Introduction
I have been listening to This Isn’t Working’s latest show (The Best Workers Aren’t Woke) and I am astonished and dismayed at the degree to which DEI has morphed into a political monster, especially in the USA.
We need to pause, take perspective and rethink what it is we think we are talking about.
I am going to talk about DEI from the perspective I know best – the Australian (especially NSW) public sector. What is relevant to a public sector isn’t necessarily relevant to a business because there are a set of specific factors to be considered.
I went from marching in the streets for gay, Aboriginal and women’s rights in the late 1960s to implementing Commonwealth anti-discrimination policies when I worked in the Commonwealth Employment Service in the mid to late 1980s to my involvement in Disability Inclusion from 2010. It’s been a workplace interest for me for almost 4 decades.
DEI now isn’t what it was envisioned to be. But the issue is far less about the objective than the methods employed in achieving its goals.
The vision was that people are not excluded from equal participation in a community solely because their gender, sexuality, colour, race or disability. But how that ideal might be achieved is little considered beyond force of law, policy or social sanction through activism. Over the decades, though, our understanding of how the vision might be realised has been transformed through more mature thinking and a lot of research.
I want to make it clear that DEI has done a lot of good. It hasn’t failed utterly. It has gotten lost and hasn’t grown up sufficiently since the early heady days of activism. So now it can’t meet the challenges of contemporary organizations and work cultures.
Below I want to reflect on why I think DEI is now in a crisis and what we might do about it. This is a personal perspective, not a thesis.
DEI is an aspiration, not a directive
In the NSW public sector organizations are subject to anti-discrimination legislation and a policy directive – to ensure the profile of the sector’s workforce reflects the community it serves. That makes sense. It is the community’s money. There’s also the 2014 NSW Disability Inclusion Act that creates a positive potential to make the community more accessible and inclusive for people with disability.
A business in NSW is also subject to anti-discrimination legislation. It is also, subject to compliance with law, free to make policies about DEI on its own account. Many do, especially in relation to people with disability. The Australian Disability Network is headquartered in Sydney and supports private and public organizations to work with staff, customers and service users with disabilities to ensure accessibility and inclusion.
Whether the NSW public sector meets its representative policy obligations is a matter of public interest, and this includes the interests of the workforce members. None of this has anything to do with politics. It is about compliance with law and policy. Acting to ensure an organization meets its obligations might be construed as political, but it isn’t. It’s about accountability – legal and moral.
The truth is that meeting the social policy of representing the community in the constitution of the workforce in a safe way is way harder than was anticipated. The NSW government has recently introduced anti-racism training for its workforce. That should be sounding alarm bells. What happened to the inclusive culture the sector has been developing for decades? Is it that fragile? Or was it never as strong, never as well settled, as imagined?
The reason things are far harder than expected is quite simple – reality is way more complex than our idealism. Good ideas and genuinely noble sentiments become bogged down in the grubby reality of human nature and psychology.
How we respond to that reality depends on how we understand what we need to do change individual and collective behaviour.
Misunderstanding method
Our communities have evolved into being increasingly complex, diverse and pluralistic. This is partially because of how our populations have developed, how our collective values have changed and how our public policies are formed. The scope of changes over the past 50 years has been astonishing.
While DEI law and policy compliance can be enforced in a simplistic way, it all runs up against our individual and group psychologies. We are naturally disposed to be biased and discriminatory. There is nothing inherently wrong here. Bias and discrimination make it possible for us to be psychologically healthy. Unfortunately DEI practitioners have been making bias the villain for a long time.
I live on the edge of a city with over 5.5 million people. I have a natural bias toward my in-group of family, friends and allies. I read somewhere that I can have around 140 who are close to me. Regardless of what that figure is agreed to be, I can count around a third of that. And that’s just fine. I want to keep the rest at bay but without negative sentiments. I want to be kind and inclusive but maintain my psycho-social space as it is. I exclude a lot of people so I can feel psychologically okay.
The key idea that is always left out when we think about bias is whether our biases or our acts of discrimination are appropriate. Anti-discrimination legislation is not against discrimination per se, but against inappropriate discrimination. Being discriminating used to be a good thing. It meant ‘discerning’. Now it has become a crime. The result is misunderstanding and confusion.
For example, I am not fond of the company of any number of people. On a personal and cultural level, we don’t have enough in common for me to include them in my friendship group. I have a right to make that choice. I wish them no ill. I do not disrespect them. I just do not resonate with choices they make. It is not that I do not like them as a class of people, just not on a personal social level. We are all like this.
But as a public servant sitting on a selection panel or making a decision of any kind, I do not have the right to bring my personal feelings to bear on my decision-making. I might know this consciously, but I will still find that bias may influencing my decision-making – unless I take intentional steps to mitigate the risk. It is not insidious, just natural and pervasive.
As public servants we have a legal and moral responsibility not to let our decisions and actions be influenced by inappropriate bias. There is an implied moral responsibility as well – because complying with law is something that we value. This supposes that we have an obligation to understand the risks of inappropriate bias and take clear, rational steps to eliminate it from our work practices.
