It’s been a busy week for our new President, to put it mildly.
The thing that’s gotten the most attention is his Executive Order putting an immediate end to all DEI initiatives in the Federal Government.
Does that mean DEI is dead?
Well… It depends.
DEI as we know it is withering. Call it reading the tea leaves or strategic foresight, but companies have been scaling back or pulling programs all together for a while now.
That being said, the need for diversity, equity and inclusion (call it small-letter “dei”) isn’t going anywhere.
Organizations, especially the big ones, can’t afford to artificially limit their talent pool by not having diverse workforces.
Yet artificial limits are exactly what most DEI initiatives created. See the irony here?
The solution? Look at your phone.
See all those social media apps? Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Reddit. Imperfect as they are, they all work. They do what they say they do. Most of our complaints aren’t really about the tech functioning these days, but about who owns them or how they get wielded.
But go back to the late 1990s. Remember Geocities? It was a very early social media platform, a proto-blog. And by today’s standards, it sucked.
It was slow, hard to use, clunky, terrible UX. A good concept, executed poorly.
But over the years came increasingly better platforms that all learned from the ones that came before them. The human need to connect in the 1990s was just as strong as it is today, the technology just had to catch up.
To quote our old friend Debs Schultz, “Technology changes, people don’t.”
So it goes with DEI. The need is real. How we get there just needs iteration.
As our CEO, Jason Korman put it in Barron’s today:
“DEI ‘training,’ is the corporate equivalent of trying to solve systemic racism with a PowerPoint presentation. At the end of the day, efforts like this rarely make a dent in prejudices. The real result is that people hold the same beliefs as before, only now they’re frustrated.”
Real change requires a change in mindsets and deep seated beliefs. And you only change that through culture.
That’s the real “dei”, DEI 2.0.
