DEI Deconstructed
December 17, 2022
This is the Too Many Trees newsletter, where I share what I’ve been writing and reading in the realm of leadership and personal development. My executive coaching practice is centered around the idea that we are more effective in moving towards our goals when we become more conscious and intentional in focusing our time and attention, and learn how our unconscious patterns are holding us back. If you know somebody that could benefit from my perspective, please forward this to them or let them know they can set up a free intro chat with me.
I follow Lily Zheng on LinkedIn, and was thus excited to read their recently published book DEI Deconstructed. I highly recommend reading it if you want practical advice on interventions to achieve measurable impactful Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion outcomes.
They call out the DEI industry for failing to live up to their own saying that "intentions do not equal impact", because despite the best of intentions, DEI as an industry has had minimal impact, and possibly even negative impact in costing billions of dollars while provoking a backlash.
Zheng instead starts the book by defining the impact and outcomes that DEI work can aim for, and then shares strategies and tactics for moving organizations towards those outcomes. This included a systemic explanation of power, because power is needed to change systems that reinforce homogeneity, inequity and exclusion.
I particularly appreciated how they call on everybody to participate in driving change, identifying a variety of roles necessary to drive organizational DEI change even without formal power, and reminding people to use what they have (privilege, identity, informal power) to advance towards outcomes. As a white-passing, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied man with all the privilege, I felt called-in and included by Zheng, and inspired to do more with what I have.
I also liked Zheng's insight that trust is the key ingredient for organizational change, laying out different paths for high-trust, medium-trust and low-trust environments. In high-trust environments, change is more straightforward because leaders are trusted to acknowledge problems and effectively follow through on commitments. In medium- or low-trust environments, the first step is to build trust by empowering others to hold leaders accountable or by ceding power to others entirely.
More insights and quotes in my blog summary at https://www.nehrlich.com/blog/2022/12/16/dei-deconstructed-by-lily-zheng/
P.S. It is sad, and yet unsurprising, that since I shared this on LinkedIn yesterday, only 1 of the 13 likes on the post was from a white man, where a post earlier this week had more than half the likes from white men. When only marginalized populations care about DEI, change is slower to happen, yet creating a more inclusive world helps all of us - life is not a zero-sum game.
Book in progress: I have been writing one draft chapter a week (two more since the last newsletter), and am pleased with how it’s progressing so far. Let me know if you’re interested in being a beta reader, and you can read early drafts in exchange for feedback.
And now for the normal personal development content…
LinkedIn: These are ideas that have helped my clients (or myself), and that I share via LinkedIn to help a wider audience.
What battles are you picking? When you have limited time and attention, you can’t fight every battle. What battles will you choose to invest in fighting? Where will you step back and let others lead so you can be more effective in your battles of choice?
Life is not a zero-sum game. Some people view the world as a zero-sum game, where opportunities are scarce and there’s not enough to go around. This leads to treating other people as threats, as they are competition for scarce resources. I choose to believe in a non-zero-sum world of abundance and generosity where collaboration can create greater opportunities for everybody, growing the pie, instead of splitting it.
Act as the butterfly. Since we can never predict how our actions might affect other things in a complex, interconnected world, any of my actions could have power and meaning. So act as if you could be the butterfly that changes the world.
What is your drumbeat message? What messages will you repeat to align your organization to move together in the same direction? You can think of such messages as similar to the drums or rhythm section of musical groups, setting the constant foundation that keeps all the other players aligned.
Articles and resources I’ve found interesting:
What if failure is the plan? by danah boyd. I appreciate boyd’s reflections on the chaos at Twitter and what it means to fail, and how to reduce the harm caused by Musk’s antics. “No one who creates a product wants to envision failure as an inevitable end state. Then again, humans aren’t so good at remembering that death is an inevitable end state either. But when someone doesn’t estate plan, their dependents are left with a mess.”
BrXnd, by Noah Brier. Noah conceived of Brand Tags 15 years ago after realizing brands were just the ideas we had in our heads about companies, and used word maps to visualize them. BrXns is the descendant of that, realizing that large learning models capture the ideas in our heads, and so generative AI can be used to understand brands. It’s fascinating (and surprisingly insightful) to see what AI thinks the collaboration between two brands would look like.
Anything You Want, by Derek Sivers. I read this brief book this week, where Sivers shares the lessons he learned from being an entrepreneur in 40 brief vignettes with a total reading time of under an hour. The stories are all online at the link, because he cares more about sharing the ideas than selling books (he donates the profits from book sales). My main takeaways: create the reality that will make you happy (because you do better work when you like what you’re doing) and on delighting your customers, putting a smile on their face (because that’s the best marketing, even ahead of a great product).
Thanks for reading! Hope you get a chance to rest and recharge as the year winds down - I’ll see you in a couple weeks with reflections on 2022 and intentions for 2023.
