I remember the weeks following George Floyd’s murder in 2020. The DEI space didn’t just grow, it exploded. Our phones wouldn’t stop ringing. Companies that had never given diversity a second thought suddenly needed consultants, training programs, dashboards, and action plans. Some were genuinely committed to change. Others simply needed to be seen doing something.
Five years later, I’m still working with clients from that initial wave. The ones who stayed. The ones who transformed a single unconscious bias session into something far more substantial. What began as a checkbox exercise evolved into embedding inclusion and culture at the heart of organizational strategy. These efforts weren’t side projects tucked away on an HR manager’s desk anymore. They earned a permanent place on the leadership agenda and stayed there, informing decisions about hiring, promotions, product development, and customer engagement.
But here’s what I keep coming back to as we enter 2026: we should be past this by now. We should be beyond the performative gestures, beyond the compliance-driven initiatives that get rolled out when headlines demand it and quietly dissolved when attention fades. By now, we should understand that culture isn’t a program you implement. It’s a system you build and maintain.
And yet, when I look at how most organizations are planning for 2026, I see strategies that still aren’t built for everyone. They’re built for some people, sometimes most people, but not everyone.
The Question No One Wants to Answer
When leaders discuss their 2026 priorities, the conversation tends to follow a familiar script: growth, profitability, market share, innovation, efficiency. All perfectly reasonable objectives. But ask how they’re building this strategy to work for all their people, and discomfort sets in.
What usually follows is some variation of “our people are important to us” or “we’re investing in culture” or “we have DEI initiatives.” These aren’t answers. They’re deflections dressed as commitments.
The honest answer is often simpler and far less flattering: we built our strategy around what works for most of our current workforce, and we’re hoping everyone else figures it out.
That approach made sense when labour markets were loose, when you could afford to lose people who didn’t fit the mould, when homogeneity felt like efficiency rather than risk. But in 2026, with 74% of employers globally struggling to find skilled talent, shifting generational expectations, and mounting evidence that diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones, building strategies that only work for some people isn’t just ethically questionable. It’s operationally reckless.
What It Means to Build for Everyone
Let’s get specific, because “building for everyone” can sound vague and aspirational in ways that let organizations off the hook.
Building for everyone means your strategy reflects the reality that your workforce is not a monolith. It means acknowledging that systems and practices that feel neutral to some people create barriers for others. And it means committing to redesign those systems rather than expecting people to work around them.
This shows up in concrete ways that have nothing to do with performative gestures. Does your hybrid work policy genuinely accommodate caregivers, or does it quietly penalize them? Do your promotion criteria reward the loudest voices in the room, or do they create space for different leadership styles? Are your meetings structured to surface diverse perspectives, or do they simply reinforce existing power dynamics?
Consider whether the growth opportunities you’re creating are accessible to people historically excluded from them, or whether you’re perpetuating familiar patterns under fresh branding.
When organizations get this wrong, it doesn’t show up as dramatic failure. It shows up as quiet attrition. People leave, not because they’re unhappy with their manager or dissatisfied with their compensation, but because they can see the ceiling. They can feel the ways the organization wasn’t designed with them in mind, and they make a rational decision to go somewhere that was.
The Evidence We Shouldn’t Still Need
The data supporting inclusive strategies is overwhelming. Diverse perspectives improve decision-making, with research showing diverse teams make better business decisions up to 87% of the time. Inclusive cultures generate higher engagement and lower turnover. Teams with psychological safety identify problems earlier and innovate more effectively. Organizations that retain and develop talent from underrepresented groups gain competitive advantages in recruitment, customer insight, and market positioning.
Let’s be honest though. The fact that we still need to justify why organizations should design strategies serving all their people is exhausting. It’s 2026. We have decades of research and lived experience from millions of workers who can describe precisely how exclusionary practices undermined their contributions and pushed them out the door.
The business case exists. It’s robust. Our continued need to make it suggests the real barrier isn’t evidence. It’s willingness.
What Gets in the Way
When organizations fail to build strategies for everyone, it’s rarely because of outright malice. More often, it’s because of inertia, blind spots, and the human tendency to design systems that work for people like us without considering who “us” excludes.
