Unless We Make Different Choices, the "Future of DEI" Will Be Just As Ineffective.
Lily Zheng from Fixing Fairness
Unless We Make Different Choices, the "Future of DEI" Will Be Just As Ineffective.We got to this point because practitioners, executives, and advocates chose the path of least resistance. Can we choose bette
”Did DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) get it wrong?”
I’ve been seeing more posts and reports floating around on this topic over the past few weeks. I understand where it’s coming from — and at the same time, I’m somewhat sick of post-mortems. This is coming from me, someone who wrote three books spanning a pre-mortem, a present-mortem, and as of this January a post-mortem on this very industry! Look, we know how and why things went wrong. We’re not lacking for analysis in this moment. Too many of these analyses, including many of my own past ones, exist in the passive voice. “DEI became this.” “DEI was diluted by that.” Um, hello! DEI can’t go to the store and buy a snack. Neither the acronym nor the work it represents are people. And yet, it’s the people involved in this work — the practitioners, the executives, the upset employees, the customers — that made choices and behaved in ways that collectively brought this industry to a place of low impact and high risk. If we want to change this outcome for future iterations of this work, to lessen our risk and broaden our impact, we have to change the choices that these same people make. That’s what we need to be focusing on as we look forward, instead of navel-gazing or admiring yesterday’s problems. The Three Choices We Need to ChangeThe field was defined by three kinds of choices that we fell into together as an industry and arguably, as a society. If we can understand why we made these choices, we can choose differently.
Practitioners were enticed by the notion of a “special project” reporting to the C-Suite, and a way out of the “inclusion work reports to HR” dead-end. Executives liked how this signaled their commitment without any real cost beyond showing up and saying supportive words. Advocates were wowed by this signal, thinking, “if diversity, equity, and inclusion gets its own dedicated role, then this must show that we really care.” But with no connection to any of the functional areas of the business and no cross-functional authority, inclusion work became ornamental almost immediately. Ironically, the existence of an inclusion “function” may have enabled other executives to take even less responsibility for making their own units fair and inclusive.
Practitioners marketed and delivered individual-focused awareness and skill-building trainings (i.e., implicit bias training) as the core of change efforts, the exact interventions that decades of research shows don’t work. Executives liked how this signaled their commitment without any real cost beyond showing up and saying supportive words. Advocates saw this kind of individual-focused work — often flashy and public-facing (remember when Starbucks closed all its stores for an afternoon to hold a bias training?) as exactly that signal of support. The incentives, standard operating procedures, policies, and norms driving harmful behavior stood untouched, even while those inhabiting these systems learned about behaviors they would never actually use. As reputation management tools, individual-focused interventions were great. As actual changemaking tools, they were useless.
Practitioners rode high on a wave of pro-DEI sentiment to hand-wave engaging seriously with skeptics, even if those skeptics were gatekeepers of change. Executives took the path of least resistance, realizing that it was simpler to nod along so long as it didn’t require actual change to long-term decision-making. Advocates loved being talked directly to, especially when it felt like momentum was on our side. It felt, for a few short years, like we could strong-arm, shame, and pressure anti-DEI sentiment out of existence. That assumption couldn’t have been more harmful. When the cultural moment passed, inclusion work was left with a burned-out coalition with little formal authority, simmering resentment from members of the workforce who felt left shamed or left behind by inclusion work, and apathetic executives with shinier goals to chase. Choosing To Do DifferentlyNot every practitioner made these choices. Not every leader made these choices. But enough did that the work became defined by siloed, performative, and shallow work that failed to either fix the problems it was supposed to fix or build the coalitions it was supposed to build. Now, everything rests on practitioners and leaders alike making different choices. We can choose to integrate this work into business as usual, translating fairness and inclusion into expections of “good leadership” for every business function. For better or worse, the time of the Chief Diversity Officer may be over. Either existing executives are incentivized and held accountable to becoming effective leaders of effective business units, or the work fails. High integration, high accountability. We can choose to change environments rather than change people, improving “business as usual” to solve shared problems and work better for all. This is not only my approach in Fixing Fairness and with the FAIR Framework, but the one advised by my colleagues Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow in How Equality Wins, and Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi in Make Work Fair. We can choose to build connection across difference, giving people ways to be part of the solution rather than only indicting them as part of the problem. I find this to be one of the most powerful tools against backlash. Rather than antagonistically targeting “allies” or “opponents,” we can reach the collective with the vision of co-designing better workplaces for everyone. These are the choices we have to be making if we care about the future of what we used to call DEI. There’s much more to say about how we incentivize those choices at scale, but that talk has to be in service of action. We can’t wait for “the field” or “the work” to magically change on its own. We have to be that change, to choose different, to choose better, right now.
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© 2026 Lily Zheng
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