About twenty years ago, I picked up one of my spiritual teachers from the Atlanta airport. On the drive, I told him about my business partners. We were in a conflict, we couldn’t get on the same page, and we were heading toward a split. I finished my rant about as unreflectively as a person can and waited for his guidance.

He said, “It is difficult for people to be honest.”

I nodded. I was happy he saw things my way. A month or three later, once the chatter in my head quieted down, I had an epiphany. He wasn’t talking about my business partners. He was talking about me.

I’m opening with that story because it’s the lens for this whole episode. At the end of August, I wrote an article about Dr. Jason Arday, the youngest black professor ever appointed at the University of Cambridge. This summer, he resigned amid plagiarism allegations and questions about claims in his biography. Days later, he died. He was 41.

Here’s the thing I want to say up front. My friend and colleague David Livermore calls me a “friendly DEI critic,” and I know some of what follows risks sounding insensitive to racial justice. It isn’t. It’s me saying what occurs to me as honest.

This conversation matters because a story like this gets turned into a spectacle fast. The more useful question is what each of us contributed and continues to contribute. In this episode, I walk through four ideas: the habit of looking in the mirror first, the difference between a choir and a mirror holder, what happens when someone feels they matter too much, and why two things can be true at the same time.

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The Habit of Looking in the Mirror First

That car ride in Atlanta changed how I handle conflict. It took a couple of few months of cognitive dissonance, but the lesson finally moved past my head and into my heart.

He wasn’t helping me be right about them. It took a couple of months of cognitive dissonance, but his teaching finally went past my cognition and into my heart. I hadn’t been honest with myself about my own contribution to the situation. [00:02:00]

What stood out to me, looking back, is how comfortable I was before that moment. I wanted a witness to my side of the story, not a challenge to it. Eventually I reached out to my former partners and told them I regretted how I’d behaved in our relationship. We remain dear friends and colleagues to this day.

That experience, and the mentors who followed, gave me a practice I still lean on.

I’ve been fortunate to have that teacher and many other mentors who’ve helped me build a habit, a habit to look in the mirror and face my cause in the matter before I point fingers or words at someone who isn’t standing in front of me. [00:03:00]

Look, this is not about self-blame. It’s about agency. I have influence over what I say, what I do, and mostly what I leave unsaid. When I forget that, I end up pointing fingers at people who aren’t even in the room.

A Choir Is Not a Mirror Holder

My father was a mortician, a funeral director, and he lived by integrity, dignity, and compassion. In hard times, he kept the truth front and center for my brother and me. I never regretted facing reality, even when it was difficult. That upbringing left me with a line I keep coming back to.

Enlightenment begins with the acceptance of all realities. [00:05:00]

Now, here’s what I think was missing for Dr. Arday. He didn’t seem to have many people like my dad in his life, if any. What he had was a large chorus in his corner, rooting for him and lifting his hero’s journey as an inspiration to people who have been marginalized across many identities.

That support was real. I don’t dismiss it. What wasn’t front and center was a mirror holder, someone who helps you see your cause in the matter, your agency and what advances your growth and what hinders it. [00:07:00]

I want to be careful about the word integrity here, because people often hear the moral kind. That’s not what I mean.

I mean integrity as integration. Can you see yourself clearly, your thoughts, your actions, and can you see if they cohere? A mirror holder checks that those pieces don’t scatter out of convenience to keep a flattering narrative alive. [00:07:00]

A choir makes you feel good. A mirror holder helps you grow. You need both, but when the choir is all you have, the narrative can start to run the person instead of the other way around.

When Mattering Becomes Too Much

Everyone needs to matter. That’s the thread running through my work. But I’ve been wondering (and researching) whether it’s possible to matter too much.

Jason Arday wanted to matter as we all do. We all need to matter, and he did. He mattered enormously. My question is whether he came to feel he mattered too much. [00:09:00]

Cambridge gave him one of the rarest opportunities in British (perhaps global) academia, and the institution stood to gain from his rise too. He was reaching to grow into a role that was bigger than what he’d been prepared for. That pressure comes with mattering.

I leaned on research from Gordon Flett, Taryn Nepon, and Xena Scott, who have studied what happens to people who feel for a long time that they don’t matter. It isn’t benign. What I’m exploring goes a step beyond their work, and I want to be clear that this extension is mine, not their finding.

What happens when someone who has long felt unseen is suddenly expected to matter more than they believe they could deliver? The gap between the values others assign you and the value you feel able to deliver may be its own kind of boulder, its own kind of weight. [00:10:00]

I’m offering this as a lens, not a diagnosis. I didn’t know Jason Arday. But I think the gap between how much others say you matter and how much you feel you can deliver deserves a name, and I’ll be writing more about it in an upcoming article on anti-mattering.

Both Things Can Be True

Facing reality means facing all of it. Part of the scrutiny Arday received was not in good faith. The blog post that set off this summer’s firestorm was written by Nathan Cofnas, a scholar known for arguing that Black people are genetically predisposed to lower intelligence. When John McWhorter questioned Cofnas about his intentions on The Glenn Loury Show, the answer was weak at best.

Arday’s family said he endured a sustained campaign of abuse and misinformation, and I believe them. Anyone who says race had nothing to do with how hard this came at him, they aren’t facing reality either, and both things can be true. [00:12:00]

And honestly, that cuts the other way too. Someone in his corner might have reminded him of what Billie Jean King said: “Pressure is a privilege.”

The institutions that elevated him noticed his potential, and they said so loudly. They didn’t notice his limitations, and they didn’t value him enough to take his critics’ substantive points seriously and help him address them. [00:13:00]

That help didn’t need to be visible. It could have been a path that appears when you need it and disappears once you’re through. It was in Cambridge’s interest to do exactly that, but it would have meant admitting the appointment was premature.

So where does that leave us? Back in that car in Atlanta.

It’s easy to point at Arday. Harder is for the institution that hired him, the chorus that cheered him, the critics who hounded him, and those of us commenting now to ask, “What was my cause in the matter?” [00:15:00]

I thought my teacher meant the other guys. He meant me. I’d say the same thing here.

One more thing. If you plan to use my reflections to prop up a weak argument, please don’t. Jason Arday’s death is not a spectacle. Much of what led here, the missing mirror holders, the uncritical support, the cruelty, was preventable, and we can all own that truth.

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Key Takeaways

1. Look in the mirror before you point. Before assigning blame, ask what your own contribution was. You have agency over what you say, what you do, and what you leave unsaid.

2. Build a team of mirror holders, not just a choir. Support feels good, but growth also needs someone who will help you see your part honestly. Seek out both.

