Introduction
The fallout from reactions against the extremes of DEI advocacy is forcing a long overdue rethink on DEI roles and values.
We risk missing the information in all the noise.
DEI is an outcome not a cause
I was dimly aware of DEI in 2010. I had a strong sense of disability inclusion because that was the field I worked in. I had a strong sense of equity and rights but not that there was a profession created to further them in workplaces.
Since July 2010 I became aware of my employer (a NSW department) being actively involved in advancing the rights of staff with disability. This was something I fostered when I became lead of the department’s Disability ERG in late 2016.
The relationship between the department’s leadership, the DEI team and the Disability ERG was the most critical element of the success that was generated.
The present passions are about DEI losing its way and becoming dominated by political activists whose positions are not representative of all interested parties.
While I agree that these activists must be held accountable for impolitic extremes, organizations must be held accountable for failing to establish and retain control of DEI practice – on an intellectual, moral and operational level.
In Australia DEI teams were created in an organization to help it meet its obligations under state and commonwealth legislation. This reflected a societal change in valuing individuals as employees. They had rights and were entitled to expectations about how they should be treated. But this has never become part of core business – and this is the heart of the problem we now face.
If we understand DEI as an effect and not a cause, we can go looking for the real cause – an incomplete realization by organizations of their responsibility to ensure that the rights and dignities of staff are protected and fostered.
Who is responsible?
Historically humans have been seen as disposable components of a rational system of governance or business. They have been replaced by technologies routinely. The recognition of their fully human status began when legislation started to be enacted to address work health and safety and inclusion rights. It has been a struggle that goes back to the beginnings of trade unions – in the early 19th century in Australia.
The rights movements of the 1960 and 1970s led to anti-discrimination legislation being enacted from the 1980s. Since then, there has been a steady change in how we, as individuals, are valued – in our communities and our workplaces.
A contemporary workplace has clear obligations concerning a staff member’s wellbeing. Those obligations are met to varying degrees. But the extent to which they are met depends on the organization’s leadership culture and the resources made available.
DEI teams and ERGs have been created as part of a requirement to meet legal obligations. However, even with a sincere sense of goodwill this response has been flawed. It led to the unfortunate assumptions that DEI teams and ERGs knew what they were doing. They didn’t and mostly still don’t.
DEI and BS
When I quit full-time paid employment in June 2021, I finally had the time to read up on a burning problem. Why was disability inclusion so hard? This blog has been a record of my effort to answer that question.
I read a bunch of books and listened to a lot of podcasts by people who styled themselves as experts. Some had useful tips and insights. But I came to understand that what I was looking at was an industry built on guesswork and assumption rather than genuine knowledge and insight.
This was familiar to me. Our natural inclination is to assume we know about other people, so we engage with our best intent. We succeed sometimes and fail other times. We rarely engage with knowledge and skill at a professional level. DEI isn’t seen as an actual profession requiring deep knowledge of psychology and organizational behaviour. It mostly operates on myths and BS about how we learn and how we change our behaviour.
The upshot is that DEI is wildly erratic in its achievements. Generally speaking, employees tend to be people of goodwill who have a positive response to efforts to foster inclusion. The hard bits arise when there are cultural, structural and individually unconscious impediments to effective inclusion and equity. And efforts to overcome these impediments either fail routinely or are not made at all.
I have noticed over a decade that the DEI team I once relied on as an effective ally has been steadily depleted of resources because the return on investment hasn’t been seen as warranting its maintenance. Once failure is anticipated there’s nothing stopping perceived ineffectual responses from becoming the norm. And when this happens real talent flees.
Abandoning accountability
DEI was an appropriate response to the opportunity created by the arrival of legal responsibility – as a first step. The take up by enthusiastic advocates reflected more a moral response than a commitment to effectiveness because, typical of such an opportunity, success with ‘low hanging fruit’ convinces early advocates that more of the same was the way to go.
This is when, in an ideal world, organizational leaders and DEI practitioners and leaders could have sat down and tried to figure out how to go after the higher fruit. This didn’t happen, of course.
All this has been over a span of 40 years – which is no time at all in the scheme of things. I am not trying to assign blame here. What happened is normal and to be expected. Accountability is always a problem for us – as individuals and groups – but especially as organizations. There remains an opportunity to uplift DEI as a genuine methodology for responding to the real needs of staff for equity and inclusion – as a professional approach to help an organization meet its responsibilities towards its staff members.