But how we gain compliance when people are not in agreement with the intent of a law or policy and are not interested in being persuaded to agree with, and act in compliance with, such laws or policy. We can’t just police them and enforce compliance through coercion. We have 50 years of evidence that this does not work.
Changing behaviour is hard – in ourselves and in others. Taking a coercive or punitive approach does not work. And yet it is still the method we reflexively turn to. Studies show that employees tend to think of accountability as being about punishment. Few workplace cultures have the psychological safety to encourage staff to own up to mistakes. The Neuroleadership Institute and the Global Leadership Foundation do powerful work on this theme.
The rights campaigns of the late 1960s led to rights being asserted via law and policy. These are solid foundations from which to launch an aspiration, not flip a moral switch.
Winning the ground to launch an aspiration with general societal assent is not job done. It is only permission to do the hard work that comes next. If we understand that laws and policies are permission-givers for aspirations, and not enforcement if there isn’t the desired level compliance, we can begin to see where DEI went so badly wrong.
Human nature and psychology are huge impediments to aspirational change. The realities of politics and government drive this home daily. And yet we revert to a simple, but entirely illusory, moral enforcement way of thinking with such ease.
So how do we make DEI work?
My biggest concern about DEI is how it became self-serving and didn’t hold the interests of the people it originally championed as the primary concern. It didn’t evolve in the way that thinking about leadership and management has, especially in the past 3 decades.
True, leadership and management have been two fields that have been richly supported by funded research. DEI has not, and so far as I can tell, practitioners haven’t asked. They have assumed that they know.
I often go back to Iris Bohnet’s What Works: Gender Equity by Design. It was published in 2016, decades after the issue of women’s equality was no longer a contested matter. Here is a rational, disciplined professional approach to securing that equality. It isn’t that women’s equality has been a complete failure of course. It’s just that the job was done patchily and Bohnet has put an argument for a method that might get the success rate up.
DEI is a deeply complex field that requires insight into psychology – evolutionary, individual, group, organizational – as well as sociology and history. I have probably missed a few fields, but I hope this makes my point.
The transition from activism (idealism, moral argument and passion) to skilled implementation of a ‘contract’ has never been intentionally taken on a collective level.
I saw this when I became Disability ERG lead in 2016 and started to connect with other Disability leads. When you are advocating for something like Disability Inclusion and you hit resistance you have to do things differently if that resistance will not readily yield. The reflex is to go back into activism mode – because that was successful. But all it really did was get attention and a promise of action – though no commitment to it. This can become a cycle that leads to habituated failure or very slow progress.
The promise of action might have been sincere, but it was ‘magical’. That is that it was made with good intent as if that alone was sufficient to trigger change. The ‘how’ of changing organizational and individual behaviour in conformity with agreed ideals is an entirely different matter.
In What Works Bohnet described how an executive board issued a directive to HR to make women’s equality happen – an act of magical thinking. The board would have assumed, wrongly, that HR would know how to do this. HR would have delegated the task to an individual or a team it assumed would know how to do it. Everyone in the decision-making chain engaged in magical thinking – until the last person who maybe hadn’t progressed beyond the activism stage. So, nothing of any substance could happen. Maybe there was change that was triggered by a general spirit of good will – but that would just be a case of harvesting the low hanging fruit. It may have felt good, but it wasn’t repeatable. Misreading harvesting low hanging fruit as evidence of an effective repeatable method is common.
We all know that quote attributed to Einstein – ‘Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity’. But this is what humans do in a sane, but not insightful way. We identify a good and then apply the least amount of cognitive effort to achieve it. We think magically repeatedly even when it doesn’t work. It feels natural. It feels good – and it may not really matter if it doesn’t work. We can feel morally justified in failure.
A friend of mine has a long list of certificates in group work, communication styles etc., a post-graduate degree in Counselling and Psychotherapy and a PhD in Applied Psychology. Why? To help people change their behaviour in ways they want. These days you can get a therapist, a life coach, a counsellor or a mentor to help you change behaviour in desired directions. All these roles require education, training and skill development.
And yet we do not require the same of DEI practitioners – inside HR or as consultants or trainers.
My qualifications are in Social Ecology – which is, according to my former professor, Stuart Hill, “The study & practice of personal, social & ecological sustainability…” (Hill 2011). It’s not enough to do the academic work, there’s personal growth required as well. The same is true, of course, other fields in the ‘human sciences’ – engagement with head and the heart is necessary.
Many years ago, I participated in a week-long residential training program in sales techniques run by an insurance company I was briefly associated with. It was training in manipulation of customers, which I found unethical – so I quit. I later completed a conflict resolution course. In both cases, influencing behaviour required knowledge and skill. My application of my conflict resolution skills was highly effective because I was also aware of the dark art of manipulation and the temptation to abuse a professional relationship. I tried harder to be authentic and ethical.
