Inclusion in the City: setting the agenda for the first years of the Inclusion Initiative at LSE

In November 2020 The Inclusion Initiative (TII) will launch at LSE. TII aims to bring behavioural science insights to firms to allow them to enhance the inclusion of all talent, and simultaneously produce academically rigorous and relevant research that links directly to TII’s purpose. TII also aims to produce research that has practical implications at the level of the firm. TII’s research agenda has three main aims. First, to propose a viable proxy measure of inclusion. Second, to quantify the direct link between inclusion and the core business outcomes it should theoretically improve, such as innovation, creativity and risk assessment both within and across firms. Third, to propose to firms a menu of cost effective interventions that could improve inclusion of all talent from pipeline to boardroom. We put emphasis on could because TII insists that all interventions should be rolled out and linked to an outcome the firm cares about, so firms are confident there is a positive net present value to their investment. Via executive training TII will provide the methodology to do just that. To set the research agenda for the first phase of TII, we embarked on a piece of qualitative research that involved interviewing senior leaders in TII’s first priority area, Financial and Professional Services, to learn their beliefs about best practice in terms of improving inclusion at the firm level, and the obstacles that stand in the way of progress. With these insights at hand, we set a research agenda for TII that will tackle the most commonly cited obstacles, drawing on current insights from the behavioural science literature. The Inclusion in the City paper outlines what this agenda is. The primary aim being to inspire firms to adopt some of the ideas in this paper for their own in-house inclusion agendas, with their own people.