Simon Fanshawe OBE has had a career that stretches from an award-winning comic (Perrier Award 1989) to Sunday Times feature writer, broadcaster and columnist. He is the author of the best-selling book The Power of Difference which brings together his own experiences and the latest research to explain why inclusion is more than just being nice to people, why unconscious bias training isn’t the fix we need and why listening to all individual voices, not assuming that one viewpoint represents a group, is key.
He co-founded Diversity by Design in 2010, is Number 2 on HR Magazine ’s 2022 list of most original thinkers.
As a consultant he works with companies to celebrate difference and create true inclusion. But he is a diversity dissident. He thinks it’s a remarkable irony that ‘diversity’ is too often being used as a tool of conformity, enforced by the weaponising of offence, and ‘inclusion’ has been turned inside out and now seems to mean that ‘you have to think like this, speak like this and behave like this. And if you don’t, we’ll exclude you’.
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