting an internal boundary. I was protecting my energy.

All of those phrases mean the same thing. I was being nice.

Nice is the thing that costs me nothing. Nice is the small smile in the mirror. Nice is mm, uh huh, ok. Nice is the version of me that arrives at the spa on time, undisturbed, with a clean conscience because I did not engage.

Decent is the other thing. Decent would have cost me the ride. It would have cost me the comfort of a stranger's approval. It would have cost me the easy ending to a long day. Decent would have meant saying, quietly, I don't see it that way, and then sitting in twenty more minutes of whatever came back.

I have been sold a lot of language that makes nice sound like decent. I have bought most of it.

The next passenger

I tipped him. I got out. I walked into the spa. The robe was waiting. The massage was good.

Somewhere later that afternoon, or the next morning, another passenger got into that taxi. Maybe a woman in a hijab. Maybe a Somali kid going to work. Maybe an older man whose accent gave him away in the first sentence.

They got the version of him I helped warm up.

He had spent thirty minutes practicing his rant on a passenger who confirmed it was sayable. I did not invent his politics. I did not radicalize him. But I was a small, smiling proof point that he could keep going. That the people he was talking about were the only ones who would push back, and they were not in the car.

I do not know what that next passenger absorbed. I know I was not in the seat anymore.

Where this leaves me

I am not telling you this so you can tell me I was scared. I was a little scared. I am telling you because the scared part is not where the failure lives.

The failure lives in the moments I have not described. The dinners. The work events. The conversations at conferences where another man says something small and I do the same thing I did in the taxi. Smile in the mirror. Make the noises. Tell myself later that I was being strategic.

I do not have a clean answer for what to do next time. I have not yet been the decent man in that scene. I have been the nice one, over and over, and called it wisdom.

If you have a clean answer, I am suspicious of you. If you do not, I think we are in the same taxi.

P.S. The next article in this series asks whether the manosphere is shaping your company culture. The taxi was the personal version of that question. The corporate version is bigger, quieter, and harder to spot. I'll see you Tuesday.

STFU: Why shutting up could be the most inclusive thing you do today

I am killing it!

That was the actual sentence in my head. Word for word. I was standing in front of 200 students, my first lecture as a professor, and my internal monologue was running hot.

Holy shit, how awesome is this.

I can't believe I'm a professor.

Look at them! Everyone's so engaged! I'm doing so well!

Shaping new minds. That phrase came up more than once. I am shaping new minds. I was thirty-something years old, freshly minted PhD, and convinced I was the best thing to happen to that lecture hall since the projector.

The students were nodding. Some were taking notes. A few were laughing at the jokes I'd rehearsed over breakfast that morning.

I wrapped up. Felt the buzz. Started packing my bag.

Then Katie came down from the back of the auditorium.

She had a notepad. She was not smiling. She walked up to me and she said, calmly, all the things I had done wrong that day. Not loud. Not angry. Just a list. The students I'd talked over. The questions I'd half-answered before pivoting to my own next point. The hand that had been up for ten minutes that I hadn't called on. The way I'd made a joke at someone's expense without noticing it had landed badly.

She didn't lecture me. She just told me what she'd seen.

I stood there with my bag half-zipped and I had nothing to say. Because every single thing she described, I had thought was the lecture going well.

The thing I was doing wasn't teaching. It was performing.

The students weren't engaged. They were watching. There is a difference, and I could not tell the difference, because I was the one doing the talking.

This is the part I haven't said out loud before. The killing-it feeling wasn't about them. It was about me. I'd built a one-man show and called it pedagogy. Every minute I spent enjoying my own delivery was a minute Katie was watching someone else's hand stay in the air.

I want to be clear about what was happening here. I wasn't being cruel. I wasn't being malicious. I was being earnest. I genuinely thought I was doing a great job. That is what makes it worse, not better. The damage gets done by the people who think they're helping.

Now here's where it gets uncomfortable.

The current conversation about inclusion in the workplace is built almost entirely around speaking up. Use your voice. Be an ally. Say something when you see something. Speak truth to power. Find your voice in meetings. Don't stay silent.

Most of that advice is aimed at the wrong people.

The people who need to speak up more are not the ones in the room with the most airtime. The ally training, the bystander programmes, the "find your voice" workshops, they keep arriving at organisations where the actual problem is the opposite. The problem is not that nobody's talking. The problem is that the same three people won't stop.

And those three people are usually the ones being told they need to use their voice more.

I was being told, at the time, that I needed to be more visible. Speak up at faculty meetings. Build my profile. Take up more space. The advice was reasonable for someone else. For me, it was rocket fuel on a fire.

What Katie gave me was not feedback.

Feedback would have been "you could improve your lecture technique." That's the kind of thing you can nod to and ignore.

What Katie gave me was a description of what was actually happening in the room while I was busy congratulating myself for being in it. There is no improvement plan for that. There is only sitting with the fact that the version of yourself you most enjoy being is also the version that other people have to work around.

I have spent the years since then trying to shut up earlier. Not always successfully. The instinct to fill the room with my own voice is still there. I notice it most when I'm nervous, or when I'm trying to impress someone, or when I think I have the answer. The killing-it feeling still shows up.

The difference is that now, when it does, I know it's a warning sign.

If you are in a leadership role and you are reading this and the killing-it feeling is one you recognise, that is the thing to pay attention to. Not the meetings where you stayed quiet. The meetings where you walked out feeling great. The meetings where you were sure it had gone well. Ask the Katies in your organisation what they saw. They have a list. They are not going to volunteer it.

Shut up so they don't shut down.