Demographically homogeneous leadership teams construct strategies reflecting their own experiences and assumptions. They design growth plans around career paths that worked for them. They craft policies accommodating their own life circumstances. They establish performance expectations based on how they prefer to work and communicate.
The result? Systems that advantage certain groups while creating friction for others. And because the people designing these systems never experience that friction themselves, they often fail to recognize it exists.
This is where conversations typically derail. Someone insists “we’re not trying to exclude anyone,” as though intent matters more than impact. Someone else claims “we treat everyone the same,” as though sameness and fairness were synonyms. The discussion pivots from “how do we fix this” to “please reassure us we’re not bad people.”
But this isn’t about moral judgment. It’s about operational reality. If your strategy fails significant portions of your workforce, you have a design problem. Design problems demand design solutions, not defensive explanations about good intentions.
What This Actually Looks Like in Practice
Abstract commitments to inclusion change nothing without concrete operational shifts. So let’s be specific.
If your 2026 strategy is built for everyone, your growth plans acknowledge that not everyone can relocate for opportunities or sustain 60-hour weeks during peak periods. Your succession planning actively develops talent from underrepresented groups rather than waiting for them to emerge fully formed at senior levels. Your innovation processes deliberately solicit input from people whose perspectives differ from the dominant group, rather than hoping diverse viewpoints surface organically in meetings where those voices routinely get talked over.
It means your performance management systems evaluate people on actual contributions rather than conformity to narrow definitions of leadership presence. Your compensation practices close gaps rather than entrench them through “market rate” justifications that ignore how historical discrimination shaped those markets.
When deciding on return-to-office policies, hybrid arrangements, or meeting structures, you explicitly ask: does this approach serve all our people, or does it privilege certain groups at others’ expense?
Most critically, you remain willing to hear honest answers and act on them, even when those answers challenge your preferences or assumptions.
What Good Looks Like
I have witnessed organizations get this right. Not flawlessly. But meaningfully.
Organizations that build strategies for everyone begin by acknowledging what they don’t know. They bring diverse voices into planning processes to genuinely shape decisions, not just validate predetermined conclusions. They test assumptions about what works by consulting people who experience those systems differently. And they listen without defensiveness when the feedback challenges their expectations.
They make tradeoffs explicit. When a strategic choice creates friction for certain groups, they name it rather than pretending it doesn’t exist, and they build in mitigation or make a different choice entirely.
They measure what matters. Not just representation numbers, but advancement rates, pay equity, psychological safety. Whether people from different backgrounds report comparable experiences of support and opportunity. Whether the gap between how leadership perceives the culture and how frontline employees experience it is narrowing or widening.
hey hold leadership accountable for creating inclusive conditions, not merely for good intentions. Performance reviews, compensation decisions, and promotions reflect whether leaders are cultivating teams and cultures where everyone can succeed.
None of this is revolutionary. But it requires sustained focus and willingness to prioritize inclusion when it competes with other demands. That’s precisely where most organizations fall short. Not because they don’t care, but because caring proves insufficient when systems and incentives point elsewhere.
The Real Question
So let me ask again: is your 2026 strategy built for everyone?
Not “do you have DEI programs.” Not “have you done unconscious bias training.” Not “do you value diversity.”
Is your actual strategy designed to work for all your people? Does it accommodate different life circumstances, working styles, career trajectories, and perspectives? When you model how your plans will unfold, do you examine how they’ll land differently across different groups? Have you asked the people most likely to be affected whether your assumptions about what works actually hold true for them?
Or are you building for the majority and hoping everyone else adapts?
Some will adapt. They’ll code-switch and conform and discover ways to succeed despite systems that weren’t built for them. But many won’t. They’ll leave. And when they do, you’ll forfeit the perspectives, experiences, and capabilities that could have strengthened your strategy.
Worse, you’ll see it reflected in declining engagement scores and rising attrition among the very groups you can least afford to lose. You’ll perpetuate the patterns that created this situation in the first place, where organizations profess to value inclusion while constructing systems that systematically favour certain groups over others..
We’re more than five years past 2020. We should have moved beyond performative commitments by now. We should be building strategies that genuinely work for everyone. Not solely because it’s the right thing to do, though it is. Because it’s operationally essential.