3. Integrity means integration. Can you see your thoughts and actions clearly, and do they cohere? Guard against flattering narratives that scatter those pieces for convenience.

4. Mattering can be too heavy. The gap between the value others assign you and the value you feel able to deliver can become its own weight. Leaders and institutions should watch for it in the people they elevate.

5. Accept all realities. Bigotry and personal accountability can both be present in the same story. Holding both is what lets people and systems get stronger under stress.

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Resources:

• The Anti-Mattering Scale Versus the General Mattering Scale in Pathological Narcissism by Gordon Flett, Taryn Nepon, and Xena Scott

• Debating a Race Realist on IQ | The Glenn Show: the episode where Glenn Loury and John McWhorter discussed Nathan Cofnas’ role in Arday’s story.

If this episode stirred anything in you, reach out to someone. I hope it was helpful.

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The Mattering and Performance Audit is a diagnostic tool that surfaces where trust, contribution, and performance are cracking before the breakdown shows up in engagement scores or exit interviews. In three to four weeks, you get a leadership readout with prioritized early actions.

This is a performance diagnostic, not a program or initiative. It turns out the conditions that make people matter are the same conditions that build organizational performance.

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I wrote a book

Liam, a composite of clients I have worked with, is a quantitative superstar at a financial services firm where he has worked for five years. At least once a quarter, he brings forward an idea or a sharply framed argument that catches senior management’s attention and often ends up shaping strategy.

His ideas used to carry brushstrokes of insight from colleagues across his global organization and across disciplines. Liam talked with people constantly, and it showed.

Then his firm, like many, encouraged employees to push the limits of their AI use. Liam went full throttle. Priding himself on rigor, he instructed his AI tools and agents to be hard on him: no sycophancy, no easy consensus, respond the way top engineers, quants, and traders would. His ideas got sharper, and a few more of them.

Yet the pushback got worse. Colleagues were more cautious, less enthusiastic, sometimes indifferent. Frustrated, he raised it with his manager, who referred him to me.

I had plenty of advice ready. Then, in a flash of metacognitive brilliance, I realized my advice was exactly what his AI would have given him: fast, confident, and blind to what was actually happening—and wrong. So instead of prescribing, we built theories together.

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AI makes answers cheap. Co-authorship becomes scarce.

Liam cited efficiency as a reason he talked with colleagues less. Why endure the messiness of human inquiry when a tool can stress-test your analysis in seconds? The tools are convincing. Randazzo et al. (2025) describe GenAI as a “power persuader.” In their study of BCG consultants, the more professionals fact-checked or pushed back on an AI’s analysis, the more intensely the AI tried to persuade them, a pattern the authors call “persuasion bombing.” Liam had built himself a tireless sparring partner. Yet after a few intellectual rounds in the ring, it kept telling him he was right.

What he didn’t account for was the downstream friction.

Nobel Laureate and AI pioneer Herbert Simon warned that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Liam used to earn his colleagues’ attention by asking for their input. Now he arrived with freight cars of polished analysis from his silicon-based colleagues, and the path to agreement grew longer, not shorter.

Before, colleagues recognized their own fingerprints on his ideas. They felt some sense of co-authorship. Now they were asked to evaluate work they had no part in creating. Pushback is often what people do when they weren’t part of building something. Liam was getting resistance where he used to get contribution.

The hidden cost: AI triggers anti-mattering

Mattering has been studied for more than 40 years, yet it is far less known in organizations than belonging. Isaac Prilleltensky, a pioneer in the field, described it as feeling valued and adding value. One of its oldest signals is simple: being depended on.

Liam had stopped depending on his colleagues. Without intending to, he told them their thinking was optional. Psychologist Gordon Flett calls what follows anti-mattering: the sense that you are insignificant to others. It shows up as withdrawal, thinner collaboration, and less shared learning.

The signal travels in both directions. In a Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon survey, knowledge workers who trusted AI more to do a task applied less critical thinking to it, while those more confident in their own abilities applied more. People who start to believe their thinking is less valuable may simply stop offering it.

AI doesn’t cause anti-mattering on its own. People choose how it is used. That is why the remedy is human.

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Care is the lever

Many leaders treat care as a nice-to-have: an emotional perk rather than a business essential. That misreads and flattens what care is and how it works.

In The Thin Book of Trust, Charles Feltman describes care as the belief that someone holds your interests in mind and wants good for you. People may trust your competence and reliability, but if they believe you look out only for yourself, they limit their trust to specific transactions. Care is judged by the receiver, not declared by the giver. Liam never intended indifference. But when he stopped asking and started presenting, colleagues could reasonably conclude he valued the machines’ input over theirs.

Georg von Krogh, drawing on the philosopher Milton Mayeroff, shows why this matters for performance. He calls knowledge creation a “fragile process fraught with uncertainty and conflict of interest.” In high-care organizations, people give their knowledge freely. In low-care organizations, they hoard it, and exchange becomes quid pro quo. Tacit knowledge, the kind LLMs cannot capture, moves through caring relationships or not at all.

What care produces: sense-making that gets stronger under stress

Karl Weick, who studied how groups make sense of crises, argued that resilience depends on respectful interaction: trusting others’ observations while respecting your own enough to voice them. Unexamined AI use threatens that balance. When the machine’s answer is fluent and confident, and a colleague presents it as their own, only those who believe their perspective matters will offer a different one.

LLMs will keep getting better at sounding intuitive and judicious. But intuition grounded in experience, perception rooted in being present, and judgment that someone is accountable for are not outputs. They demonstrate skin-in-the-game. They are human capacities. They atrophy or grow depending on whether organizations create the conditions for people to use them.

What your organization can do

Ikujiro Nonaka and his colleagues call those conditions ba: shared spaces, physical, virtual, or mental, where knowledge is created.

AI dominates one kind of ba and is absent from the one where care begins. Three practices follow.

Bring people in before the machine polishes. Share rough ideas with colleagues first, then use AI to stress-test what you built together. Leaders presenting AI analysis should frame it as input, invite challenge before stating their view, and speak last.

Protect ‘originating ba’. As AI removes routine interactions, deliberately keep the ones that build relationships and judgment: apprenticeship and mentorship, working through problems together, debriefs after hard moments.

Make contribution visible. Name who shaped the work, especially where human judgment improved on the machine’s. It tells people they are depended on.

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The scarcest resource

Liam’s problem was never the quality of his ideas. It was that he had stopped actively building them with others.

So that is where Liam and I started. He now brings rough ideas to a few colleagues, in person, before any AI sees them. They question, sketch, and shape the idea together, and only then does he take it to the machine to stress-test. It’s early days, but the work is being made together again.