That phrase came out of that lecture hall. It has been in every keynote I've given since. I used to think it was advice for other leaders.

It was always advice for me first.

P.S. Katie graduated. She's doing brilliant things. She knows this story has been told on stages in 32 countries. If you're reading this, Katie, thank you for the notepad.

Why Many Men Confuse Confidence With Competence

Confidence is easy to spot.

It’s loud. It’s visible. It takes up space.

Competence is quieter.

And that’s part of the problem.

What Gets Rewarded Early

From a young age, many men are taught, directly or indirectly, that confidence wins.

Speak up. Take the lead. Have an opinion. Don’t hesitate.

And in many environments, that works.

Confident people get noticed. They get opportunities. They get the benefit of the doubt.

Long before anyone has actually verified what they can do.

What Gets Exposed Later

Competence doesn’t show up in the same way.

It shows up over time.

In decisions that hold up under pressure. In work that stands on its own. In how people around you perform and grow.

You can signal confidence in seconds.

Competence takes longer to prove.

And eventually, the gap between the two becomes visible.

Where It Starts to Break

The real issue isn’t confidence itself.

It’s over-reliance on it.

When confidence becomes the shortcut: You speak before you understand. You lead before you’re ready. You assume instead of asking.

And because confidence is often rewarded early, there’s very little incentive to correct course.

Until something goes wrong.

The Leadership Pattern

This shows up clearly in leadership.

Confident leaders:

• make fast decisions

• communicate with certainty

• create a sense of direction

All valuable.

But without competence underneath, those same behaviors become: overconfidence, poor judgment, false clarity

And the cost isn’t immediate.

It shows up later.

In missed signals. In avoidable mistakes. In teams that stop trusting what they hear.

The Hard Adjustment

One of the most important shifts I had to make was this: Stop using confidence as proof.

Start treating it as a signal that needs to be tested.

That meant:

• asking more questions before offering answers

• slowing down decisions I felt certain about

• being willing to say “I don’t know” without losing credibility

It felt like a step back.

It wasn’t.

It was the beginning of actual competence.

What Competence Looks Like

Competence isn’t about certainty.

It’s about calibration.

Knowing when you understand something and when you don’t

Knowing when to move fast and when to pause

Knowing when confidence is earned and when it’s just habit

The Takeaway

Confidence gets you in the room.

Competence determines whether you should be there.

And the longer you rely on one without building the other,

the more expensive that gap becomes.

P.S. Several of the mistakes in The Big F#cking Book on How to Be a Decent Guy come from exactly this, confusing how I showed up with what I was actually capable of. Confidence opened doors. Competence determined what happened next.

The Dangerous Leadership Lesson Boys Learn Early

I noticed something recently that stopped me.

In the Netflix series The Dinosaurs, all the male dinosaurs were bigger than the females.

Stronger. More dominant. More aggressive.

It looked completely normal.

Except for one problem.

We don’t actually know if that’s true.

The Story Beneath the Story

There’s a term for this: sexual dimorphism.

In some species, males and females are visibly different in size or form.

In others, they’re not.

With dinosaurs, the evidence is limited.

Which means a lot of what we see is interpretation.

And interpretation isn’t neutral.

What Boys Learn Without Being Taught

When you grow up seeing the same pattern over and over again, it doesn’t feel like a message.

It feels like reality.

Men are bigger. Men are stronger. Men take up space. Men lead.

You don’t question it.

You absorb it.

And by the time you enter school, work, or leadership, it’s already sitting in the background.

Unexamined.

How It Shows Up Later

Fast forward a few decades.

The same pattern starts to show up in more subtle ways: Who speaks first. Who gets interrupted. Who is assumed to be in charge. Who is seen as “naturally” authoritative.

None of this starts in the boardroom.

It starts much earlier.

The Leadership Lesson Hiding Inside It

If you learn early that leadership looks like size, dominance, and control, you carry that forward.

You start to associate leadership with: taking up more space being more certain being more forceful.

Even when the situation calls for something else.

Listening. Restraint. Adaptability.

And those skills are harder to access when they don’t match the model you grew up with.

The Part That’s Easy to Miss

This isn’t about blaming a TV show.

It’s about recognising how early the script gets written.

Because once something feels “natural,” it becomes hard to question.

Even when it no longer serves you.

Even when it gets in the way of better leadership.

What Needs to Change

The shift isn’t about removing confidence or strength.

It’s about expanding what leadership looks like.

So that: presence doesn’t equal dominance, authority doesn’t require volume, and strength includes the ability to step back

That shift doesn’t start in adulthood.

It starts in what we notice.

The Takeaway

The most dangerous leadership lessons are the ones we never realised we learned.

Because we don’t challenge them.

We build on top of them.

P.S. A lot of what I unpack in The Big F#cking Book on How to Be a Decent Guy traces back to these early assumptions, the quiet beliefs about power, control, and what it means to be a man. The work is noticing them before they quietly shape how you lead.

The Man I Was Supposed to Be

I grew up in Texas in the shadow of John Wayne.

Not literally. But close enough. The template was clear. Strength, silence, and the willingness to use force when force was called for. I absorbed it from film, from the men around me, from the fights that broke out because nobody stopped the boys from sorting it out with their fists. This was considered character building.

I was surrounded by violence. At school. In my community. On every screen I looked at. And I didn't question it. Not for a long time. That was just what men were. That was the deal.

Men and women were a dichotomy. Hard line. No spectrum. Anything feminine on a man was weakness, deviation, something to be corrected. You knew this the way you knew anything in a closed environment. Not because someone explained it. Because the consequences of getting it wrong were immediate and physical.

