Ethos, logos, pathos — why you do it matters

The three reasons organisations pursue inclusion

When you ask a leadership team why inclusion matters to them, you tend to get one of three kinds of answer. Understanding which type you're hearing — and which type is actually driving behaviour — tells you more about the health of your inclusion culture than any survey or audit.

• Ethos — "we have to." Equality legislation, reporting requirements, public-sector duties, contractual obligations. Compliance is the floor, not the ceiling, but many organisations never move beyond it. When inclusion is driven by ethos alone, it lives in the policy folder and rarely reaches the lived experience of the people it's meant to help.
• Logos — "it makes business sense." Diverse teams outperform. The talent pool widens. Retention improves. Innovation follows. These arguments are real and worth making — but they treat people as instruments of organisational performance rather than as ends in themselves. When the numbers shift, logos-only inclusion gets defunded.
• Pathos — "it's the right thing for people." This is the motivator Joanne calls the one that goes underneath. As she puts it: what we hide beneath, we should focus on. is pathos, which is the emotional response, and that's about the human factor. I wanna be treated fairly. I wanna be treated with dignity. When pathos is the foundation, inclusion doesn't depend on the regulatory calendar or the next board presentation.

Why starting with pathos changes the outcome

Joanne is clear about the sequence that works: I'm a great believer in if we start with the emotional, with the human factor, the pathos, then the business case will follow and then we'll be compliant. This is not idealism — it is a practical observation about what sustains behaviour change over time.

An organisation that starts from "we care about people being treated fairly and with dignity" will naturally build practices that also satisfy the regulator and produce the performance outcomes. One that starts from the regulator or the spreadsheet may tick the boxes without ever changing how it feels to work there — and that gap is exactly where talented people quietly disengage and leave.

Diversity and inclusion work is full of organisations who have done everything right on paper and still have a culture problem. The missing ingredient is almost always pathos — a leadership team that has internalised the human argument, not just the compliance one.

Ethos: compliance as floor, not ceiling

There is nothing wrong with compliance as a starting point. Equality legislation exists for good reason, and meeting its requirements is non-negotiable. The problem is when compliance becomes the destination rather than the minimum standard. When inclusion is framed as a legal obligation, people experience it as a burden — something to manage rather than something to mean. Policies get written, training gets delivered, boxes get ticked, and the culture stays exactly as it was.

If your inclusion work is driven primarily by ethos, the question to ask is: what would we do differently if there were no legal requirement? If the honest answer is "nothing", that's worth sitting with.

Logos: the business case is real but fragile

The evidence base for inclusive leadership and diverse organisations is substantial, and Joanne doesn't dismiss it. The business case is a legitimate and often necessary part of the conversation — particularly when making the case to a board or a finance director who needs to see return on investment.

But logos-driven inclusion has a structural vulnerability: it is always one difficult quarter, one new CEO or one restructure away from being deprioritised. If the only reason you are doing this is because it improves performance metrics, then it will be traded off against other performance levers the moment pressure mounts. People can sense when they are valued instrumentally, and it erodes trust in ways that are slow to build back.

Pathos: the human factor as foundation

Pathos, in Joanne's framing, is about recognising the simple human need at the centre of all inclusion work: to be treated fairly, to be treated with dignity. It is not sentiment — it is the most durable motivator available, because it doesn't depend on external conditions. When a leader genuinely holds this value, they behave inclusively whether or not the auditors are watching, whether or not the organisation is hitting its targets, and whether or not there's a dedicated D&I budget this year.

This is why Joanne's approach to speaking and facilitation always starts with the human story rather than the data. Hear more of these ideas explored on the Inclusion Bites podcast, where lived experience is always the starting point.

Putting it into practice

Shifting from a compliance-first or ROI-first approach to a pathos-first one doesn't mean abandoning the business case or ignoring the law. It means changing the question you lead with. Instead of "what do we have to do?" or "what will this cost us?", the question becomes "what kind of workplace do we actually want to be, and what does it feel like for the people already here?"

• Run listening exercises with people across your organisation — not to gather data, but to genuinely understand experience.
• Ask your leadership team to articulate why inclusion matters to them personally, not just organisationally.
• Review whether your inclusion activity is designed around people's experience or around audit trails.
• Notice whether inclusion conversations happen only when something goes wrong or is reported.
• Consider what would change if you led every inclusion initiative with a human story rather than a statistic.

Take it further

Read more in the guides library, explore what inclusive leadership looks like in practice, or browse topics including diversity and inclusion. If you'd like to bring this conversation into your organisation, get in touch.