ABSTRACT
This chapter explores diversity and conflict resolution, starting with the author’s own leadership experience of creating a recipe sharing slot on a human rights agenda radio programme for the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation). Rachel Ellison takes a psychoanalytic look beneath the surface of ideas around difference and prejudice, the commercial imperative to encourage diversity and resistance to embracing and including otherness at work. The narrative begins in Afghanistan, then moves to the Middle East and the UK. It argues that diversity increases innovation, value creation and collective success in business and in the public and third sectors. Difference can stimulate innovation, and collation might not otherwise have been possible, as we see from the example of two chefs Yotam Ottolengi and Sami Tamimi, both born in Jerusalem, Israel, who met in London. The value of neurodiversity - diversity of thinking - for business is also discussed.