I followed the script. Not happily. But I followed it.

Then I saw Kurt Cobain perform in a dress on MTV.

I was a teenager. I did not have the language for what I was watching. I just knew it was the most fascinating thing I had ever seen.

Here was a man, loud, raw, arguably more aggressive on stage than anyone, wearing a dress. Wearing eyeliner. Not apologising for it. Not explaining it. Not performing femininity as a joke or a costume. Just doing it, completely unbothered, while the crowd lost their minds.

Eddie Vedder. Trent Reznor. Men who wrote songs about loneliness and fear and desire. Men who cried in public and put it on the album. Men who pushed every boundary about what a man was allowed to look, sound, and feel like, and did it with a kind of ferocious indifference to anyone's opinion.

My immediate reaction was not confusion.

It was "that is awesome".

Not because I wanted to wear a dress. Because I wanted that freedom for me and others. The freedom to just not give a fuck about how your manliness is being perceived. To push the boundary and let people deal with it. To exist outside the script entirely.

It wasn't relief exactly. I was still in Texas. The school was still the school. The community was still the community. The script was still being enforced every day by people who had never seen what I was watching on MTV and would not have liked it if they had.

It was a vent. A window. Proof that somewhere, someone was living differently.

That mattered more than I can explain.

The script is still being sold. It just has a new distributor.

Thirty years later, the template is back. Different packaging. Same structure.

There is a multi-billion dollar industry built on the idea that men are broken and need fixing. Not struggling. Not confused. Broken. And it has the fix.

Wake up at 5am. Cold shower. Cut this out. Optimise that. Complete the challenge. Restrict this. Subscribe to the program. Become the man you were supposed to be.

The business model requires that you never quite get there. A program that actually fixes you loses a customer. The profitable version keeps you close. Gives you enough wins to stay. Enough failures to keep buying.

This is not a conspiracy. It is subscription economics applied to identity.

And it is selling men the exact same thing Texas sold me. Manhood as a performance. Strength as the only metric. The idea that if you could just get the formula right, discipline yourself hard enough, eliminate the soft parts, you would finally be enough.

John Wayne didn't work.

Neither will the app.

The skills that actually compound don't work like this.

I have spent twenty years in rooms with men trying to lead. Not perform leadership. Actually lead.

The ones who got better over time, genuinely better, were not the ones who optimised their morning routines. They were the ones who learned how to listen without immediately trying to fix. How to stay in the room when the room got uncomfortable. How to say "I got that wrong" without it dismantling them.

Those are learnable skills. And once learned, they do not expire.

You do not renew listening monthly. You do not need an audience to keep your access. You use it, and it makes you better at the things that actually matter. Showing up. Staying present. Being someone people trust enough to tell the truth to.

Skill compounds. Performance requires maintenance.

The teenage version of me didn't understand that yet. He just knew that Kurt Cobain looked freer than anyone he'd ever seen in real life. That was enough to keep going until the geography changed.

Decent is a practice. Not a protocol.

The word "decent" is unfashionable. It does not trend. It does not come with a before and after you can screenshot.

But it is the right word.

A decent man is not an optimised man. He is a man who keeps trying to do right by the people around him. Who fails at it regularly. Who notices when he has failed. Who tries again. Who doesn't need a subscription to remind him why.

That is the whole thing.

Manhood is not a dichotomy. It never was. It is a spectrum, and you can move around on it, and nobody is coming to take your man card because you cried at a film (last time for me was Black Panther) or wore something unexpected or admitted you didn't know what you were doing.

Cobain knew that. Vedder knew that. Reznor knew that.

They just said it louder than anyone was ready for.

Build from there.

P.S. The most decent men I know are not the most disciplined men in the room. They are the most honest. There is a difference. It is not a small one.

Why Being a “Nice Guy” Isn’t Enough

Let me say this as plainly as possible.

A lot of “nice guys” aren’t actually nice.

They’re transactional.

The Deal Nobody Agreed To

For years, I operated with a quiet assumption: If I’m nice, if I show up, if I do the right thing, then things should work out for me.

People should respond well. Opportunities should come. Relationships should feel fair.

I didn’t say it out loud.

But it was there.

A deal I thought the world had signed.

It hadn’t.

When “Nice” Turns Into Entitlement

This is where the “nice guy” logic breaks.

Because underneath it is often a hidden expectation: I did this so you should do that.

I was respectful so I deserve something in return.

I showed up so I should be chosen.

And when that doesn’t happen?

Frustration. Resentment. Confusion.

Not because something unfair happened.

But because the deal was never real.

The Leadership Version of This

This doesn’t just show up in dating culture.

It shows up in leadership all the time.

Leaders who think: “I’ve been supportive, so my team should perform.” “I’ve been approachable, so people should speak up.” “I’ve created a good environment, so results should follow.”

And when they don’t?

They feel let down.

But support is not a transaction. Trust is not a transaction. Leadership is not a transaction.

The Hard Lesson

One of the most uncomfortable things I had to confront was this: I wasn’t being “nice.”

I was trying to control outcomes without admitting it.

Niceness was the strategy.

Expectation was the goal.

And when reality didn’t match that expectation, I blamed everything except the assumption itself.

What Decency Actually Requires

Decency is different.

It’s not about being pleasant.

It’s about being grounded.

You do the right thing because it’s the right thing. You show up because that’s who you are. You lead because you take responsibility.

No hidden contracts. No silent expectations. No scorekeeping.

The Takeaway

Being a “nice guy” often comes with strings attached.

Being a decent man doesn’t.

