Inclusive Leadership, When the World Is On Fire

I’m publishing Inclusive Leadership Trends for 2026 today.

And I want to be honest about the moment it’s entering.

This is not a calm year for leadership.

Across the U.S., Europe, and beyond, leaders are navigating political volatility, economic pressure, rising polarisation, and very real fear about what comes next. Institutions feel fragile. Trust feels thin. People are tired and sharper, faster decisions are being demanded anyway.

So the question isn’t whether inclusion still matters.

The question is whether our current ideas about inclusion are strong enough to survive reality.

That question is what shaped this year’s report.

When “Doing the Right Thing” Stops Working

One pattern kept surfacing as I reviewed the 2025 research:

Most leaders are trying. Most organisations are saying the right things. And yet… something still isn’t landing.

Over the past few days, I’ve shared the report quietly with a small group of colleagues, researchers, practitioners, and educators. What came back wasn’t applause. It was recognition.

That response matters because the research doesn’t point to bad intentions as the problem.

It points to fragile assumptions.

What the Research Makes Unavoidable

Across 100 peer-reviewed studies published in 2025, one thing became unambiguous:

Inclusive leadership no longer works as a set of values, traits, or statements.

It functions or fails as a system of mechanisms.

When psychological safety isn’t present, everything downstream collapses: voice, learning, error reporting, innovation, even basic trust.

When leaders demand outcomes (engagement, innovation, accountability) without building the upstream conditions, inclusion becomes performative, especially under stress.

And when work becomes hybrid, AI-mediated, cross-cultural, or cognitively diverse, “standard” inclusion practices quietly exclude the very people they claim to support.

In other words:

Inclusion doesn’t fail because leaders don’t care. It fails because it’s being applied out of sequence, out of context, and without accountability.

Why This Matters Now

In unstable times, leadership shortcuts are tempting.

Pressure compresses behaviour. Ambiguity exposes power. And whatever inclusion is really built on gets revealed very quickly.

This report doesn’t offer comfort.

It offers clarity.

It shows where inclusion still works, where it breaks, and why many well-intentioned leaders keep getting it wrong, not in theory, but in practice.

A Question to Leave You With

If inclusion only functions when conditions are calm, what happens when leadership gets hard?

That question is at the heart of Inclusive Leadership Trends for 2026.

The report is now public. Read it if you’re serious about leading in the world we actually have, not the one most leadership advice still assumes.