The scarcest resource in the AI enterprise isn’t compute. It is people who believe their perspective is worth offering, and the relationships that make offering it feel safe and worthwhile. Leaders can’t buy that. They can only create it through care.

Belonging gets you in. Mattering keeps you relevant. As machines do more of the work, the same is true for organizations: the ones that stay relevant will be those whose people still believe their thinking counts, feel valued, and consistently add value.

I’ve known Joe Gerstandt for a long time. We’ve been going back and forth on the same questions for years about what diversity and inclusion work is actually for. So when I sat down with him for this episode, I wasn’t expecting a tidy conversation. I’ve never looked for one with him, either.

Joe has been doing this work for about 25 years. He started his own practice 19 years ago after leading workforce diversity efforts inside a regional healthcare system. He’s worked with Fortune 500 companies and small nonprofits and everything in between, he served four years in the Marine Corps, and he co-authored Social Gravity: Harnessing the Natural Laws of Relationships. None of that is really why I wanted him on.

I wanted him on because Joe has never been interested in performing certainty. He’s one of the few people in this field who will tell you, plainly, what he doesn’t know. And he knows A LOT!

That’s what this conversation is. Joe told me before we hit record that DEI was never big enough to begin with, and we spent the rest of our time together pulling that notion apart. We talked about why the field settled for small wins instead of big vision. We talked about how we lost control of our own language and narrative and let other people (i.e., even novice and/or naive practitioners) write the story of what this work is.

We talked about the corporate structures and the professions- management and HR- that DEI was always quietly trying to correct for, and never got credit for correcting, and may not have “corrected” much. We got into AI and what it means to keep humans in the loop instead of the other way around. And we landed on identity, real identity change, as the thing underneath all sustainable behavior change.

If you’ve been doing this work for a while and you’re exhausted by the current state (and maybe before now), this conversation is for you. If you’re new to it and wondering what the last two decades actually taught us, this is for you too. Joe doesn’t hand you a neat framework at the end. He delivers something better: an honest accounting of what didn’t work and where the real opportunity still is.

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DEI Was Never Big Enough

Joe didn’t hedge on this one. When I asked him what he meant by “never big enough,” he traced it back to something he watched happen across an entire field, not just one organization.

I think that we were fighting for, I think, small improvements in a lot of small places. [00:05:00]

He pointed to the year after George Floyd died as the clearest example. Organizations suddenly had more energy and budget behind this work than they’d ever had, and the field didn’t know what to do with it, because it had spent decades asking for scraps.

We had been so long fighting for small improvements, a little bit more budget, one more employee resource group. We’d been fighting for these little improvements. We didn’t even know how to think or act big or dream big. [00:05:00]

I felt that one. We had a moment where the door was open wider than it had ever been, and a lot of us walked through it with the same small asks we’d always made. Joe’s point isn’t that the work lacked value. It lacked scale, ambition, and a vision big enough to match what organizations actually needed. The door became a window, the window became a porthole, the porthole a pinhole.

For Joe, that vision (or lack thereof) is about the workplace itself.

It is making a workplace that is more human-centric and human-informed. I don’t really see or hear a strong voice for human beings in the corporate workspace today. [00:06:00]

Not a diversity voice, not an inclusion voice. A voice for human beings, full stop. Joe’s argument is that no function in most organizations holds that role, not HR, not DEI as it was built, nobody. If that’s true, and I think it is, then the opportunity in front of this field isn’t smaller than it used to be. It’s bigger.

We Lost the Narrative

Joe was the most direct here, and I think the most helpful. I asked him what the flaws in the field were or continue to be, not the ones assigned to us from outside via non-practitioners, but the ones we could own.

I didn’t feel like we were taking good care of the language. I didn’t feel like we were doing a good job of clearly and concisely explaining what we mean when we talk about diversity, what we mean when we talk about inclusion, what we mean when we talk about equity. [00:09:00]

That gap didn’t stay empty. Somebody else filled it.

Some other people came along and wrote their own story, and a whole bunch of people now believe that’s the truth about DEI... the public conversation about DEI is almost the opposite of the truth about DEI. That’s how far removed we are. [00:09:00 – 00:10:00]

I pushed back a little here, or rather, I added to it. We watched people who had never done a single day of this work inside an organization get the loudest platforms to describe what it is. Joe agreed, and he was careful not to pretend he has clean hands either.

It’s been pretty shocking to me the amount of conversation that I’ve seen on media... but neither of the people involved have any direct... I don’t know if there’s a person or organization that could have done something about it. [00:12:00 – 00:14:00]

What struck me most was Joe’s honesty about the practitioner community itself. We talk about accountability constantly, but he named it in a way I don’t think gets said enough—at least not out loud.

I think another part of the answer is that we need to change our relationships with each other. I think we need to know each other better as practitioners. [00:14:00]

We didn’t build the deep, trusting relationships with each other that would have let us have real disagreements in public without it turning into a pile-on. Instead we partied at conferences and sniped at each other online, and when the narrative war actually came, we weren’t organized enough, or close enough to each other, to answer it. That’s not a talking point. That’s a real gap, and Joe’s naming it plain as day, is part of why I wanted him on this episode.

It’s [always] Structural, Not Just Cultural

A lot of so-called inclusion work has focused on individual behavior: unconscious bias training, allyship workshops, better hiring panels. Joe thinks the real problem sits underneath all of that, in how organizations themselves are built.

I do think the existing corporate structure is part of the problem. I think it’s way too easy for organizations to harm human beings today, whether those human beings are employees, neighbors, or customers. [00:23:00]

He told me about a project where he interviewed a senior leader before a training program, someone he described as genuinely smart, who said something that’s stayed with him ever since.

I wish I cared about human beings as much as I care about robots. [00:24:00]

That’s a person in charge of several hundred employees saying the quiet part out loud. Joe’s response wasn’t outrage; it was closer to a diagnosis: that person is probably excellent at something, just not at leading people, and our current structures put people like that in charge of people constantly.

I think there’s not a function or a profession in the organizational workplace today that is human-centric and human-informed, at all. [00:07:00]

This connects directly back to his opening point. If management and HR, the two professions DEI was in large part quietly correcting for, were actually doing their jobs, a huge amount of what DEI had to fight for wouldn’t have needed a separate function at all.

DEI was in large part a corrective to those two professions and they kind of stood there while DEI was taken out in the back alley. [00:41:00 – 00:42:00]

That reframe matters. It’s not that DEI overreached. It’s that DEI was doing work that management and HR should have already been doing, and when the political pressure came, those two professions let it take the hit alone.

Humans in the Loop, Not the Other Way Around

I brought AI into the conversation because I don’t think this field can afford to sit this one out the way it sat out during the early days of social media. I laid out a hypothesis for Joe: the organizations that take care of their people, rather than laying them off the moment AI shows up, will be the ones that actually win the AI transition, because someone still has to do the thinking that makes the tools useful.

