I’m Tony McCaffery, founder and chief executive of Diversity Scotland and our international arm, Diversity Company.

I’ve spent more than thirty years working in people and culture, and I came to it the long way round. I’m mixed-race and autistic, I’m disabled, and I’m queer. I grew up in Scotland, spent time in the care system as a child, and knew poverty and homelessness before I knew much stability. None of that is a sympathy story. It taught me early, and at close range, how organisations decide who belongs and who ends up managed out at the edges, and that’s the understanding underneath everything we do in our consultancy business.

I started Diversity Scotland because so much inclusion work in this country never gets past awareness. A training day here, a policy refresh there, a rainbow lanyard in June, and not a lot else holding it together. It can make people feel something for an afternoon, but it changes very little. I wanted to build something that worked at the level where culture is actually set, which is governance. Boards, executive teams and senior leaders make the decisions that shape who thrives, and that’s where we do our deepest work.

The consultancy is built on a single principle: equity comes before diversity. You can’t bring more people through the door if the place isn’t fair once they’re inside. The ‘food, fun and flags’ version of inclusion has never interested me. We do the slower, structural work that changes how an organisation governs itself, and we stake our name on it lasting after we’ve gone.

That work runs on the EMBED framework, which my team and I built over years of practice. It moves an organisation through five stages. First we evaluate where it really stands, which is rarely where it says it stands. Then we map where power, decisions and barriers actually sit. From there we build the capability and the structures to act on what we’ve found. The fourth stage is embedding inclusion into governance itself, into how budgets, appointments and strategy get decided. And the last is driving it, so the momentum carries on once we’re out of the room. It gives a board something rigorous to hold, so inclusion stops being a scatter of disconnected initiatives that fade by the next quarter.

Hiring is where a lot of the damage to inclusion gets done, so we built a 12-stage Inclusive Hiring Framework that covers the whole cycle, from how a role is first imagined and resourced through to how someone is welcomed once they arrive. Most processes obsess over the advert and the interview. We look harder, at the quieter barriers: the essential criteria that aren’t essential, the wording that warns people off, the panels that recognise only themselves, the onboarding that leaves new people to sink or swim. Remove those and you change who can get in and who can stay.

Diversity Scotland isn’t a one-person operation. I hold the board and executive conversations, and my consultants work alongside operational managers and HR teams, with expertise across the range of protected characteristics and inclusion disciplines. That’s what lets us keep the work coherent from the boardroom to a single team meeting, without the strategy thinning out as it travels down. Precision really matters to us as well. Getting the difference between neurodiversity and neurodivergence right is how you show you understand the thing you’re being paid to change.

The reach is wider than people expect from a firm headquartered in Glasgow. In Scotland we work across NHS governance, higher education, cultural institutions, the third sector and private business. Through Diversity Company we support NHS bodies in England and organisations in the tech, sports, and renewable energy sectors around the world. The principles travel with us. Inclusion has to be strategic, evidence-led, measurable and built into the structures that govern the place, or it won’t hold.

I measure what we do by what’s still standing after we leave. A board that’s started questioning its own decisions about who gets included and who gets left out. A recruitment process that’s stopped screening people out before anyone’s even met them. By the end, inclusion has moved from one tired person’s side project to part of how the leadership governs. That’s the change worth paying for, and it’s what keeps clients coming back to us.

Beyond the consultancy, I sit on Skills Development Scotland’s Disability Focal Point Group, the Our Past Our Future Steering Group and Scotland’s Historic Environment Forum, and I’m an Advisory Friend to the Institute of Equality and Diversity Professionals. I appeared in the Scottish Government’s Mind to Mind campaign, and in 2025 I received the Proud Scotland Leadership Award.

I’m proud of all of that, but the part that matters most to me is simpler. When a board starts noticing who isn’t in the room before I have to point it out, the work has landed. That’s what I’m here to build.