A keynote on allyship as a leadership capability, and why it matters more now than it has in years.
Delivered at Deloitte’s Pride event. Reflections from the stage, and a few practical tools to take back to your team.
I was honoured to be invited to give the Pride keynote at Deloitte, and I want to thank the team again for the trust, the conversation, and the seriousness with which they treated the topic.
This post is for everyone who was in the room, everyone who wanted to be, and everyone in a Nordic organisation right now thinking carefully about what allyship actually looks like in 2026, when the headwinds are real, the language is contested, and the people doing this work are tired.
Let’s get straight into it.
The headline argument: allyship is a leadership capability
Allyship is not a values statement.
It is not a poster.
It is not a hashtag in June.
It is a practical leadership capability. It is something you can train, measure, and hold people accountable for, like communication, decision-making, or strategic thinking. Treat it that way, and it produces results. Treat it as decoration, and it produces nothing.
For organisations like Deloitte, the business case is now well-established:
- Pride is not a poster, and allyship is not seasonal.
- Allyship needs to be visible, safe, and backed by policy.
- People should know what support looks like, not only in June, but in every month of the year.
- Inclusion and innovation go hand in hand when people can speak up without fear.
That last point is the most underrated one. The cost of a workplace where people self-censor is not measured in HR metrics. It is measured in the ideas that are never proposed, the risks that are never flagged, and the decisions that are never challenged before they become expensive mistakes.
Why this matters now: the Nordic pushback is real
I do not give this keynote as often as I used to.
The reason is simple: in a landscape dominated by AI, geopolitics, cybersecurity and tight budgets, DEI has slipped down corporate priority lists, especially since the pandemic. Programmes have been cut. Language has been softened. Some leaders have stopped using the word entirely.
And underneath that quiet retreat is something louder and more concerning.
A recent Nordic report by NYTKIS and the Nordic Council of Ministers documents that professionals working on equality across the Nordic region are facing harassment, intimidation, doxing, legal threats, and pressure to stay silent or to change the language they use. (Read the full report here.)
The pushback often takes hybrid forms:
- Online harassment.
- Legal threats.
- Smear campaigns.
- Pressure to cut funding.
- Pressure to avoid certain topics altogether.
The impact is concrete. It reduces public participation. It weakens academic freedom. It slows down progress on LGBTQIA+ and gender equality work. And LGBTQIA+ advocacy, especially trans-related work, is among the highest-risk areas right now.
This is not a social issue floating somewhere on the side of corporate life. It directly affects participation, innovation, reputation, and the conditions under which people are able to do their best work.
If you are a leader, this is your operating environment. Pretending otherwise is no longer an option.
What allyship actually looks like inside an organisation
When I was preparing the Deloitte keynote, I kept returning to the same idea: allyship is most powerful when it is concrete.
Abstract allyship is just sentiment. Concrete allyship changes how a team works.
Inside an organisation, allyship often looks like this:
- Asking who is missing from the discussion, and inviting them in.
- Listening to quieter or newer voices so they can influence outcomes.
- Treating disagreement as useful input, not as a social threat.
- Using inclusive language, and seeing people accurately, especially when privilege and power are unevenly distributed.
None of this requires a budget. All of it requires attention.
A note on the Nordic context
There is a particular cultural dynamic worth naming here.
The Nordic context is shaped by Janteloven, the unwritten “don’t think you’re special” norm that runs through workplace culture across Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Janteloven has its strengths. It keeps egos in check. It supports collective decision-making. It softens hierarchy.
It also makes allyship harder.
In a culture that quietly discourages anyone from standing out, choosing to speak up, to challenge a group pattern, to name an exclusion, to ask the uncomfortable question, takes more courage than it would elsewhere.
This is where leadership and allyship intersect most directly. Sometimes the most effective ally in a Nordic organisation is the person willing to break the polite silence. The person who notices the room has gone quiet and asks the question anyway. The person who chooses curiosity over judgment, even when it is socially easier to let the moment pass.
That is not about being disruptive for its own sake. It is about creating space for better decisions, more authenticity, and stronger collaboration.
Inclusion is the culture we create. Allyship is the behaviour that sustains it.
The question I’m leaving you with
The same question I left in the room at Deloitte:
“How will you practice allyship more deliberately this week, in your workplace, and in public spaces?”
Not next quarter. Not in next year’s DEI plan. This week.
Pick one concrete behaviour. Notice who is missing from a meeting and invite them in. Make space for a quieter voice. Use accurate language. Ask the question no one else is asking. Then do it again next week.
That is how a culture changes.
A practical next step: the Futurice Inclusion Canvas
If you want to move from good intentions to inclusive design, at the level of teams, services, or products, one of the most useful tools I recommend is the Futurice Inclusion Canvas.
It helps teams identify who is being left out of current processes, assumptions, or services. It’s a structured way to spot where you are quietly assuming a “default user”, and to redesign with real diversity in mind, including LGBTQIA+ colleagues and customers, neurodiverse colleagues, people with disabilities, different languages, age ranges, family structures, and cultural backgrounds.
Bring it into a team workshop. Use it before launching a new internal process. Use it before designing a new customer experience.
It works.
Access the Futurice Inclusion Canvas here →
Resources I recommend
A few of the materials I shared with the Deloitte audience, and that I’d encourage anyone doing this work to bookmark:
- HRC guide on being an LGBTQ ally: a solid foundational starting point. Read it here.
- The Futurice Inclusion Canvas: a practical team tool. Access it here.
- Diversity, equity and inclusion at Futurice: broader context on how a Nordic company is approaching this work in practice. Read more here.
- The Art of Active Allyship by Dr. Poornima Luthra: one of the strongest practical books on the topic in the Nordic region. Find it here.
- Alok Vaid-Menon’s pocket books and storytelling work: beautiful, accessible, and worth reading aloud. Author page here.
- LGBTQIA+ films and series on Netflix: a generous selection worth exploring. Browse here.
What I do and what I bring to the rooms I’m hired for
I work as a multilingual event host, moderator, facilitator, keynote speaker, panel guest, and organisational community-building consultant across the Nordics, Central Asia and beyond,and as Associate Partner at SavvY Advisory.
For keynotes specifically on allyship, equality, inclusion, leadership culture and organisational community-building, I am a strong fit when your organisation is looking for:
- A keynote that makes the strategic and business case for this work, not the moral one.
- A speaker who treats equality and inclusion as a measurable, disciplined part of organisational development.
- A multilingual presence comfortable across English, Russian and Uzbek, fluent in Nordic and international corporate cultures.
- A keynote that fits inside a longer engagement, a workshop, a facilitation day, a consulting project, when you want the message to keep working inside the organisation afterwards.
- A long-term partner for organisations committed to this work even when the climate makes it harder.
If that sounds like the room you’re building, I would love to hear from you.
A final thank you
To the Deloitte team for the invitation, the trust, and the willingness to keep this conversation on the agenda.
To NYTKIS and the Nordic Council of Ministers for the research that gave this keynote its sharpest evidence.
To Futurice, Dr. Poornima Luthra, Alok Vaid-Menon, and HRC for tools and language that are making this work more practical for the rest of us.
And to every reader who scrolled to the end of this piece, thinking about how to be a more deliberate ally this week.
Inclusion is the culture we create. Allyship is the behaviour that sustains it.
See you in the next room. 💙