Humans are the loop, and AI gets to be a part of it. And I think right now we’re flipping that. It’s humans in the loop of AI. That’s already the wrong framing if you talk about language. [00:26:00]

Joe wasn’t ready to go as far as I was on the prediction, but he agreed on the underlying principle.

I think the answer is always, in the long run, the organizations that take care of their people are gonna win out. I think that is true. I think evidence supports that. [00:28:00 – 00:29:00]

Where he added something I hadn’t fully landed on is the short-term trap that makes this hard to act on.

When you’re thinking in short-term, things like slowing down and building trusting relationships and telling the truth to each other and having that constructive conflict, all of that looks like waste and inefficiency. It’s incredibly important and valuable in the long term, but today it’s gonna make today more difficult. [00:29:00]

That’s the whole tension in one line. The behaviors that make an organization durable look inefficient on any given Tuesday. I talked about my own habit of never dropping a source document into an LLM without reading it first, because I’ve caught tools misrepresenting material I hadn’t fully absorbed myself. Slowing down isn’t nostalgia. It’s the actual advantage, and right now almost nothing in how we measure productivity rewards it.

Real Change Starts With Identity

We closed on the thing Joe said is underneath everything else: real, sustainable behavior change requires some amount of identity change, not just a better business case.

I’ve come to believe that real sustainable behavior change always involves a certain amount of identity change... I came to see the world differently. And I didn’t like to even talk about it as a business case thing after that. That seems disrespectful. [00:32:00 – 00:33:00]

He was honest that this doesn’t scale the way a training module scales.

It takes time, and it takes difficulty, and it takes vulnerability. There’s not a lot of people that are going out of their way to be more vulnerable in the workplace today. [00:33:00 – 00:34:00]

This is where our conversation about identity turned toward team and community, and Joe got animated in a way he hadn’t been all episode. He talked about the Marine Corps, and about how a strong shared identity can make individual differences smaller, not by erasing them, but by giving people something bigger to hold onto together.

If you have a strong shared identity as a team, what I see happen is that those individual differences become small... I loved being a Marine. I was a Marine 24 hours a day. I drank all of the Kool-Aid, and I think team leaders need to mix some Kool-Aid. [00:38:00 – 00:39:00]

I connected that back to Henry Mintzberg’s idea of communityship and to Peter Senge’s definition of leadership as the capacity of a community to shape its future, because that’s exactly what Joe’s been doing with the practitioner communities he’s built over the past twenty years. He didn’t set out to build community for its own sake. He needed a peer group, and what he found was something he didn’t fully understand the value of until much later.

I didn’t have any comprehension for how important and valuable that piece was. I think it is, I think we still need more of that. We need to be, we need to have more community with each other and more well-connected. [00:44:00]

That’s where we left it. No five-step plans. A practitioner telling the truth about what actually holds: community, depth, identity, and admitting the rest of it—the training modules and the business cases- was never going to be enough on its own.

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Key Takeaways

1. The field asked for too little for too long. Small budget increases and one more employee resource group were never going to be a big enough vision, and when organizations finally offered more after 2020, a lot of us didn’t know how to ask for it.

2. Losing control of our own language cost us the narrative. When we didn’t clearly define diversity, equity, and inclusion for ourselves, other people wrote the definition for us, and the public conversation ended up almost the opposite of the truth.

3. This is a structural problem, not just a training problem. Corporate structures make it easy to harm people for profit, and neither management nor HR, the two professions DEI was quietly correcting for, ever fully stepped up to close that gap.

4. Short-term thinking punishes the exact behaviors that make organizations durable. Trust, honesty, and constructive conflict look like inefficiency today and pay off later, which is exactly why they keep getting cut.

5. Taking care of people is the actual AI strategy. Someone still has to think, and the organizations that treat their people as multipliers rather than costs to cut are the ones positioned to come out ahead.

6. Sustainable change is identity change, not a better pitch. A shared identity, on a team or in a community of practice, makes individual differences smaller and behavior change durable in a way no business case ever will.

About the Guest

Joe Gerstandt is a speaker, author, and advisor based in Omaha, Nebraska, who has spent close to two and a half decades helping organizations rethink how they understand and practice diversity and inclusion. He works with everyone from Fortune 500 corporations to small non-profits, blending story and research to make the case for what he calls “next generation cultures,” both inside and outside the workplace.

Joe grew up on a family farm in northwest Iowa and served four years in the United States Marine Corps, including deployments during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. After Iowa State University and six years in management and business development in the tech and communications world, he moved into nonprofit work and found the issue that would define his career. That path eventually led him into corporate diversity leadership before he struck out on his own.

He co-authored Social Gravity: Harnessing the Natural Laws of Relationships with Jason Lauritsen, and his writing and commentary have appeared in Diversity Best Practices, Diversity Executive, HR Executive, The Diversity Factor, The American Diversity Report, and other industry publications. He continues to speak, write, and consult on what he describes as resetting the diversity and inclusion conversation, pushing organizations to move past a 20th-century approach to a set of problems that have only gotten more urgent.

You can find more of Joe’s work and writing at joegerstandt.com or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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Resources:

• The Power of Us Blog by Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer — referenced in connection with Jay Van Bavel’s research on superordinate identity and team performance.

• Henry Mintzberg’s concept of “communityship” — the framework describing the kind of collective identity Joe has built in his practitioner communities.

• Peter Senge’s definition of leadership — “the capacity for a human community to shape its future,” referenced from Senge’s work on systems thinking and organizational learning.

• B Corp model — raised by Joe as a possibly promising, if still complex and costly, structural alternative for organizations.

If this conversation has brought something up for you, whether it's about your own place in this work, a moment of identity change you've lived through, or just the state of this field right now, I'd genuinely love to hear it. Reach out, bring it to a colleague, bring it into your own community of practice. You don't have to carry it alone.

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I wrote a book

August 14th, 2026 would have been my father Larry D. Johnson Sr.’s 86th trip around the sun. That was also the day the Cambridge University professor, Dr. Jason Arday, took his life at age 41.

My father’s final journey from hints of illness to his passing took many years. His cough was first diagnosed as asthma, but asthma medication was not helping the cough. It persisted.

A few years after the cough started, my brother died. Age 40. Before my brother passed, I rationalized my dad’s cough, attributing it to post-nasal drip. I had heard my dad say the exact same thing, many times. He wanted to believe it, and I did, too. Except this cough grew progressively more intense, almost incessant, between 1998 and 2006. The grief from my brother’s death, I surmise based on my studies of subtle energy in Traditional Chinese Medicine, made it worse.