And in leadership, that difference shows up fast.

Because people can feel the gap between: someone who is genuinely grounded and someone who is waiting for something in return

even if nothing is ever said out loud.

P.S. A lot of the mistakes in The Big F#cking Book on How to Be a Decent Guy come from this exact pattern, confusing good intentions with clean motives. It took me a long time to realise how often I was expecting something back.

The Leadership Failure Behind the Manosphere Debate

There’s a lot of noise right now about young men.

Podcasts. Documentaries. Opinion pieces. Everyone trying to explain what’s going on.

Most of the conversation focuses on extremes.

On one side, influencers selling dominance, control, and grievance. On the other, criticism that often stops at what’s wrong.

What’s missing is something much simpler.

Leadership.

The Gap Nobody Filled

Young men are not born knowing how to lead.

They learn it.

From fathers. From teachers. From managers. From the cultures they grow up in.

Or they don’t.

And when they don’t, they go looking for it somewhere else.

The problem is not that young men are looking for guidance.

The problem is where they’re finding it.

What Happens When Leadership Is Absent

If no one teaches you how to listen, you learn how to dominate.

If no one teaches you how to handle rejection, you learn how to resent it.

If no one teaches you how to hold responsibility, you learn how to externalise it.

That’s not ideology.

That’s learned behavior filling a vacuum.

The Part We Don’t Like to Admit

We tend to treat the manosphere as the problem.

It’s not the starting point.

It’s the symptom.

The uncomfortable question is: Where were the credible voices before that?

Where were the mentors who could say: Here’s how to deal with failure. Here’s how to show up in relationships. Here’s how to lead without control.

Not in theory.

In practice.

Leadership Is Taught Through Failure

Most of what matters in leadership isn’t taught in schools.

Listening. Accountability. Holding space. Owning mistakes.

These are learned through experience.

Often through getting it wrong.

The problem is that many young men are left to learn these lessons alone.

And alone, people tend to reinforce the wrong patterns.

What Needs to Change

The answer isn’t louder criticism.

It’s better examples.

Men who can say: Here’s where I got it wrong. Here’s what it cost me. Here’s what I had to change.

Not from a pedestal.

From experience.

Because credibility comes from honesty, not perfection.

The Takeaway

The manosphere didn’t appear out of nowhere.

It filled a gap.

If we want a different outcome, we need different inputs.

Better leadership. Earlier guidance. More honest conversations.

Because if young men don’t learn leadership from people who have done the work,

they will learn it from people who haven’t.

P.S. This is the space The Big F#cking Book on How to Be a Decent Guy is trying to step into. Not as another voice shouting from the sidelines, but as someone willing to say: I got this wrong and here’s what I learned.

Why “Fixing It” Is the Mistake Most Men Make

I used to think being helpful meant being useful.

If there was a problem, I solved it. If someone was struggling, I offered a solution. If something felt uncomfortable, I tried to fix it quickly.

That’s what I thought good men did.

That’s what I thought good leaders did.

I was wrong.

The Moment I Got It Wrong

A student once told me something that stopped me cold.

Her family was forcing her to leave university and return home for an arranged marriage.

She said it calmly. Almost clinically.

Then she told me she had been thinking about ending her life.

My brain did exactly what it had been trained to do.

Fix it.

Find resources. Call someone. Intervene. Solve the problem.

I was already halfway into a plan before I realised: She wasn’t asking me to fix anything.

She was asking me to hear her.

Why Men Default to Fixing

Most men are trained early: Problems are solved. Emotions are managed. Discomfort is reduced.

We learn that value comes from being effective.

So when someone brings us pain, we translate it into a task.

We move from: “This is hard.” To: “How do I solve this?”

And in that moment, something important gets lost.

Fixing Is Often About Us, Not Them

Fixing is often a way to reduce our discomfort.

Silence feels awkward. Pain feels overwhelming. Uncertainty feels threatening.

So we act.

We offer solutions. We give advice. We take control.

It doesn't help the other person. It only helps us feel useful again.

What Leadership Actually Looks Like

That day, I did something very different.

I stopped talking.

I listened.

I told her I believed her. I told her she wasn’t alone. I stayed in the discomfort instead of trying to escape it.

It felt like I wasn’t doing enough.

It felt like I was failing.

It was the first time I was actually leading.

The Shift Most Men Need to Make

There’s a difference between solving and holding.

Solving is fast. Holding is slow.

Solving is about control. Holding is about presence.

Solving ends the conversation. Holding deepens it.

Most of the situations that matter, in leadership, in relationships, in life, don’t need immediate solutions.

They need space.

The Takeaway

If your first instinct is to fix, pause.

Ask yourself: Am I helping? Or am I trying to escape discomfort?

Because the moment you stop trying to fix everything is the moment people start trusting you with what actually matters.

P.S. Hanne is now thriving. She's working and living her life on her terms. This chapter is part of The Big F#cking Book on How to Be a Decent Guy, a guide built on the mistakes I made so you don’t have to.

If Your Only Case Studies Are American, You’re Not Global. You’re Nostalgic.

I sat through a professional talk recently.

Smart speaker. Confident. Experienced.

Every example?

U.S. companies. U.S. politics. U.S. case studies. Mostly from the 1990s.

That’s not global expertise.

That’s intellectual inertia.

The World Has Moved

We are not operating in a unipolar moment anymore.

Innovation ecosystems are scaling in China at breathtaking speed. Digital identity systems are transforming public services in India. Defense and cybersecurity collaboration is intensifying across the Baltics. Climate governance is being redesigned inside the European Union. Fintech and mobile infrastructure are leapfrogging legacy systems across parts of Africa.

