Learnings from Impact Leaders: redefining success through vulnerability, scale, and partnership

This last session of the series took place on World Day of Social Justice, an intentional recognition that connected directly to the conversation’s core themes: belonging, dignity, and the real work of building more inclusive systems.

The episode brought together Ashoka Fellow B. S. Nagesh, a pioneering social entrepreneur in India’s retail sector and the founder of TRRAIN, a social initiative focused on skilling and employment pathways, and Sridhar Sajja, an IKEA co-worker whose collaboration with Nagesh became a powerful example of what can happen when purpose, humility, and practical tools meet at the right moment. Moderated by Lorena García Durán (DEI expert at Ashoka), the conversation offered a grounded and refreshing perspective on what inclusion looks like when you’re trying to achieve it at scale.
 

Inclusion begins with purpose

Nagesh opened up the session with an idea that set the tone for the entire conversation: purpose is inseparable from inclusion. He reflected on a lifetime career in retail and a deeply personal transition: stepping out of his corporate leadership role at age 50 to enter what he described as the “returning” phase of life. In his view, after learning and earning comes the responsibility to give back.

But Nagesh was also clear: meaningful giving back requires learning, especially when you’re building something new. When he first heard about Dela, he hadn’t even come across the systems change accelerator programme before. Still, the invitation resonated immediately.

Sridhar’s motivations spanned both personal experience and professional alignment. Growing up in India, he had witnessed deep social disparities. Also, during his MBA, his school required a grassroots summer project that involved working directly with a social entrepreneur or NGO. When Dela came across his path, it felt like a continuation rather than a detour: a chance to bring what he had learned in business systems into a space where the primary return is social impact.

The Dela difference: commitment, continuity, and the courage to challenge

When Lorena guided the conversation toward challenges, Nagesh made something very clear: for social entrepreneurs, one of the most valuable ingredients in a partnership is reliability.

In his view, what makes Dela distinct isn’t only that it lasts over a year, but it’s that a year-long programme signals real commitment. Nagesh described the scale mismatch honestly: his organisation had a 12-person core team, with additional field staff, and a four-person team dedicated to the Dela journey week after week. It wasn’t only meetings, it was the “homework”: tasks, probing questions, and field testing that pushed the organisation to sharpen its thinking and stretch its capacity.

Sridhar reflected on one bias he actively worked to counter: the temptation to enter as an expert from a large organisation. His reminder to himself was continuous: Nagesh and his team have been doing this work day and night for years. The role of an IKEA co-worker in Dela is not to arrive as a consultant, but to work with the entrepreneur as a partner. But the most powerful tool he named was simpler, and arguably harder: a coaching mindset. Asking better questions. Practicing humility. Creating space for reflection without taking over the work.

Nagesh felt the difference. Within three months, he said, he stopped seeing Sridhar as a coach or consultant and started seeing him as a partner, sometimes even as a mentor, and sometimes as “a school headmaster asking too many questions”, always in service of a shared purpose.
 

The most striking moment of the session came when Nagesh described the central experiment of their Dela journey, and the decision that followed.

His organisation’s mission focuses on skilling people with disabilities and connecting them to jobs in retail. The challenge: to scale. The team explored building a platform to enable match-making: youth on one side, and recruiters on the other. With support from the Dela programme, they developed and tested a prototype with a broader group of contributors, including technical expertise.

And then, after testing from multiple angles (youth, recruiters, partners), the conclusion was clear: It wasn’t going to work.
 

The value of the accelerator wasn’t that it produced a shiny product; it was that it helped them make a grounded, evidence-based decision about what to stop. His framing was simple and unforgettable: sometimes “what not to do” is more important than “what to do”. In a culture obsessed with productivity and visible outputs, this was a bold redefinition of success: one rooted in learning, protection of limited resources, and long-term impact.
 

What lasted beyond 

When Sridhar was asked what changed for him after the experience, his answer had three layers:

• A real-life lesson in vulnerability

It’s not necessary to “win” every initiative. The experience mirrored IKEA’s belief that mistakes are acceptable when learning is captured and applied.

• Personal fulfilment through transferable skills

Using both soft and hard skills outside the boundaries of day-to-day work brought a different kind of satisfaction.

• A ripple effect inside IKEA

Sridhar shared how the experience sparked ongoing conversations that contributed to future decisions in the accelerator programme. 
 

The spirit of the series: brave conversations, practical tools, and openness.

“Learnings from Impact Leaders” has never been only about defining unconscious biases. It’s about seeing how biases show up in real collaboration: in how we enter partnerships, how quickly we assume we know the answer, how we measure success, and whether we allow vulnerability to be part of the process.

In this final session, Nagesh and Sridhar offered a clear message: inclusion at scale requires purpose, patience, and partnership – but it also requires the courage to pause, test, and sometimes walk away from a good idea in order to protect the mission.

And that may be one of the most important biases to outsmart of all: the belief that progress only counts when it comes with a “deliverable”.