Stephen Frost
Most diversity programmes have produced training, dashboards and statements without changing how decisions are actually made. Boards now face fatigue from staff, scrutiny from regulators, and a political climate where DEI is contested rather than assumed. The unresolved question is how to make inclusion a measurable operating discipline that survives both internal cynicism and external pushback.
Stephen Frost is the founder of Included and the author of The Inclusion Imperative, helping organisations embed inclusion into the decisions leaders actually make.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Stephen Frost
- He has run inclusion at a scale almost no other practitioner can claim, leading diversity and inclusion across the 200,000-strong workforce of the London 2012 Olympics and afterwards heading the function at KPMG.
- He treats inclusion as a system to be engineered into hiring, promotion and decision-making, not a values campaign, an approach laid out in The Inclusion Imperative and Building an Inclusive Organization.
- His teaching positions at Harvard Business School, Sciences Po and Singapore Management University give boards confidence that the methodology stands up to academic scrutiny as well as commercial pressure.
- He brings a record of building inclusion infrastructure that outlives him, including Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index, now used by most leading UK employers.
- He is one of a small number of DEI voices able to hold the line on substance while a political backlash makes many DEI conversations harder to have at board level.
Biography highlights
- Head of Diversity and Inclusion for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
- Former Head of Diversity and Inclusion at KPMG.
- Founder and CEO of Included, a global diversity and inclusion consultancy.
- Teaches Inclusive Leadership at Harvard Business School, Singapore Management University and Sciences Po.
- Author of The Inclusion Imperative, Inclusive Talent Management and Building an Inclusive Organization; editor of The Key to Inclusion. All published by Kogan Page.
- Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum (2011); recipient of the 2010 Peter Robertson Award for Equality and Diversity Champions.
Biography
The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games employed close to 200,000 people. Running diversity and inclusion across that operation was not a values exercise. It was a delivery problem under intense political and media scrutiny, and Stephen Frost was the person who owned it. The workforce that resulted was 46 per cent female, 40 per cent from minority ethnic backgrounds and 9 per cent with a disability, on numbers that few corporates have come close to since.
After the Games, he was hired by KPMG as Head of Diversity and Inclusion, where he set the firm’s targets on gender, ethnicity, social mobility and sexual orientation. He went on to found Included, a global consultancy that now advises governments, multinationals, media organisations and universities. Earlier in his career he had built much of the modern UK D&I infrastructure at Stonewall, including the Workplace Equality Index now used as a benchmark across most leading employers.
The argument in his four Kogan Page books is consistent. Inclusion is a decision-making system, not a culture campaign. The Inclusion Imperative draws on the Olympic work to set out how it can be embedded into procurement, recruitment, leadership and operations. Building an Inclusive Organization, co-authored with Raafi-Karim Alidina, extends the case into the cognitive and behavioural mechanics of how inclusion succeeds or fails inside a firm.
That body of work is reinforced by teaching positions at Harvard Business School, Singapore Management University and Sciences Po, and by his selection as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. For boards under pressure on inclusion at the same time as they are under pressure on cost, regulation and political risk, the value of Frost’s perspective is that it treats inclusion as an operating capability that can be measured, defended and improved.
Key speaking topics
- Inclusive leadership
- Embedding inclusion into organisational strategy
- The business case for diversity and inclusion
- Inclusive talent management and hiring
- Culture change and behaviour design
- Cognitive load and decision-making in diverse teams
- Building an inclusive organisation at scale
Ideal for
- CHROs and Chief Diversity Officers under pressure to show measurable outcomes from inclusion investment.
- Boards and executive committees navigating DEI in politically contested or regulatory-heavy environments.
- Talent, recruitment and leadership development leads redesigning processes around inclusion.
- Senior leadership teams in firms scaling internationally across multiple cultural and legal contexts.
Audience outcomes
- A working definition of inclusion as a decision-making discipline, not a values statement.
- Specific levers leaders can pull inside recruitment, promotion and team design to improve inclusion outcomes.
- A clearer language for defending inclusion work to sceptical boards and shareholders.
- Examples drawn from enterprise-scale deployments at the London Olympics, KPMG and Included’s client base.
- A grounded view of where inclusion programmes commonly fail and how to design them to last.
Talks
A keynote on how leaders make inclusive decisions in the moments that matter, drawing on Frost’s research and operating experience.
Key takeaways:
- A framework for inclusive decision-making at individual leader level.
- The behavioural and cognitive habits that distinguish inclusive leaders from well-intentioned ones.
- How inclusive leadership shows up in hiring, promotion and team design.
A session on the cultural and behavioural conditions inside which inclusion either embeds or fails.
Key takeaways:
- Why culture, not policy, determines whether inclusion sticks.
- The most common cultural blockers inside large organisations.
- Practical mechanisms for shifting culture without launching a programme.
A talk on how inclusion connects to commercial strategy, drawn from work with multinationals and governments.
Key takeaways:
- Where inclusion intersects with strategy, procurement and operations.
- How to set inclusion targets that survive scrutiny.
- Lessons from the London 2012 inclusion model applied to corporate strategy.
Frost’s framework for the next stage of inclusion work, beyond awareness training and representation targets.
Key takeaways:
- Why first-generation DEI programmes have stalled.
- The shift from compliance and training to system design.
- How to attract, retain and develop talent that creates competitive advantage.