Hanna Naima McCloskey is Algerian British and the Founder & CEO of Fearless Futures. Before founding Fearless Futures, she worked for the UN, NGOs and the Royal Bank of Scotland, across communications, research and finance roles; and has lived, studied and worked in Israel-Palestine, Italy, USA, Sudan, Syria and the UK.
Hanna has a BA in English from the University of Cambridge and an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, with a specialism in Conflict Management. Hanna is passionate, compassionate and challenging as an educator and combines this with rigour and creativity in consultancy. She brings nuanced and complex ideas in incisive and engaging ways to all she supports, always with a commitment for equitable transformation.
Please tell us a little about you and your background.
I’m the daughter of an Algerian Mother and an Irish-Guernsey Father. I grew up in Wembley attending a local comprehensive school; where I was proud to get accepted to study English at Cambridge University and worked hard to make sure I got the grades. Fast forward to working for the UN, completing a Masters in International Relations, researching in Sudan, studying Arabic in Damascus and then working in investment banking as the world economy fell apart due to the subprime mortgage crisis – several factors compelled me to set up Fearless Futures.
How has your journey shaped the mission of Fearless Futures?
In the years running up to my decision to quit my job in investment banking to start Fearless Futures, I had been involved in DEI-related endeavours. This was actually in the days before the I and the E, and the days of ‘Gender diversity’. However, it didn’t mean a diversity of Genders, it just meant the Gender binary: Men and Women.
Despite the best of intentions (including my own), ‘events’ were the start and end of the work. Councils and committees and conversations abounded. And through the un-impactful albeit highly visible, busyness of this singular lens of the Gender binary I queried: “If my mother, an Arab, Muslim, formerly colonised, migrant Woman was here – if she could even access this company – what of her? Whose concern would she be?” The answer: she would be at the margins of both a conception of who we mean when we say Woman and at the margins of organisational power – in all likelihood. Because Woman, in this instance, and in so many instances, across Western company contexts means a Woman who is White, Middle Class, CIS, Heterosexual and so on.
Confronted with this reality, I took to reading. I was reading ferociously. I read books, Crenshaw, Hill Collins, Baldwin, El Sadawi, Spivak, Butler, Chomsky, Davis, Ahmed, Fanon, Fraser, Friere and many others thereafter too… These and countless other scholars are the giants on whose shoulders the work of Fearless Futures rests.
While reading I felt very strongly – due to the specific work of bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress who has had the strongest impact on my life and the story of Fearless Futures of all these scholars – that it is possible to build up people’s capabilities to understand how the world is organised and structured oppressively with the particular goal of enabling them to think and act differently, to disrupt it. And that’s what I set out to do.
What does fearlessness mean to you in the context of challenging inequity?
In the early years of Fearless Futures, during what Sara, our Chief Learning Officer and I refer to as our days in ‘the ice box’ because of the freezing tiny office space we were kindly gifted to work from: we were one of the first – if not the first – organisation in the UK to use the word ‘privilege’ in our training. We have over the years, received and still receive, countless rejections from companies for whom our approach is ‘too radical’. But yesterday’s radical is today’s mainstream. No one bats an eyelid at the word privilege now in DEI training. And this is how change happens. Too often adults in workplaces are infantilised and coddled under demands for checklist-style practical actions or celebratory events, instead of technical equitable redesign of internal structures. But these feel-good shortcuts are false economies – they almost always fail. The only way to resist this inclination is with ambition and compassion. Ambition and compassion for ourselves and others. DEI work is entirely about pushing the boundaries of what is considered acceptable and respectable with respect to the dominant status quo. It is also about recognising that there is no purity in this work, and we all will make mistakes – and that every one of us deserves the opportunity to grow, without being defined by the worst thing we may have done.
How do you balance hope and realism in your work?
Realism is meeting people where they are – and hope is being ambitious about where they will go. As an educator, nothing is possible without hope.
How do you ensure authenticity in both your personal and professional life?
Controversially I don’t think there is a singular authentic self and a self that is consistent across my personal and professional lives. Who I am professionally will always require performance as a strategy in order to do my job effectively and to bring about the change I wish to see. Plus, no one needs to see the version of myself when I’m frazzled with high levels of cortisol as I try and corral my kids out the door to the nursery in the morning! I have a strong critique of ‘bring your whole self to work’ narratives – not only is it not realistic or healthy, but this demand on folks whose identities can make them very vulnerable in certain contexts due to systemic oppression at play – is not fair or reasonable at all.
What lessons have you learned about leadership through this work?
I’ve learnt that the most powerful thing any leader can do is be clear about expectations. Most of the conflict and lost energy that emerges in this work occurs in the expectation gap. The clearer our expectations personally, and organisationally, the more we can close this gap and folks can work together effectively in shared endeavour.
What has been your most transformative moment while working on DEI Disrupted?
The comparison we undertook in exploring corporate responses to the Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2020; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022; and Israel’s war in Gaza from 2023. This research was profound, deeply sad; much needed as well as very clarifying with respect to the inconsistencies and conditionalities that plague current approaches to DEI and ultimately lead to the trust deficit we see in this space.
Hosted by the Women Pivoting to Digital Taskforce in collaboration with Lloyds Banking Group, this event is for women based in Leeds who are considering a move into tech or digital roles and are interested in learning more about how to transition.