Beyond the political
A good deal of the problems faced by DEI now arise from the presumption that it is political in essence. It isn’t. It is legal.
A DEI team that has been created in response to legislation it is a very different thing to one that thinks it has a mission to foster behavioural and cultural change for political reasons. The issue isn’t the merit of the cause, but what the guiding imperative for the team’s activity is.
I am not saying that DEI should not be political, just that it is an entirely different function relative to meeting an organization’s legal obligation to address discrimination. That legal obligation will also have a moral tone to it as well – a hangover from the political passions that created it. But in so many areas of concern for human welfare we have turned good intent into skilled, knowledge-based, endeavors – but DEI has missed out on this.
I saw in my former employer how this inability to distinguish between the legal and the political led to confusion. It had created 6 ERGs of which only 3 had distinct legal/policy concerns – what I described as ‘problem-solving’. The other 3 seemed to me to have a focus on ‘celebrating’ diversity. All 6 were treated as the same value to the organization, and the same function.
I can’t speak for private organizations, but I do not believe that a public sector organization should be engaging in internal political activity under the guise of DEI. This is especially the case with the current passions in identity politics. I have noted previously that this isn’t part of the scope of my writing. My focus is entirely on ‘problem-solving’. Neither am I saying that staff in an organization should be forbidden participation in political activity – just not under any organizational auspice and not whilst on duty.
There is no automatic entry
I am old enough to have campaigned for the rights now accepted via legislation. The current identity politics passions seem to me to be insisting on acceptance because they seem to be part of DEI. But the case hasn’t yet been won. This is why I come back to the distinction between what is a legal obligation (compliance with legislation) and what is a moral claim expressed through political action. The distinction is critical in the context of the obligations owed by organizations to their staff.
There may be some delicate matters that must be addressed internally. The one that comes immediately to mind to me is in instances where a person who identifies as having a disability seeks access to adjustments. As an advocate of universal design, I favour universal access to adjustments that are necessary to ensure wellbeing. But I also recognise that this could be a problem area if the claim to disability is entirely self-asserted.
My sense is that risks associated with such a scenario would be greatly reduced if the organization has a clear sense of the function of its DEI team as being legally based. This is not to say this might be the only basis for a response, but it must be grounded in that responsibility.
Conclusion
Forty to fifty years ago workplaces were very different – in terms of what a staff member might expect and seek. But they are not so different in terms of attitudes and practices by executives and managers. Of course, there is some difference – it just doesn’t match the difference between what an employee could expect or seek between then and now.
Organizational leadership is playing catch up still. The demands upon the individuals in these roles have increased to an absurd degree. In fact, in many organizations (private and public), demands on staff members seems to have been growing relentlessly – and this worse for managers and executives.
Some private sector organizations are talking about dismantling DEI teams. Other organizations are just quietly depleting them – as if they are the problem. It may be true that some have become a problem. But they are not The Problem.
That is that we don’t have a theory of DEI. We have notions and sentiments but no theory. I have argued in earlier posts that we don’t have a theory of ERGs and this has been disastrous.
Responsibility for DEI (or whatever we end up calling it) lies with organizational leadership, not with enthusiasts driven by sincere passions. It must be plainly seen in the context of an organization’s legal responsibility to its staff before it is anything else.
It must also be understood as a high skill, high knowledge, function whose practitioners must be specialists. This is a very unpopular message. It means more hard work to upskill and redeployment of staff not suited to the role.
It is possible to ignore this message and stay with the low skill, low knowledge and high BS that dominates now. But that will lead to a well-merited demise as ineffectuality and confusion persist. The people who really need the kind of help and support intended to be provided by effective DEI will continue to miss out.
Here’s a final interesting thought. If you don’t know that within your organization there will be staff members who endure actual physical and psychological distress because of the way they are treated, in contravention of clear legal responsibilities, you really don’t understand what DEI is intended to address.
There are wider conversations to be had about equity and inclusion, but these will be futile and counter-productive if the need for them is misunderstood. The need arises because of our natural psychological reflexes, not moral failings. If we want to achieve our ideals the conversations must be guided by our understanding of our legal accountability, not contention about political and moral beliefs. Taking a political perspective is attractive because it justifies failure, tolerates intellectual laziness and excuses a lack of genuine accountability.