It was chronic, and relief was nowhere in sight. At least not with the physicians he saw, from doctors in our hometown of Topeka to Kansas University Medical Center to Mayo Clinic. All of those physicians said that they could only conclude that he had an “idiopathic lung disease.” Meaning, they didn’t know the cause or cure. No one knew.

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My dad was an undertaker; a mortician, funeral director, and funeral business owner. He dealt with the dead. But his gifts didn’t stop with those unlikely to notice. His greatest service was to the living, in their most grief-stricken and vulnerable moments.

There were many times when I was at my dad’s funeral home, and sheets of laughter mixed with gentle tears through the celebration and mourning of the lives of loved ones rolled out of the “family room” where he made arrangements.

People trusted him with their grief, and his presence allowed them to be their saddest while finding freedom, a candle in the dark, to laugh a belly laugh. A reminder of who the deceased was and their significance in the lives of the relations in the room and outside of it, that life continues. And, to honor the dead, we must persist in living life to its fullest.

So, after many doctors and many treatments, and a couple of back surgeries created by a few bad decisions to lift “dead weight” (not a pun, a reality), my father had a chronic cough, along with arthritic and glue-enhanced vertebrae whose condition was worsened by the force of his cough.

He was in tremendous pain, had compromised lung capacity, and eventually had to be on oxygen 24/7.

In retrospect, I wish I had been able to put on my epidemiologist hat before my concerned-son hat. After many treatments and visits to doctors, my dad was finally seen by a physician who had treated two other men who were also morticians in his age range. The final diagnosis – ”embalmer’s lung.”

His vocation gave him life and purpose by letting him compassionately care for people, a ministry of sorts, in their deepest times of sorrow and need with dignity, compassion, and integrity. He did it until he couldn’t any longer and had to stop (with my mother taking over day-to-day operations well before then). He didn’t stop completely; people continued to call him, even in his more fragile times, with their sorrow and woe. Within two years, he transitioned out of this realm.

My dad faced people directly and indirectly who were facing one of the most profound realities: We are all going to die.

Many he faced were primarily focused on the life of their deceased loved one. Inevitably, most of them, especially after burying a parent, have to face the reality for themselves.

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I never talked to my father about his deeper philosophical thinking or feelings about death. He was a devout Christian, so I knew enough about his beliefs in the afterlife from that. And I think from the few conversations I had with him during hard times I was going through, his focus was, interestingly, on living more than dying. “. . .or whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.”

He would say, at peace with his choices, “I did what I was supposed to do. I can’t worry about the actions of someone else.” Dignity, compassion, and integrity shaped his choices. He never complained.

These principles, perhaps values if I may, were etched in my dad’s heart. He embodied them, and he didn’t waver in that regard. Ever.

Even when it would have been more convenient. Some might think he was maladaptive because he didn’t shift his mental model for personal gain. He would be ok with that. He would adapt to people based on their needs, not simply because a shift would personally benefit him or make things easier.

In some of my darker days, in conversation with him, he reminded me, and even now, reminds me through my memory of him, to keep living. To continue my spiritual cultivation, and serve others with dignity, compassion, and integrity.

Sometimes he came to visit me, particularly during the handful of times he came while I was divorcing my first wife. His physical presence I only got occasionally due to our distance, me in Atlanta and Boston, and him in Kansas. And I never felt him less present from afar–his grounding ensconced me in a love-woven cocoon of reality.

When I unconsciously would seem to click out of that mesh of truth and transformation, I swear, something spiritual and mental had been embedded in me that prevented me from straying away from “what is,” ”what I choose to respond to (not react),” and “how I choose to respond.”

My dad never allowed me (to the extent of his influence on me) to unface reality. He did so while encouraging me to hold a dream bigger than I could fully conceive in the moment.

Now, let me share the connection to Arday.

Dr. Jason Arday was born to Ghanaian immigrant parents on the “Southside” of London in the mid-1980s. According to his origin story (consistently across many sources, and that I won’t detail as it is readily available and perhaps at this point something you might be familiar with, if only loosely), he was diagnosed as autistic. He says that he was non-verbal for many years and didn’t become enmeshed in scholarly pursuits until he was 18 years old.

Arday became “the youngest black professor in Cambridge University history” in 2023. Compared to 99% of applicants for an endowed chair professorship at Cambridge, Arday was extremely disadvantaged.

The reality is, Jason Arday got a job he was underqualified for. One where on measures such as:

• 🚫Research record

• 🚫Supervision of PhD students; and later

• 🚫Productivity after endowed chair

Arday underperformed by any reasonable measure of such a role.

Now, this underperformance after his appointment could have stemmed from the constant pressure and “campaign of scrutiny intended to undermine him,” as his family asserted. The prestige of the role, his visibility, and the expectations he had from the outside world and himself come with the privilege of pressure. And being harassed and singled out, sometimes with hostile, racist vibes, is a horrible microscope that, I imagine, starts to feel inescapable in the moment. This scrutiny also had nothing to do with his credentials or any deficits before he was hired.

Yet, let me cite another hardscrabble scholarly case. That of Professor Roland Fryer.

Roland Fryer, Jr. grew up between Daytona Beach, FL, and near Houston, TX, with his grandmother. His father was incarcerated, and many of his relatives made ends meet selling crack cocaine.

Nurtured by his grandmother and mentored by teachers, professors, and friends who saw his potential and aptitude, he was introduced to economics and proved he could excel. At age 30, he was the third-youngest tenured professor in Harvard history. Only Jeffrey Sachs and Lawrence (Larry) H. Summers (who served as Harvard’s president) were tenured earlier.

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In 2016, Dr. Fryer was set to publish a study finding no bias in police-involved shootings. The research drew academic and public pushback. Some scholars who have made their names on what one could frame as deficit and discrimination, or, as Eve Tuck has written, damage-centered research, reached out to Fryer before the publication of his seminal paper.

Many of them asked him to NOT publish the research. At that point, he’s said publicly, that he “had to publish it!” His conclusion about going to press was: the data is impeccable; the findings can be replicated if one chooses. Thus, he could confidently defend his scholarship, despite the controversy. Thorough, high-quality research that looks forward to scrutiny.

Fryer would not be stopped for something as frivolous as worrying about the opinions that so-called white people would have reading the headlines of his paper. Fryer is perhaps one of the biggest advocates for the marginalized and underserved. He is open about creating opportunity for those who grew up like he did. And publishing the paper made a large cohort of race-focused scholars unhappy. Some quite influential enemies resided adjacent to his lab at Harvard.

