Welcome to the Reconstructing Inclusion Podcast!
In this podcast episode, I argued that DEI, as we’ve come to practice it, may need to die. Not the principles. Not the heart of the work. But the letters themselves, D, E, and I, have become hollow symbols in a war of words that serves no one.
I haven’t given up. Far from it. I’ve been on the road, working with companies globally, and I’m seeing something unexpected emerge from the wreckage: genuine traction, particularly outside the United States. And the renewed momentum looks different from what came before. It’s less about identity categories and representation metrics, more about humanity and systems change. Yes, what’s it has always been about but not consistently practiced as such.
What makes this conversation particularly important is the willingness to interrogate our own field. I opened with a story about my six-year-old son telling me “this is just a dream, Daddy” a moment that connected to ancient Taoist philosophy and forced me to consider how practitioners in this space have been co-creating the very conditions we now face. It’s a level of self-reflection rarely seen in DEI discourse, where most energy goes toward defending positions rather than examining whether those positions remain useful.
The Dream We’ve Been Co-Creating
My opening story about my son sets the philosophical tone for everything that follows. At bedtime, my six-year-old Kai was restless, unable to settle down. After I yelled (as parents sometimes do), he looked me in the face and said something profound: “Daddy, you know, this is just a dream.”
“My mind immediately went to the philosophers who used that metaphor, Zhuangzi, the Daoist philosopher who famously asked, was it a butterfly dreaming it was Zhuang Zhou, or was it Zhuang Zhou dreaming about a butterfly? The point being that it’s sometimes hard for us to distinguish what we’re creating and what world we’re creating and the dream we’re living in.” [00:03:00]
In my work facilitating crucial conversations about organizational culture, I’ve seen how powerful it can be when leaders recognize their role in co-creating the very problems they’re trying to solve. My willingness to apply this lens to DEI itself, to suggest that we practitioners have been dreaming a particular dream and calling it reality, cuts through the defensiveness that typically surrounds this work. The butterfly-dreaming-of-being-human metaphor isn’t just philosophical flourish; it’s an invitation to see how our constructs shape what becomes possible.
The philosophical grounding matters because it reframes the entire debate. We’re not just talking about tactics or messaging. We’re questioning whether the fundamental categories we’ve been using (diversity, equity, inclusion as separate concepts organized primarily around racialization, gender, and sexuality) reflect reality or construct it.
“DEI, as many have framed it, practice it, has created the likelihood of it becoming untenable as a combination of letters theoretically and pragmatically. We might have driven it into being obsolete, not the principle, not the foundation of what this work is, not what we want to do at the heart of it.” [00:05:00]
I’ve had countless conversations with executives who’ve pulled back from DEI initiatives. What they’re rejecting isn’t the principle that people should thrive at work. They’re rejecting a particular package deal, one that felt prescriptive, divisive, and disconnected from their organization’s actual challenges. My framework helps explain why good intentions produced such fierce backlash: we confused the map with the territory, the letters with the essence.
Why DEI (The Letters) Should Die
My most provocative argument of late came from a semi-formal debate I had with my colleague Roianne Nedd at Oliver Wyman on the proposition “DEI Should Die?” Taking the affirmative position, I wasn’t arguing against inclusion principles. That would be absurd for someone whose company is literally called Inclusion Wins. Instead, I was making a more subtle point about symbols, meaning, and transformation.
“D, E, and I are not the essence. The essence has been stuffed into these three letters, and it’s like writing the word pizza on paper and handing it to you. That’s not pizza. You can’t ingest that. You can’t get the nutrients or deliciousness from it. I think we’ve gotten there with DEI.” [00:06:00]
The metaphor crystallizes what I’ve been observing. We’ve been arguing about what’s written on the paper while everyone goes hungry. The anti-DEI crowd has something to rally against; the pro-DEI crowd has something to defend. But nobody’s actually eating. Both sides have a stake in keeping the letters alive. For opponents, it provides a brand to both frame as preferred and a boogeyman to attack; for supporters, it represents their identity and passion. Meanwhile, the actual work of creating conditions where people can thrive gets lost in symbolic warfare.
“The people that are against DEI are using DEI as something contrary to what I think most people would like to see in the world. Those who are pro-DEI are pushing back on them, trying to tell them no, DEI is good. They’re saying no, DEI is bad, it needs to die. But the reality is nobody wants it to die. If it dies for the anti-DEI folks, they lose their brand. If it dies for the so-called DEI folks, they lose what they think is their passion, but their passion is not that.” [00:08:00]
In facilitating stakeholder dialogues, I’ve witnessed exactly what I’m describing. Both sides perform for their base rather than searching for common ground. My observation that “people don’t read broadly, they don’t read things that challenge their narrative” speaks to a deeper problem in how we engage with complex ideas. We’ve optimized for confirmation rather than discovery, for tribal loyalty rather than truth-seeking.