Power is distributed. Influence is regional. Execution is local.

If your frameworks never leave one national context, they’re not universal.

They’re local models with international branding.

Dominance Doesn’t Equal Relevance

For decades, U.S. business schools and corporations were treated as default reference points.

That made sense in a certain era.

It makes less sense now.

Global audiences don’t need a rerun of American case studies.

They need tools that reflect the realities they’re actually navigating.

Multipolar markets. Regional governance blocs. Cultural variance in leadership norms. Diverging regulatory environments. Shifting power centers in tech, security, and sustainability.

If your intellectual map still centers one country, you’re teaching from habit, not awareness.

If your examples haven’t evolved since the 1990s, your authority hasn’t either.

The Takeaway

The world is multipolar.

Your slide deck should be too.

Before your next presentation, ask yourself: Does my intellectual map reflect the world as it is or the world as it used to be?

If your only case studies are American, you’re not global.

You’re exporting nostalgia.

P.S. This isn’t about rejecting U.S. insight. It’s about expanding intellectual range. Global leadership requires curiosity beyond your own borders and the humility to admit the center has shifted.

Neurodiversity Isn’t a Side Quest. It’s Where Inclusion Gets Real.

Most inclusion work focuses on who is visible.

Neurodiversity exposes something harder: how work itself is designed.

Because many organisations are doing inclusion “right” and still excluding neurodivergent people every single day.

The Problem Isn’t People. It’s Design.

Neurodiversity includes autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and other neurological differences.

It’s often invisible. Often undisclosed. Often punished socially, even when unintentionally.

The 2025 research is clear on this point: Neurodivergent employees are not excluded primarily through bias. They are excluded through workplaces built around narrow cognitive assumptions.

How meetings run. How communication happens. How performance is interpreted. How ambiguity is normalised.

Inclusion can look successful on paper and still create constant friction for people whose brains process differently.

When “Inclusive” Practices Backfire

Well-intentioned inclusion often assumes one default way of working.

That’s where things break.

• Open-door cultures rely on spontaneous interaction and social timing. • Indirect communication rewards reading between the lines.

• Brainstorming privileges speed, verbal dominance, and ambiguity.

• Unstructured flexibility creates uncertainty instead of autonomy.

None of this is malicious.

But it quietly shifts the cost of adaptation onto neurodivergent employees, who spend energy masking, translating, and managing misalignment instead of doing their actual work.

What Actually Works (According to the Evidence)

Across the 2025 studies, four things consistently matter:

• Psychological safety before disclosure: People don’t ask for support unless they trust what will happen next.

• Clarity instead of constant interpretation: Concrete language, written summaries, and explicit expectations reduce cognitive load.

• Accommodation as infrastructure, not exception: Quiet spaces, advance agendas, sensory awareness, and predictable rhythms are access conditions, not special treatment.

• Visible normalisation, not private tolerance: When leaders name neurodiversity openly and model acceptance, safety increases for everyone.

This isn’t about lowering standards. It’s about removing unnecessary barriers.

Why This Strengthens Inclusion for Everyone

Designing for neurodiversity doesn’t fragment inclusion.

It deepens it.

Clarity reduces anxiety. Predictability preserves energy. Multiple ways of contributing improve decision-making.

Neurodiversity forces inclusive leadership to move beyond intentions and into how work actually works.

The Takeaway

True inclusion isn’t about treating everyone the same.

It’s about building systems that don’t require people to exhaust themselves just to belong.

Neurodiversity makes that impossible to ignore.

P.S. If your inclusion strategy only works for people who thrive on ambiguity, noise, and social guesswork, it’s not finished yet. Neurodiversity doesn’t complicate inclusion. It reveals whether it’s real.

Humility Comes Before Mastery

A few years ago, I took the Norwegian language test required for citizenship.

You need B1.

I got A1.

There is no A0.

That wasn’t a technicality.

That was ego.

The Status Story I Told Myself

For 15 years, I had very convincing reasons not to learn Norwegian properly.

I ran businesses. I employed people. I brought money into the country. I was publishing in international scientific journals. I was speaking to corporate audiences in the thousands. I was travelling internationally as a researcher and keynote speaker.

English was my arena. And I was winning in it.

So I told myself a quiet story:

Why should I lower myself to being a beginner?

No one would have said that out loud. But that was the attitude.

I confused being impressive with being integrated.

I thought my achievements excused my avoidance.

I Hid Behind Intelligence to Avoid Vulnerability

The truth is simpler than the narrative I built.

I didn’t want to sound clumsy. I didn’t want to be corrected. I didn’t want to feel small.

So I hid behind intelligence.

I stayed in the language where I had power, vocabulary, status.

And I justified it as strategy.

But it wasn’t strategic.

It was defensive.

Men Do This With Everything

We double down in the rooms where we dominate.

We avoid the rooms where we would be exposed as beginners.

Then we call it preference. Or efficiency. Or being “strategic.”

But most of the time, it’s fear.

Fear of not being competent. Fear of losing status. Fear of looking average.

This Is Why So Many Men Avoid Therapy

Not because they don’t need it.

But because therapy requires the same thing language learning requires:

Admitting you don’t already know. Admitting you’re not fluent. Admitting you need help.

It threatens the identity of the man who is supposed to have answers.

So instead of walking into a room where we might feel inexperienced, we stay where we feel impressive.

And we call that strength.

You Can’t Demand Belonging in a Language You Refuse to Speak

I talk about inclusion for a living.

Belonging. Participation. Meeting people where they are.