In the Spring of 2018, Harvard, after a complaint from a woman Fryer fired due to poor performance, investigated sexual misconduct accusations under Title IX, in the midst of the “Me Too” movement.

As a superior to the woman, Harvard found that Dr. Fryer acted inappropriately by taking part in sexually suggestive banter (but nothing physical). They recommended workplace sensitivity training and asked him to be more mindful of the impact of his speech, given his position.

But, the saga wasn’t over because the findings then went to Professor Claudine Gay (who became Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2018) and sociology Professor Larry Bobo, who happen to be racialized as black and were among those unhappy about the findings of Fryer’s 2016-17 research; and, were likely among those who were compelling him to not publish his findings, at least not with the conclusions he had made.

In a unilateral verdict, Bobo and Gay (before her rocky tenure as Harvard President, which ended in a resignation after a horrible showing at a congressional hearing about antisemitism on Harvard’s campus and accusations of plagiarism), failed to take Dr. Fryer’s tenure (per their intent) but instead got him suspended for two years. They also shut down his well-funded and prolific lab (a profound documentary on Fryer’s story).

Harvard, and particularly Gay and Bobo supported Fryer about as much as Cambridge purported to support Arday.

For Fryer, the punishment was extreme by any measure. He was highly productive. He supervised many PhD students (who also suffered when his lab was razed), along with the many less privileged children his work was elevating to greatness, coming to a sudden halt.

His research track record was stellar (best of the best). He was/is very pro-support of the underserved, and his academic integrity and rigor are unquestionable (e.g., Clark Medal, deep publications, MacArthur Genius, etc.)

Yet, he persists after his disproportionate public pummeling. Doing so by building businesses, still teaching, writing, and speaking as a public intellectual.

By the way, Fryer also initially claimed he was targeted because of his skin color. Once he discovered the arbiters of his fate claimed the same racialization, he realized what Chuck D from the iconic, Public Enemy, “. . .go by the color, you’ll discover. . .Damn! . . . everybody ain’t no brother (or, “sister” in this case.)”

Arday, like Claudine Gay, faced plagiarism accusations. Her scholarly record, upon her confirmation as President, was also questioned. The side-by-side comparison to other scholars seeking similar roles, respectively an endowed sociology chair and President of Harvard, both institutions arguably the most well-known in the world, was asymmetrical. There were more qualified candidates for the prestigious jobs they held.

And, that’s not so bad. Why? I’ve met and continue to meet people who get jobs for reasons that have nothing to do with a meritorious track record. They still could have performed their duties successfully. This happens quite a bit.

The problem is: the jobs they got, by the nature of the institutions and the level of the roles, invite scrutiny. Candidates (at least the final ones) would benefit from knowing that scrutiny is the unwritten part of the job description for roles like theirs. It’s predictable.

Since it is, why wouldn’t the university, in both cases, be relentlessly thorough in its diligence?

So that when scrutiny comes (not if), they can respond resolutely and publicly with facts to quell the critic’s noise.

This even goes for critics who live up to their accusations of eugenicism and blatant bigotry, like Nathan Confas. Yes, he used flawed AI tools to detect plagiarism (e.g., Pangram or Turnitin). Yes, he can be considered a white supremacist. Yes, it is possible that the color of Gay’s and now Arday’s skin could have been at least part of what ignited the heated criticism and all that it entailed on and offline. The pressure and vitriol of trolls can no doubt become relentless and surely overwhelming.

And, the knee-jerk response of skin color/racism was used by Drs. Fryer and Gay, and Arday. Dr. Fryer’s distinction was that none of his story questioned the quality and authenticity of his work. His critics and his judge/jury of two influential Harvard professors, and a slew of so-called black scholars, discouraged him from publishing that “the police don’t disproportionately kill unarmed black people [but do harass black people much more]” research.

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One cannot say, with certainty, that Gay and Bobo dropped a bomb on Fryer’s career because he defied the gatekeepers of the predominant critical race theoretical narrative that had been rooted and cloned by professors at Harvard and spread beyond in the 1970s.

It is not a stretch to say Fryer was punished with race being one variable; just not in the typical reactionary way it is usually seen. Thus, the story of Roland Fryer got much less airtime than either Gay or Arday. And, significantly less support for what, from my reading and dialogue with parties closer to the source, was reinforced by many as a fairly benign set of behaviors that only became harmful when a terminated employee/(once) friend was looking for a larger severance package. Fryer was/is unquestionably competent. His punishment was disproportionately greater than that of Gay and Arday (notwithstanding that he was overwhelmed by the pressure).

Now let me close this by:

1. Reinforcing that Dr. Jason Arday is a tragic character in a drama created by years of co-crafting an embellished narrative; not being checked on his claims, allowing the story to take on a life of its own; the absence of someone in his life who insisted that he face reality to elevate his game beyond reproach.

   Jason Arday didn’t have a Larry D. Johnson, Sr. A figure, father-like, or another wisdom-holding figure guided by unconditional love. Roland Fryer’s grandmother, despite the huge obstacles in his path, grounded him in reality. Claudine Gay, who bounced back strongly after her post-presidential resignation with a reported $900k salary as a sociology professor, grew up in a prosperous two-parent home. From what I know about well-educated Haitian immigrant families, she was held to a high standard and had a level of financial, intellectual, community, and moral support that is rare, regardless of one’s racial ascription.

   Arday had a lot of coddling. He was lifted up, but he didn’t have what Dr. David Harris, Professor Emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, said he gravely needed: “critical friends” rather than “sycophants.” That is, people who mostly uncritically supported him in the perpetuation of that which was clearly not helpful to his well-being or career long-term.

2. Being clear that race played a role in the saga. And race and racism’s role was elevated because integrity was not upheld and reality wasn’t faced by the university. People outside the university also didn’t process it with reflexivity, refusing to acknowledge and intervene despite the obvious gaps in Dr. Arday’s development. And thirdly, but perhaps most importantly, not by Arday himself nor along with his family, who were also so proud of the accolades gifted to him and all that came with it that they didn’t stop (out of ignorance of the reality or willful blindness toward the situation) to consider the help or harm that could come to their sensitive son, spouse, or self beyond his 15 minutes of fame.

   Inadequate citation (aka plagiarism) is an avoidable mistake. It takes rigor. Rigor is helped along by good editors with knowledge of the field of study and its body of evidence to discern where the author is elevating, maintaining the status quo (i.e., regurgitating), and potentially imitating, without proper attribution, a person who had an insight that one found similar to their conclusion or helped them round out a line of inquiry.

