Dr. Grace Lordan

Why organisations work with Grace Lordan

• She runs the only research centre of its kind inside a top-tier university focused on bringing behavioural science to inclusion at firm level, The Inclusion Initiative at LSE, which gives her findings weight that internal DEI teams cannot generate alone.
• Her work tells senior leaders which interventions actually shift hiring, promotion, and retention data, and which ones look good in a values statement but fail under measurement.
• She speaks the language of CFOs and boards, linking inclusion to productivity and performance, which is what gets budget approved and kept.
• She brings a practical behavioural toolkit, nudges, structured decision design, debiased processes, that leaders can install rather than aspire to.
• Her Penguin book Think Big has built a wide reader base among professionals, so audiences often arrive already familiar with her frame for individual career design, which makes the organisational material land faster.

Biography highlights

• Associate Professor in Behavioural Science, London School of Economics and Political Science.
• Founding Director of The Inclusion Initiative at LSE, the research centre she established in 2020.
• Director of the MSc in Behavioural Science at LSE.
• Author of Think Big: Take Small Steps and Build the Future You Want (Penguin Life, 2021).
• Served on the UK government’s Skills and Productivity Board and the BEIS social mobility taskforce; advisory board member of the Women in Finance Charter.
• Contributor to Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Fortune, Fast Company, and Reuters; host of the Work FORCE podcast.

Biography

Inclusion work inside firms has a credibility problem. Budgets have grown for a decade, yet most leadership teams struggle to show a clean line between their interventions and real movement in who gets hired, promoted, and retained. That is the gap Grace Lordan has built a career around closing.

She is an Associate Professor in Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and the founding director of The Inclusion Initiative, the LSE research centre she established in 2020 to bring behavioural science into how firms actually design talent decisions. Her research tests which interventions move the numbers and which do not, across hiring screens, promotion processes, and team composition. The work is published in peer-reviewed journals and picked up by Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, and MIT Sloan Management Review.

She also directs the LSE MSc in Behavioural Science, teaches corporate decision-making to executive students, and has advised the UK government on skills, productivity, and social mobility. Her Penguin book Think Big: Take Small Steps and Build the Future You Want applies the same evidence base to individual career design, which is why professional audiences often encounter her ideas before they meet her in the room.

What senior buyers get is someone who can talk to a CHRO about process design, to a CFO about productivity, and to a board about where their inclusion spend is working. The argument is built on evidence from an LSE research centre, not consultancy generalities.

Key speaking topics

• Inclusion as a measurable driver of firm productivity
• Behavioural science applied to hiring and promotion decisions
• Designing teams for performance and progression
• The future of work and skills in a changing labour market
• Women’s progression and the economics of the gender gap
• Evidence-based leadership and debiased decision-making

Ideal for

• CHROs and heads of talent responsible for moving measurable inclusion outcomes
• CEOs and boards allocating budget to DEI and wanting to know what actually works
• Financial services and professional services leadership teams working under the Women in Finance Charter or equivalent progression commitments
• Executive audiences across government, policy, and regulated sectors addressing skills and social mobility

Audience outcomes

• A sharper read on which inclusion interventions have evidence behind them and which do not
• Specific behavioural design moves leaders can apply to hiring, promotion, and team decisions
• Language that connects inclusion to productivity and performance for CFO and board conversations
• A clearer view of where the future of work is moving for skills, talent pipelines, and progression
• Confidence to retire activities that signal good intent but fail on measurement