And yet for 15 years, I expected Norway to meet me halfway.

Because I was contributing. Because I was visible. Because I was successful.

That’s not integration.

That’s transactional thinking.

Belonging isn’t earned through achievement.

It’s built through participation.

Scheduling the Humbling

This time, I stopped negotiating with myself.

I booked the exam.

Two hours of tutoring every week. Four hours of crash course. Extra practice with colleagues. Conversations that made me tired and exposed.

Somewhere along the way, it stopped being about B1.

It became about identity.

Was I the kind of man who protects status?

Or the kind who pursues growth?

The Masculinity Nobody Applauds

We teach boys to compete.

We rarely teach them to be novices.

Humility feels like demotion when your identity is built on competence.

But confidence built on avoidance is brittle.

Confidence built on humility is durable.

Mastery doesn’t begin when you feel powerful.

It begins when you admit you’re not.

The Real Lesson

Humility comes before mastery.

Not talent. Not dominance. Not intellect. Not success.

Humility.

The willingness to mispronounce. To fail publicly. To look average before you become good.

Most men don’t avoid growth because they lack discipline.

They avoid it because they don’t want to feel small.

I did.

For 15 years.

The Takeaway

If there’s an area of your life you keep dismissing as unnecessary, ask yourself: Is it actually beneath you? Or does it threaten the version of you that needs to look impressive?

The language you avoid might not be Norwegian.

It might be emotional fluency. Relational fluency. Cultural fluency.

Mastery begins where ego ends.

P.S. Passing B1 will feel good. But becoming the kind of person who isn’t threatened by being a beginner, in language, in therapy, in identity, for me, that’s the real milestone. This chapter belongs in The Big F#cking Book on How to Be a Decent Guy. Because decency requires humility before it produces mastery.

The Quiet Genius of Letting Younger Employees Teach You

Here’s something a lot of leaders rarely admit out loud: Age makes us awkward.

Not because people are difficult. But because power, experience, confidence, and insecurity collide in strange ways when generations work together.

And most leadership models still pretend age is a footnote.

It isn’t.

Age Changes What Inclusion Even Means

Age is not a fixed identity. It moves.

What people need at 25 looks nothing like what they need at 55. What feels supportive early in a career can feel suffocating later on. What feels empowering to one generation can feel dismissive to another.

The 2025 research is clear on this: inclusive leadership works across ages, but only when it adapts across the life course.

Static frameworks don’t survive dynamic lives.

Where Leaders Start Losing People (Quietly)

Age-related exclusion rarely shows up as conflict. It shows up as hesitation.

Younger employees hold back to avoid sounding naïve or entitled. Older employees hold back to avoid being seen as outdated or “in the way.”

Add hybrid work and digital acceleration, and the gap widens fast.

What leaders often read as disengagement is something else entirely: calculation.

Reverse Mentoring, Minus the Theatre

This is where reverse mentoring should come in.

Not as a programme. Not as a branding exercise. And definitely not as “young teaches old.”

The research shows it only works when one thing is true:

Both sides are treated as legitimate sources of knowledge.

Younger employees bring:

• digital fluency

• emerging norms

• speed and pattern recognition

Older employees bring:

• discernment

• institutional memory

• risk awareness

When leaders explicitly protect that symmetry, something important happens: trust stabilises across ages.

When they don’t, reverse mentoring turns into polite discomfort or quiet humiliation.

The Power Move Leaders Miss

Age differences amplify leadership impact.

The larger the gap, the more inclusive leadership matters.

Avoiding age doesn’t neutralise it. It hands the narrative to stereotypes.

Leaders who name age differences, calmly, without drama, give people permission to contribute from where they actually are, not where they think they’re supposed to be.

That’s not soft leadership. It’s precise leadership.

Inclusion Has a Time Dimension

Here’s the part most organisations still resist: Inclusion isn’t a moment. It’s a career-long practice.

• Early career: growth, feedback, visibility.

• Mid career: sustainability, integration, flexibility.

• Later career: autonomy, legacy, health.

One organisation. Multiple timelines.

Treating everyone the same doesn’t create fairness. It creates drift.

The Takeaway

Letting younger employees teach you isn’t generosity.

It’s competence.

Because organisations that only let knowledge flow one way eventually run out of it.

P.S. If your inclusion strategy works beautifully for early-career talent but quietly loses people later on, that’s not a pipeline problem. It’s a leadership design problem. Reverse mentoring is one signal of whether you’ve noticed.

Hybrid Work Rewards the Loud. What About Everyone Else?

Hybrid work was supposed to level the playing field. More flexibility. More autonomy. More inclusion.

Instead, something quieter is happening.

Some people are thriving. Others are slowly disappearing.

The Thing I Didn’t Realise (Until Hybrid Work)

Quick confession.

I used to think reaction emojis were fluff. Nice-to-have. Not leadership.

In hybrid teams, presence isn’t physical anymore. It’s inferred.

A 👍 A ❤️ A quick “saw this, thanks”

Those tiny signals now decide who feels seen.

Hybrid Work Doesn’t Create Inclusion. It Exposes It.

The 2025 research is very clear on this:

Technology connects people. It does not create inclusion.

In hybrid work, inclusion doesn’t emerge organically through proximity. It has to be designed.

When leaders assume it will “just happen,” the same pattern shows up again and again:

• Fast, confident digital communicators dominate

• Reflective thinkers fade

• Neurodivergent employees lose cues and context

• Caregivers get read as “less present”

• Ideas survive meetings but die in summaries

No conflict. No complaints. Just less traction.

That’s not neutrality. That’s exclusion by design.