What I offer instead is a reconceptualization: inclusion defined as “any action that creates the conditions for people to thrive in organizations to create extraordinary value.” My approach moves us from identity-based advocacy to systems thinking, from zero-sum representation battles to mutual flourishing. The shift I have been proposing presciently for several years is increasingly critical each day.
Beyond ROI: Return on Intangibles and Social Capital
One of my most compelling arguments addresses the perennial demand to prove DEI’s financial value. Rather than fighting on that terrain, I reframe what we should be measuring.
“What I’m talking about could be understood as social capital. If social capital is not present, if those networks aren’t robust, and there’s no trust and reciprocity, I don’t care how much financial capital you generate. At some point there’s going to be some type of downswing.” [00:12:00]
In my experience working with organizations as they implement AI and automation strategies, I’ve seen leaders communicate in ways that are, as I put it, “absolutely dehumanizing, inhuman, unhelpful.” They tell employees that machines will replace them, framing it as transparency or preparation. But what it actually does is erode the social capital that makes organizations resilient during transformation.
“If social capital isn’t present, the floors of businesses are hollow and the ceilings are capped. The only change, call it growth if you must, is downward. It will erode relatively rapidly to the left of zero on a number line. I believe negative returns will come from a lack of social capital.” [00:14:00]
I’ve watched exactly what I’m describing play out in real time. Companies with strong technical capabilities but weak relational infrastructure struggle to execute even straightforward changes. Trust, reciprocity, and the willingness to extend effort beyond the transactional minimum aren’t just soft skills peripheral to business outcomes. They are the infrastructure on which everything else depends.
I reference Dave Ulrich’s concept of “return on intangibles” as a better frame than traditional ROI. The shift matters because it acknowledges that what makes organizations work (the networks, the knowledge sharing, the collaborative problem-solving) isn’t easily reduced to direct financial causation. But these intangibles absolutely affect financial performance, just through longer causal chains than simple cost-benefit analyses capture.
Five Shifts Defining the Future of Inclusion Work
My vision for the future centers on five fundamental shifts, which I present not as aspirational ideas but as emerging realities I’m already seeing in my global work.
Shift 1: Moving Beyond Old Paradigms
“We’re gonna move beyond the old patterns and paradigms. Beliefs are going to have to shift. The paradigms we’ve adhered to, the patterns we’ve focused on, which were really about social justice, need to evolve. Equity has always been at the heart of this work, but it became equity for some, focused on systems of inequality and historically marginalized groups.” [00:16:00]
In my facilitation work, I’ve noticed how focusing exclusively on specific identity groups (even with good intentions) can inadvertently reinforce the very divisions we’re trying to transcend. I’m not saying we ignore disparities or stop addressing injustice. I’m saying that organizing exclusively around categories like racialization, gender, and sexuality limits our ability to build the coalitions necessary for systemic change.
When I was inside an organization as an executive, I spent considerable time ensuring ERGs weren’t focused on a single identity. If they were, they needed significant representation from people who didn’t necessarily possess that identity but were firmly engaged in the work. They needed to join other ERGs to understand those perspectives and see that there’s more commonality than the differences we delineate.
Shift 2: Cultural Intelligence as Foundation
“Cultural intelligence is gonna be a foundation. The emerging research coming out around how identity shapes the way we interact about time, orientation, power (all through the lens of CQ) shows tremendous potential. It’s a set of skills that every single person at every single level can utilize for better ways of engaging each other.” [00:19:00]
I’ve worked with the Cultural Intelligence Center and David Livermore, one of its founders, for a long time. The shift toward learnable capabilities rather than fixed identity categories represents a significant evolution. Cultural Intelligence offers a framework that applies universally while honoring particular experiences. It gives everyone a path toward growth rather than sorting people into oppressor and oppressed categories.
CQ has always been a foundation of our work as part of the Emergent Inclusion Framework. But it needs to be more of a foundation, a foundational part of the approach that organizations and you take to inclusion.
Shift 3: Deeper Understanding of Care
“When we care for the so-called other to help them fulfill their highest potential, that’s how we fulfill our own highest potential. We need openness, willingness to be influenced by the so-called other. We need to create safety. Real safety means you have agency, you have autonomy.” [00:20:00]
I find myself needing to articulate what I mean by care. When I talk about care, it’s not about touchy-feely care. It’s really about interdependence. Understanding that we’re intrinsically connected: when we don’t learn to care for each other, we miss the opportunity for everyday mattering to occur.