   And, it happens, perhaps even to the most gifted of writers without their conscious awareness. Like the argument that Nabokov’s Lolita was heavily influenced by Heinz von Lichberg, who published “Lolita,” written in 1916. Nabokov’s body of work beyond Lolita also tells a different story. I imagine if Nabokov were still alive, a plagiarism accusation would have created a different response by his advisors and from Nabokov himself. The rigor, breadth, and depth of his work signal this.

   It seems (and it happens for a variety of reasons) that Jason Arday didn’t have sufficient personal rigor, nor advisors with such.

   Let’s assume, despite the opinions of many who might read this, that Dr. Arday had the aptitude for rigor. There are indications this is the case. If so, did he have adequate exposure to close ties who practice with it? Were there any beacons, human lighthouses, to guide him through periods of (metaphorical) shadow vision? Was he adequately exposed so that he could learn and maximize his potential? It seems that we can check “No.” on all the diagnostic questions above.

   And the fact that the answers are clearly all a-nay says someone(s) were not being honest about reality, whether out of self-protection, hubris, ignorance, willful blindness, or any combination of the above.

When I was about 13 or 14 years old, I was in the backyard of our family home in Topeka, KS, half-assedly raking cuttings from the hedges that my mother had trimmed the evening before, when it was not oppressively hot and when I was supposed to rake the leaves.

It was 36℃/97 ℉, and since I didn’t wake up early and my mom insisted I finish before going to play with my friends, I had to endure it and get the job done from 11:30 am until my mother’s final inspection pardoned me.

I was suffering and didn’t recognize I was doing so at my own behest. I was doing a sorry job, and doing so was making my predicament worse.

My dad happened to come home for lunch as my mother was off part of the summer. While I was raking, I could feel him watching me for about two minutes. It was likely longer, but the intensity of his gaze was felt powerfully for two minutes. I dared not look!

Then in a flash, my dad was standing next to me, in a three-piece suit at high Noon. He put his hand out for the rake and began, in his Marine-shined Johnston and Murphy shoes, to properly rake the cuttings–lightly lecturing me the entire time on how to do it the “right way.”

He then gave me back the rake to see if I’d really paid attention, then beamed back into the house to cool down and rehydrate before going back to meet with the family of a deceased. I never raked the same or saw raking (or how to do life) the same since then.

My three-piece-suit-wearing dad, raking in scorching heat to teach me a lesson, is one of many he provided. He didn’t preach very long when he did, and as St. Francis of Assisi is inaccurately quoted but congruently cited, when he preached, he seldom used words; and if so, few.

Yet, the principles of integrity, dignity, and compassion are foundational to who I am. To me, they are my father’s greatest legacy. I hope I can pass at least a smidgen of that to my niece (who I helped raise) and my son.

It doesn’t occur to me that Jason Arday, based on his life, publicly available scholarship, and mental models/worldview, was built on a solid foundation of durable principles. Without that foundation, he floated through experiences with nothing to ground him in reality or tether him to truth.

He and his family took his good fortune, after an earlier life of challenge, to mean he was good to go indefinitely. Thus, they ignored or looked past his foundational (principle-deficient) fragility. The institutions he was invited into didn’t help build a stronger foundation; they sought to capitalize on his narrative for institutional gain. (The most sinister mechanisms of elite capture.) Who stood up for Jason with the utmost care–to create the conditions for him to thrive vs. cheering him on without insisting on greatness and constant effort toward greatness; and owning greatness and flaws in order to grow through adversity?

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Who was truly there to help Jason Atta Kwei Arday?

3. Third, I have never defended DEI. What I do uphold and refuse to stray from are principles. The flippant statements about Arday or anyone else being “DEI hires” are lazy and reflect people who don’t acknowledge the realities of institutional and organizational life.

   Jason Arday’s was an unprincipled hire (or if you think it was principled, the principles were brittle and destined to crumble). If you look to some of the most powerful institutions in whatever country you live in, you will find several of such hires. Most in roles that won’t determine much in other people’s lives, but some that can determine the fate of multitudes.

   Use “DEI hire” if you must because you can’t help it. But if you are honest, that it means an inadequate hire or lackluster qualifications; use it judiciously. That is, don’t make it a simple-minded quip to criticize someone because of their visible or invisible identities.

Dr. Jason Arday’s story was an avoidable tragedy. People who have enabled it to become tragic–from those in the Golden Triangle to folks from South London–are complicit. This painfully, but obviously, includes Dr. Arday (rest his soul) himself.

Many wound up the ticking time bomb. And now, claims of systemic racism, negligence, charlatanism, plagiarism, ableism, etc. are being selectively plucked from the rubble of a man’s life.

A man flawed but loved,

A man who was lofted and harshly let down.

A man who created wings, ascended, and flew toward a dream, yet lacked full awareness of the sun’s heat and had to face reality in his tragic descent when his wings were singed.

A man who will be praised and vilified.

A man who had conditions created for him to thrive, yet, unfortunately, didn’t have the agency, along with a nurturing community, to take the favorable opportunities and create the extraordinary out of them; even in the inadequacy that all great people have experienced in their growth.

Reflecting on Arday’s trajectory is saddening. It’s a lesson about intentions and the actions behind them.

Ask: Are we creating the conditions for those we “help” to thrive? Do we understand what it means to do so over the long term? Do I have skin-in-the-game as it relates to this person? That is, right now, does their success or failure impact me?

If this avoidable tragedy teaches us nothing else about our personal institutions or organizational realities, the questions above, at least, call for us to look at ourselves in the mirror before we jump in to take a side.

If you must choose a side, #ChooseHumanity – all of it.

Gamiel Yafai and I had been passing each other in the night for years, crossing paths at conferences, waving from opposite sides of LinkedIn, before we finally sat down for a real conversation. He’s one of the standard-bearers in this field. He’s seen the cycles, the ups and downs, the good, the bad, and the ugly, across every name this work has carried in the past few decades: EDI, DEI, inclusion, diversity.

What made this conversation different is that Gamiel doesn’t just talk about the work. He talks about the life that built him for it. Scottish, Irish, Yemeni, Muslim, Christian, raised in a deprived part of Birmingham, and shaped by two years in a Yemeni village that turned into an education no classroom could have given him. That story matters, because everything he says about organizations, about foundations, about embedding versus appearing to embed, comes from a man who learned community, accountability, and enterprise before he ever learned the language of diversity work.

We covered a lot of ground. Where the field has genuinely moved and where it’s only appeared to move. What real embedding looks like at the level most organizations claim to be at but rarely are. Why representation without diversity of thought is a trap even profitable companies fall into. What the rise of Reform means for practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic. And what he’d tell anyone watching their role, their title, or their whole field feel like it’s being dismantled right now.