Digital Empathy Is the Missing Skill

This is where digital empathy comes in.

Not being “nice online.” Not emoji spam.

Digital empathy is intentional signalling.

It’s leaders paying attention to:

• Who gets responses

• Who gets acknowledged

• Whose ideas get carried forward

• Who slowly stops contributing

In hybrid work, people rarely disengage loudly.

They evaporate.

AI Makes This Even Riskier

Now add AI into the mix.

Algorithms shape:

• task allocation

• performance narratives

• idea prioritisation

When leaders treat AI as objective, bias gets automated.

Inclusive leadership in hybrid work means:

• questioning summaries

• auditing outputs

• noticing whose contributions survive the system

Otherwise, exclusion just looks efficient.

The Real Risk for 2026

Some organisations are already seeing this:

They were more inclusive before hybrid work than after.

Because flexibility without leadership norms creates a two-tier system:

• the loud thrive

• everyone else goes quiet

Hybrid work doesn’t fail inclusion dramatically. It fails it politely.

P.S. Here’s a question worth sitting with: Who on your team used to contribute, and doesn’t anymore?

Not because they left. Because they stopped being noticed. That’s where inclusion work lives now.

Inclusion Doesn’t Travel Well (And That’s a Problem We Created)

Let me start uncomfortably.

Most of what I was taught about inclusive leadership was designed in the Global North. By people like me. For contexts that look a lot like mine.

And for years, I assumed it traveled.

It doesn’t.

The Mistake I Had to Unlearn

I used to believe inclusive leadership was a universal skillset.

Open doors. Speak up. Challenge authority. Be radically transparent.

All good things.

Also deeply Western.

The 2025 research makes this painfully clear: when inclusion models built in low-power-distance, individualistic cultures are exported without translation, they often reduce safety, voice, and trust instead of increasing them.

Good intentions. Bad outcomes.

When “Good” Inclusion Backfires

Here’s what shows up again and again in the research:

In high power-distance contexts, leader accessibility can signal weakness, not care. In collectivist cultures, spotlighting individual uniqueness can disrupt belonging. In high-context cultures, verbal inclusion matters far less than timing, presence, and relational signals.

So when leaders in Europe say:

“Why won’t people speak up?”

The answer is often:

“Because you just made it unsafe, in this context.”

Silence isn’t disengagement everywhere. Sometimes it’s respect.

This One Stings (Especially for People Like Me)

Multinationals roll out “global inclusion frameworks.” Scores drop in Global South subsidiaries. Leaders panic.

The usual diagnosis?

“Resistance.” “Low inclusion maturity.” “Cultural barriers.”

The research says otherwise.

What’s eroding isn’t inclusion. It’s leader legitimacy.

When inclusion behaviors violate local norms of authority, harmony, or credibility, people don’t lean in. They pull back.

What the Research Forces Us to Admit

2025 studies don’t treat inclusive leadership as a fixed competency anymore.

They treat it as culturally adaptive practice.

Same principles:

• dignity

• fairness

• belonging

• voice

Different expressions.

Not copy-paste. Recomposition.

Translate the why. Not the how.

The Question I Keep Asking Myself Now

Not:

“Are we being inclusive?”

But:

“Who decided what inclusion is supposed to look like here?”

And:

“Who pays the price when we get that wrong?”

Because too often, it’s not European leaders carrying the risk. It’s everyone else.

What I’m Taking Forward Into 2026

Inclusive leadership that works globally requires:

• humility, not export confidence

• listening before rolling out

• local leaders shaping the model

• and a willingness to let go of familiar behaviors that feel inclusive to us but land badly elsewhere

Inclusion isn’t universal behavior.

It’s situational leadership with a moral compass.

The takeaway

If your inclusion model only works where you designed it, it’s not inclusive.

It’s colonial with better branding.

P.S. This tension — between intention and impact, principle and practice — runs through the entire Inclusive Leadership Trends for 2026 white paper. If you’ve ever led across cultures and felt that “something isn’t landing,” you’re not imagining it. Next week, I’ll show you what the research says leaders need to do instead.

High-Pressure Leadership and the Mistake We Keep Repeating

When decisions are fast, stakes are high, and consequences are real, leaders make a familiar move.

They tighten control. They narrow voices. They prioritise speed over conversation.

And they quietly drop inclusion.

Not because they don’t believe in it but because inclusion feels too soft for hard moments.

That’s the mistake. And the 2025 research is unambiguous about it.

The Assumption That Keeps Breaking Systems

In high-pressure environments (defence, cybersecurity, healthcare, critical infrastructure), leaders often assume:

We don’t have time for inclusion right now.

But pressure doesn’t remove the need for inclusive leadership. It amplifies it.

Because under stress, people:

• hesitate to report errors

• hide uncertainty

• push through fatigue

• default to silence

And silence is not discipline. It’s unreported risk.

What the Evidence Actually Shows

Across healthcare, construction, high-risk infrastructure, and safety-critical operations, inclusive leadership consistently predicts:

• lower burnout and emotional exhaustion

• higher error and near-miss reporting

• stronger vigilance and safety participation

• reduced harm

Not eventually. Not culturally. Operationally.

The mechanism isn’t politeness. It’s fear reduction.

When leaders remove punishment from honest reporting, information surfaces earlier, before errors compound into incidents.

One Leadership Approach. Two Safety Outcomes.

Inclusive leadership works on two safety systems at once.

1. Psychological safety: People speak up. They admit uncertainty. They protect cognitive bandwidth instead of burning it.

