Diversity

If you have ever stood in a dense forest and looked straight up, you may have seen something that stops you: the canopy above forms a kind of jigsaw puzzle, each tree’s crown growing right to its edge and then stopping — leaving a precise, channel-like gap between itself and its neighbour. The branches reach toward each other but do not touch. The gaps run through the canopy like a network of rivers seen from the air, tracing the exact boundaries between one tree’s space and the next.

This phenomenon is called crown shyness. Scientists have studied it since the 1920s and still debate its exact causes — whether it is the trees sensing each other through photoreceptors, or the wind pruning the branches that collide, or something else entirely. What is not in debate is the effect: each tree in the canopy finds its own space, holds its own territory, and in doing so allows light to reach the forest floor, protects its neighbours from the spread of disease and insects, and contributes to the structural resilience of the whole.

What is most astonishing, and most relevant here, is this: in some species, trees have been found to position their leaves to avoid casting shade on their kin — even at the cost of shading themselves. They sacrifice their own access to light so that the tree beside them can have it.

No hierarchy enforces this. No policy mandates it. It emerges from the nature of the system itself — from a deep, distributed intelligence that understands, without needing to be told, that the health of each is bound to the health of all, and that coexistence requires the deliberate creation of space for the other.

This is the image I want to hold at the centre of this essay on diversity. Not the diversity of a pie chart. Not the diversity of a quota. The diversity of a forest — where difference is not a problem to be managed but the very condition that makes the system alive.

Diversity of what, exactly?

When the word diversity enters an organisational conversation, it almost immediately narrows. We start talking about percentages — the percentage of women in leadership, the percentage of people from rural backgrounds, the percentage of representation across age, state, language, caste. These are not unimportant conversations. The data matters. The representation matters. But if we stop there — if diversity becomes a poster child for inclusion rather than a fundamental challenge to how we think — we have missed most of what the concept is actually asking of us.

Diversity, as a mindset, is about something prior to any demographic category. It is about the belief that there are multiple sides to every story, and that no single perspective — however senior, however experienced, however well-resourced — ever holds the whole of it.

Consider the most well-known stories in human history. The story of Jesus, heard from the perspective of the star that showed the direction, or the barn where he was born, or the land that held his footprints. The Mahabharata, heard from the perspective of the soldiers of nations that had accepted the supremacy of the Kauravas or Pandavas — ordinary people who had nothing to do with the family feud and everything to lose from its violence, who left their lives on the field at Kurukshetra without their names being recorded anywhere. Would these be the same stories we know? And if they are not — if the story looks entirely different depending on where you stand when you hear it — then what does that mean for the certainty with which we hold our own accounts of things?

The question of truth

When you genuinely hold the belief that there are multiple valid perspectives on any given situation, a difficult question follows immediately: how, then, do you make decisions? How do you act? If every story has another side, does anything remain true? Does anything remain wrong?

The answer is not that truth disappears. It is that our relationship to truth changes.

What this mindset gives you is not relativism — the idea that all perspectives are equally valid and therefore no perspective can be trusted. It gives you something more demanding and more useful: epistemic humility. The understanding that your current decision is the best you can make with the information and perspective available to you right now, and that it may look different when seen from another vantage point, and that you remain open to being corrected by that other vantage point.

In practice, this means that when you make a decision — as you must, because leadership requires it — you make it as your subjective best understanding, not as a universal finality. You take ownership of the decision without claiming ownership of the truth.

This quality is frequently misread as underconfidence. In institutional settings, where the performance of certainty is rewarded and the admission of uncertainty is read as weakness, a leader who operates from epistemic humility will sometimes appear tentative. That is a real cost. The way through it is not to pretend to more certainty than you have. It is to be explicit about the principle that is driving the tentativeness: not inability to decide, but refusal to mistake your vantage point for the whole view. When you can name that principle clearly — when you can say this is how I am making this decision, and this is why I am holding it lightly — you move from appearing uncertain to appearing thoughtful. That is a different thing entirely.

The system we are actually inside

Diversity as a mindset also asks us to see the system we are operating within — and to name, honestly, what that system has been optimised for.

The world as it is currently organised — in its institutions, its economies, its standards of what counts as knowledge, its definitions of who counts as a leader — was largely designed by and for a specific kind of person: powerful, wealthy, Western-influenced, city-bred, English-speaking, and most often male. This is not a conspiracy. It is the accumulated result of centuries of decisions made from a single vantage point, by people who believed, with genuine conviction, that their vantage point was the universal one.