DEI is about influencing human behaviour to be more inclusive, and more equitable. The good will part of us sees this as a good thing. But our fundamental psychological responses respond in a highly selective way. If you are ‘one of us’ then you are included and are treated with a high degree of equity. If you are not ‘one of us’ neither inclusion nor equity are assured. This is neither good nor bad – it’s how we are.
The ideals which govern contemporary western cultures are humanist and universalist. This is evidenced in United Nations charters on rights. But these are aspirational ideals, not statements of actualities. They are also shared, to varying degrees by religious folks. Transitioning from a ‘tribal’ sense of ‘one of us’ to a universalist sense of ‘all of us’ is not something everyone agrees with – and for those who do, it isn’t at all easy to live up to. The shift from baked-in psychological reflexes to ideals, whether on an individual level or collective level, is neither natural nor assured. It must be intentionally worked at.
Those of us who embrace the ideals of DEI cannot assume that others do so as well. We cannot assume that we have a right to impose them. At best we might assert we have a duty to persuade others of our cause. But persuasion is a fine skill. Here’s a guide from Prof Stuart Hill using a Social Ecology perspective on Keys for enabling transformative change:
• Empathic & responsive listening
• Gaining trust
• Meeting other’s specific needs
• Being ‘critically’ supportive & loving
• Mentoring, modelling, inspiring, challenging
• Acknowledging, celebrating
• Creating supportive structures & processes
This requires self-awareness and a decent degree of psychological maturity. Enabling and facilitating transformative change with integrity and competence is what DEI should be about, but we didn’t imagine how hard that would be.
It is tempting to decide that this is just too hard and that morally satisfying activism is easier – and gives us that that ‘feel good’ hit we enjoy so much for way less effort.
Conclusion
DEI was originally about facilitating transformative change in our communities and workplaces, but it got stuck in the activism phase. It was a noble idea that didn’t comprehend the difference between a non-existent moral switch (a form of magical thinking) and the hard work of helping a culture evolve toward a universalist and humanist ideal. To make matters somewhat worse its supporters assumed that attaining that ideal was non-negotiable and easy – and resistance was evidence of moral and intellectual deficiency.
What has happened might have been predictable decades ago, had we the insight now available now back then. But it wasn’t – for most of us at least. Over the past 3 decades our understanding of human behaviour had grown immensely. But that’s of very little use if we don’t access it and employ it.
In Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results (2025), Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi make a strong argument that DEI now has harmful political and cultural baggage, so we may be better off thinking in terms of fairness in general rather than in terms of ‘disadvantaged’ groups. Fairness may be politically neutral (for now) but it is still vulnerable to the ‘people like us’ problem. The book’s appeal for me is in the words ‘data’ and ‘design’ – intentional and informed rather than activist guesswork.
In 2018 I encountered Kate Nash, founder and CEO of PurpleSpace. She gave a keynote address at a conference and introduced me to the idea of Networkology. An ERG could be seen as engaging in deliberate, informed and strategic ways to achieve Disability Inclusion goals for staff with disability? This was the final stage of my transition out of the activism stage and into being a professional change agent. It was radically transformative. I went from being a Disability ERG lead struggling to find the time to perform in that role to being given 3 days a week. When I became professional in my approach, I delivered positive change outcomes and the organization responded by making my Disability ERG lead role part of my ‘real job’.
I am not a great fan of perpetuating the idea of identified disadvantaged groups that were an essential part of the 1960s rights assertion movements. Continuing to rely on them now muddles settled campaigns with current forms of activism that have a strong, if not excessive, focus on gender and sex identity that is irrelevant to the workplace, save in a few very limited areas.
Disability remains pertinent because it has a concrete dimension. Disability Inclusion is supported by serious professional bodies like the Australian Disability Network and PurpleSpace.
We are increasingly moving into a more general need for a cultural change that makes workplaces kinder and fairer. The ‘disadvantaged’ groups are far less disadvantaged as a whole, but individual members might be subject to ongoing discrimination in one workplace setting, but not in others.
However, this kind of change is the hardest of all – because it requires personal assent and commitment. It was part of the original ideal that has not been fully realised. Those most resistant to common goodwill are the hardest to persuade and it’s easy to see this resistance as moral failing. It is not. It’s just not a priority for everyone – and that is okay. We are still free to choose how we respond to propositions that seek to engage our sense of fairness and justice. We cannot deny others the right to disagree.
We have work to do, but it must be done competently. We may not exempt ourselves from the obligation to engage in respectful and consensual persuasion just because we imagine the moral power of our cause is beyond dispute. But we see such exemptions made everywhere.
We cannot demand respect by being disrespectful. We cannot celebrate diversity by outlawing diversity we do not like. We cannot champion inclusion by excluding those who disagree with us. We cannot celebrate equality by denying others their voice.
I aspire to making the transition from ‘one of us’ to ‘all of us’, but it’s hard to sustain. ‘All of us’ was what we marched for in the 1960s. It was, and remains, a high and fine ideal.