2. Physical and operational safety: Hazards get reported. Procedures get questioned. Small failures don’t grow in the dark.

This isn’t softness. It’s signal quality.

Why This Hits Defence and Cyber Especially Hard

European defence and cybersecurity organisations operate in environments defined by:

• zero tolerance for failure

• strong hierarchies

• constant readiness

• moral and legal consequence

In those conditions, silence often gets mistaken for strength.

But the research shows the opposite.

The most dangerous moment is not disagreement. It’s when people stop correcting the system.

Inclusive leadership improves decisions by widening the information leaders receive before it’s too late.

Care Is Not the Opposite of Readiness

One of the sharpest shifts in the 2025 literature is this: Care is no longer framed as kindness. It’s framed as risk management.

Leaders who legitimise rest, listen for strain, and invite dissent don’t weaken teams. They prevent fatigue-driven error, presenteeism, and catastrophic silence.

In high-pressure work, ignoring exhaustion doesn’t create toughness. It creates fragility.

The Pattern Leaders Miss

The dominant causal chain now looks like this:

Inclusive leadership → psychological safety → engagement → safety behaviour → reduced harm

Break the first link, and everything downstream collapses.

That’s why compliance-heavy safety models keep failing under pressure. They manage rules. They don’t manage fear.

The Takeaway

When the stakes rise, leaders don’t need less inclusion.

They need better inclusion.

High-pressure leadership doesn’t require narrowing voices. It requires making sure the right ones don’t go quiet.

P.S. Inclusive Leadership Trends for 2026 goes deeper into how psychological safety predicts error reporting, vigilance, and burnout reduction in safety-critical environments. If your work depends on reliability under pressure, this research is worth engaging with before the next hard decision arrives.

What People Actually Mean When They Say “You Have Good Energy”

For years, people have told me some version of the same thing: “You have good energy.” “I feel energized after we meet.” “Your energy on stage is contagious.”

I always smiled, said thanks, and moved on.

I didn’t really know what they meant.

This year’s research changed that.

The Thing We Feel but Rarely Name

The inclusive leadership literature in 2025 starts using a phrase that stopped me cold:

Relational energy.

It’s not charisma. It’s not positivity. It’s not personality.

Relational energy is what people carry with them after an interaction with you.

Do they walk away clearer or heavier? More willing to speak, or more cautious? Energised, or quietly depleted?

That emotional residue, not your intent, not your values, not your leadership style, is where inclusion actually happens.

Or quietly dies.

Inclusion Isn’t Built in Big Moments

Most leaders I work with assume inclusion shows up in:

• policies

• programmes

• town halls

• big statements at big moments

The research says otherwise.

Inclusive leadership is enacted, or undone, in micro-interactions:

• the two-minute check-in before a meeting

• the Slack message you don’t send

• how quickly you respond when someone flags a problem

• whether you pause, or push on, when tension appears

These moments feel small.

They’re not.

They are the mechanism.

Across healthcare, virtual teams, project work, and crisis environments, the same pattern shows up again and again:

Leaders who consistently engage in high-quality micro-interactions build relational energy. Leaders who don’t slowly drain it, even when everything looks fine on paper.

What “Good Energy” Actually Is

Here’s the uncomfortable reframe.

Good energy is not something you project. It’s something people experience.

Relational energy forms when interactions leave people with:

• a sense of safety

• a sense of being seen

• a sense of forward momentum

It builds on psychological safety, but it doesn’t stop there.

Safety allows people to exhale. Energy gives them the fuel to re-engage.

And once that energy exists, it changes everything downstream:

• engagement rises without being demanded

• discretionary effort appears without incentives

• work-life strain eases instead of compounding

• commitment deepens without pressure

Not because people are told to care more, but because they have emotional resources to draw from.

Where Micro-Interactions Matter Most

The research is especially sharp in four settings leaders often underestimate.

1. Hybrid and virtual teams: When informal contact disappears, micro-interactions are the culture. Predictable, human touchpoints matter more than grand digital strategies.

2. High-stress environments (like healthcare): A two-minute leader check-in can buffer burnout more effectively than another resilience workshop.

3. Project-based and temporary teams: When trust has to form fast, energy is built, or lost, in the first few interactions.

4. Crisis and peak-load periods: Under pressure, small moments function as micro-recoveries. Ignore them, and exhaustion compounds fast.

Across all four, one finding is consistent: Formal inclusion training without daily micro-practice does almost nothing.

Inclusion Is No Longer Stable. It’s Variable.

This may be the most unsettling insight in the 2025 literature.

Inclusion is not something you “achieve.” It fluctuates.

Week to week. Interaction to interaction.

Relational energy rises and falls based on presence, attention, and responsiveness, not values statements.

And it’s not one-size-fits-all:

• neurodivergent employees often need predictability, not spontaneity

• caregivers respond to clarity more than enthusiasm

• some people recharge through written affirmation, others through brief verbal connection

The question for leaders is no longer:

“Am I inclusive?”

It’s:

“What do people walk away with after interacting with me?”

Inclusion Lives in the Gaps

The cumulative evidence lands on a simple but uncomfortable truth.

Inclusion is not built in:

• annual reviews

• leadership programmes

• diversity summits

It is built in the hundreds of small moments between them.

When leaders treat micro-interactions as active inclusion sites, pausing, noticing, responding, they build energy reserves people draw on for voice, learning, and contribution.

When they don’t, inclusion becomes performative fast.

The research doesn’t ask leaders to be louder, nicer, or more inspirational.

It asks them to be more aware.

Because inclusion doesn’t live in what you say when it counts. It lives in what people carry away when you think it didn’t.