The consequences of this are not merely representational. They are structural. The metrics by which we measure organisational success, the language in which strategy is conducted, the frameworks through which problems are defined, the timelines by which change is expected to occur, the very notion of what expertise looks like — all of these carry the assumptions of that original vantage point, often invisibly. And when someone arrives at the table from a different vantage point — a woman, a person from a rural community, someone whose knowledge is practical and oral rather than credentialled and written — they do not simply join the conversation. They are evaluated by standards that were never designed with them in mind.

This is why, in 2026, we are still asking why there are not more women in senior leadership. Not because the pipeline is empty. Not because the talent is absent. But because the system rewards a particular kind of presence, a particular kind of communication, a particular kind of ambition — and many of the most capable people do not perform those things in the way the system expects.

The diversity mindset does not simply ask us to bring more kinds of people into the existing system. It asks us to examine what the existing system was built for, and whether that purpose is still — or was ever — adequate.

What matriarchy and nature already know

There is a body of knowledge about how to organise collective life that predates the institutional frameworks most leaders are trained in, and that produces consistently different results.

In the northeastern states of India, matrilineal societies have organised community life around principles of care, shared resource management, and collective decision-making for centuries. In Kerala, the cultural legacy of matrilineal traditions has shaped a relationship to education, health, and community that shows up in the state’s development indicators in ways that purely economic models cannot fully explain.

Kudumbashree, the Kerala government’s community network of women’s collectives, is perhaps the most striking institutional example of what happens when care and community become the organising principles. Beginning in 1998, it has grown into a network of nearly five million women organised into neighbourhood groups, working collectively on livelihoods, food security, local governance, and social support — one of the largest women-led development programmes in the world, built not from the top down but by trusting the intelligence already present in communities.

SEWA — the Self-Employed Women’s Association, founded in 1972 in Gujarat — built an entire trade union around the needs of women in the informal economy: women who had no fixed employer, no formal contract, and no access to the institutions that conventional labour organising assumed. SEWA’s approach did not try to fit these women into an existing framework. It redesigned the framework around them.

And at the level of global conversation: Vandana Shiva, whose documentation of the Chipko movement put women’s ecological knowledge on the international map; Malala Yousafzai, whose insistence that a girl’s right to education is not a cultural negotiation but a human absolute; Greta Thunberg, whose solitary refusal to accept institutional reassurances about climate action generated more genuine accountability than decades of policy negotiation — all of these represent the diversity argument made in action. They did not arrive with credentials the system recognised. They arrived with a perspective the system needed and could not generate from within itself.

How diversity shows up — and fails to show up — in organisations

In most organisations, diversity is understood as a HR mandate and measured in headcounts. The question asked is: who is in the room? The question that diversity as a mindset demands is: whose perspective is shaping what we do?

These are not the same question. You can have a leadership team that looks diverse on a slide and operates from a single vantage point, because the people in the room have been selected for their willingness to work within the existing framework rather than their capacity to challenge it. Representation without epistemic inclusion is not diversity. It is decoration.

When organisations operating in the same space compete for the same funding pool, trying to prove they are more effective than the other, the cause they are both working toward suffers. Collaboration requires the diversity mindset — the genuine belief that the other organisation’s approach carries something yours doesn’t, that together you can see more of the whole than either of you can alone. This is not idealism. It is the forest logic. No single tree captures all the light.

Cultivating the mindset: from concept to practice

Before every major decision, ask whose perspective is missing. Not whose sign-off is missing — whose perspective. Who has direct experience of the consequences of this decision and has not been in the room where it was made?

Change what counts as expertise in your organisation. Credentials are one form of knowledge. Lived experience is another. Traditional and indigenous knowledge are others still. A diversity mindset requires that you design your processes of consultation, decision-making, and evaluation so that all of these forms of knowledge have genuine access — not as gestures of inclusion, but as sources of insight that your decisions would be worse without.

Practise the discipline of the provisional decision. Make decisions clearly and own them fully — but hold them as your current best understanding, not as universal truth. Create the conditions for people around you to correct you when they can see something you can’t.

Diversify the senses through which you lead. Most leadership thinking happens in one register: the head. What happens when a strategic conversation happens on a walk through a forest rather than in a boardroom? When a team sits in silence together before speaking? When a decision is made after spending time in the place it will affect? Intuition, somatic knowing, the felt sense of a situation — these are forms of perception that the monoculture of analytical leadership has systematically devalued, and their absence shows up in the quality of decisions made without them.

Notice the difference between diversity as headcount and diversity as epistemology. Ask regularly: are the people in this room actually shaping what we think, or are they present in a framework that was already set before they arrived?

Look at your collaborations through a forest lens. In the forest, no tree tries to monopolise the canopy. In your field — where are you competing for space that the cause would be better served by sharing?