“Real safety means you have agency, you have autonomy. You can throw something out there or push back without negative consequences. It means people feel noticed, they feel affirmed, they feel needed. They feel like they matter. They feel like what they say matters and that people will act on it unambiguously, even if it’s not the final thing.” [00:21:00]
Safety comes from seeing that happen over and over again. And of course, there’s trust: the trust that occurs when people aren’t around each other. Not only when they’re in an exchange with each other, but when they’re apart, representing each other’s interests when the stakes are high.
Shift 4: Sense-Making as Organizational Superpower
“People in leadership roles feel like they’re decision makers. They should be the chief sense makers. How do you engage people to make sense of something before the action is taken? Because oftentimes the decision makers are not the action takers.” [00:22:00]
I’ve learned a lot about sense-making over the past few years, particularly from my colleague, Geoff Marlow. Geoff talks about the distinction between action-taking and decision-making. A lot of people in leadership roles feel like they’re decision makers. They should be the chief sense makers, in my opinion.
When I was inside a company (and I’ve seen it as a consultant as well), the decision makers make the decisions, the action takers put them into practice, and in many cases the so-called action takers are like, “Man, that was stupid. I’ll just do it because they said.” That’s disempowering. That doesn’t signal that people matter; it just means that they’re part of a machine and they semi-obediently feed it out of necessity. AI can do that, but a human makes sense of things. You can’t outsource that to AI.
As Peter Drucker said (and I quote constantly), “Leadership is the capacity of a human community to shape its future.” Leadership is largely about sense-making. Decision-making is fundamentally about sense-making with the folks impacted by the decisions or those who will take the actions forward.
Shift 5: Networks and Social Capital
“The future of DEI is about networks. The connections we’re making are now insufficient. The more information we have, the more connection we need with other people. If we’re not transferring knowledge and information with care, bouncing things off each other, we lose our cognitive capacity.” [00:24:00]
At the LEAD Network 2025 Conference in Milan, from which I just returned, many people discussed diverse teams, often focusing on visible identity, gender, racialization, and sexuality. But what I’m talking about (and what some people did discuss) was cognitive diversity.
I heard amazing stories about people who moved from Turkey to Italy to the Nordics, from the Nordics to the UK and Germany. These journeys left them with an experience of seeing the world that someone in the US might have from moving from the South to Chicago, from Chicago to Kansas City, from Kansas City to the Pacific Northwest.
We need to understand all these experiences people have. Sometimes they’re not gonna come out explicitly. We need to measure the distinctions we all have, these combinations, this multidimensionality. You can call it intersectionality if you may. We need to measure it, and that’s what my colleagues at Atlas at Cultural Infusion do, which is also part of the Emergent Inclusion Framework.
Our diversity of cognition comes from our experiences that come from where we’ve been, what we’ve done, how we’ve done it, and who we’ve interacted with in the process. It’s never a single thing. Diversity in networks and expertise and language and all those dynamics bring new ways of thinking, seeing, being, and doing in organizational life. They’re gonna become more important than ever before.
Key Takeaways
DEI as currently practiced has become obsolete, but the principles must evolve, not disappear. The letters have become symbols in a culture war rather than useful categories for creating thriving workplaces. We need to move beyond defending or attacking “DEI” toward focusing on what actually creates conditions for human flourishing in organizations.
Social capital (trust and reciprocity across differences) is more critical than financial capital alone. Without robust networks and genuine care, organizations become hollow regardless of their technical or financial resources. The dehumanizing rhetoric around AI replacing workers actively erodes the social capital that makes transformation possible.
The future requires five fundamental shifts: moving beyond identity-category-based organizing toward centering humanity; building cultural intelligence as a universal skillset; deepening understanding of care, openness, safety, and trust; developing sense-making capabilities throughout organizations; and investing in diverse networks and social capital.
Real safety means agency and mattering, not just belonging. Psychological safety isn’t about everyone getting along comfortably. It’s about people having genuine autonomy, being able to push back without negative consequences, and seeing their input actually influence decisions and actions.
Sense-making cannot be outsourced to AI. While technology can help analyze data and generate options, the deeply human work of making collective sense of complex challenges before taking action requires human-to-human engagement that artificial intelligence cannot replicate.
Identity still matters, but organizing exclusively around fixed identity categories has reached its limits. The goal isn’t to become “colorblind” or ignore real disparities, but to build solidarity across different groups and address the systems that create conditions for thriving rather than just treating symptoms through representation metrics.
Resources:
Subscribe to Geoff Marlow on Substack
Cultural Intelligence Center - Since 2004, has helped leaders and teams confidently navigate cultural complexity, leading to stronger collaboration, sharper innovation, and more impactful leadership.
Atlas at Cultural Infusion - delivers world-first missing data, and empowers teams with an innovative, engaging experience.
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