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The Heritage That Built the Framework

Before Gamiel ever audited an organization’s diversity maturity, he was a kid learning to hold multiple identities at once. Christian on his mother’s side, Muslim on his father’s, Scottish and Yemeni heritage woven through a childhood in Birmingham. At eleven, right before he was sent to live in Yemen for what was supposed to be six weeks and became two and a half years, a teacher read him a line from scripture that never left him.

I actually see the biggest gift I’ve ever been given is my heritage. [00:08:00]

I found this striking because so much of our field talks about identity as something to manage or navigate. Gamiel talks about it as something to draw from. He described taking the good from every thread that made him: his mother’s Christianity, his father’s Islam, his Yemeni family, his English upbringing, rather than treating them as competing claims on who he’s supposed to be.

That framing carried straight into the village in Yemen where he spent his early teens with no gas, no electricity, and no safety net beyond the people around him.

Everybody supported everybody else. And if somebody’s crops died for some reason, everybody would share their crops. [00:12:00]

I asked him about this because it’s easy to romanticize scarcity from a distance. What struck me was that he wasn’t romanticizing it. He was holding up an example of a community that functioned because people were genuinely accountable to each other, not because a policy told them to be. That thread runs through everything else he said in this conversation. You can’t legislate what he is describing. You have to build the conditions for it. Gamiel and I vehemently agree on that.

What Has Actually Moved, and What Only Looks Like It Has

I asked Gamiel directly, after 25-plus years in this space, what has the field actually moved, and what has only appeared to move. His answer didn’t flatter anyone, including organizations that think they’re doing well.

You could say the awareness has improved. However, the embedding is still way off. [00:23:00]

His consultancy has been running maturity audits for eight years. Most organizations, when they self-assess, place themselves at what he calls level four: progressive, meaning they’re not just doing the work but seeing measurable impact from it. When his team actually audits them, the honest number is level two or three. Awareness, moving slowly toward embedding, but not there yet.

The reason, he told me, comes down to something almost embarrassingly basic.

Organizations haven’t created the foundations for diversity, equity, and inclusion to thrive in their organization. If you don’t know where you’re at, you’re not gonna have any foundations to build on. [00:27:00]

Most organizations have never monitored, measured, or managed where they actually stand on recruitment, retention, progression, and development across the diversity strands they claim to care about. And not just the number in each of those buckets but what that means to the company and individuals every day. Without that baseline, there’s nothing to build roots into. You can pour resources into training and awareness campaigns for years and still be standing on sand.

Inclusive of Who You Already Have Isn’t the Same as Diverse

One of the sharpest points Gamiel made in this conversation is one I think a lot of leaders would rather not hear. Plenty of organizations feel inclusive because everyone inside them gets along, enjoys the culture, and stays. The problem is who has historically and more recently entered the room.

A lot of those organizations are inclusive of the representation that they have. And what I mean by that is the vast majority will be of the same nationality. They may even be profitable, but what they’re forgetting is they could be even more profitable. [00:33:00]

We talked about how this shows up as echo chambers that feel warm from the inside. Everyone shares a school, a postal code, a network, and the culture feels great because nobody’s experience of it is being challenged. Gamiel’s point wasn’t that inclusion doesn’t matter within that group. It’s that an organization can be genuinely good to the people it already hired and still be leaving enormous value on the table by never widening who gets hired in the first place. Homogeneity in background can produce the illusion of cognitive diversity, but the odds are stacked against it when everyone came up through the same pipelines.

Evolution, Revolution, and the Rise of Reform

Given what’s happening in the United States and the growth of the Reform Party in the UK, I asked Gamiel what he thinks it means for practitioners if the far right keeps gaining ground on either side of the Atlantic. His answer reached back further than I expected, to Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech in the late 1960s.

I’ve always seen the work that we do around diversity and inclusion as being evolutionary. We evolve. However, we are going to see revolutions. [00:37:00]

He was careful not to paint an entire political movement as monolithic hatred. Instead, he described a gap in understanding, one he thinks can be closed.

When I think of Reform, I think of a political party that is built not based on hatred, not based on anti-anybody, but that really hasn’t got an understanding, particularly around the area of our work [beyond memes and silliness]. [00:38:00]

His read is that decades of this work have leaned too heavily on strand-by-strand advocacy, race, disability, gender, one category at a time, without ever making the case for what every single person gains when inclusion is done well. That includes people who’ve never felt spoken to by this work at all. Closing that gap, in his view, means fewer loud slogans and more direct engagement with the people currently standing outside the tent.

The Work Is Simple. People Complicate It.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Gamiel what I hadn’t asked that he wished I had. His answer was the most practical thing either of us said the entire episode.

The majority of the work that we do is behavioral change, and I genuinely believe that 85% of the change that needs to happen in every single organization is human behavior. [00:48:00]

Not new policy. Not another framework. Behavior. Simple acts of allyship, sponsorship, and recognition, like noticing someone built brilliant slides for a colleague and saying so out loud in front of the room that matters.

The work that we do is simple. I genuinely believe it’s simple. People complicate it. [00:49:00]

For practitioners feeling the ground shift under them right now, watching titles disappear and budgets vanish, Gamiel’s advice was concrete rather than comforting for its own sake: become an associate for other organizations still doing the work, take a corporate role that funds your own consultancy on the side, get specific about the one thing you’re genuinely excellent at instead of staying a generalist, and give twenty percent of your time away for free. He’s built a chunk of his own business from the trust that voluntary work generates. Being seen, he said, still matters more than almost anything else.

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Key Takeaways

1. Your heritage is a resource, not a liability to manage. Gamiel’s ability to move comfortably across cultures came from treating every part of his background as something to draw strength from rather than a set of competing claims to reconcile.

2. Awareness and embedding are not the same maturity level, and most organizations conflate them. If you haven’t measured where you actually stand across recruitment, retention, and progression, you don’t have a baseline, and without a baseline you don’t have foundations.

3. A culture that feels inclusive can still be dangerously homogeneous. Profitability and staff satisfaction inside an echo chamber don’t tell you what you’re missing by never widening who gets in the room.

4. Political backlash isn’t new, and it isn’t unbeatable. Gamiel’s read on Reform is that most of the gap is understanding, not hatred, which means the work is persuasion, not just resistance.

5. Behavioral change accounts for the vast majority of what actually shifts in an organization. Simple, visible acts of allyship and recognition move more than another policy rewrite ever will.

6. Visibility and generosity build businesses in hard markets. Specializing in what you’re genuinely best at, and giving a meaningful share of your work away, is how Gamiel has kept his consultancy resilient through repeated downturns in this field.

About the Guest

Gamiel Yafai, MBE is the founder and CEO of Diversity Marketplace, the consultancy he built from the ground up in 2005 after leading the diversity practices at two of the UK’s largest HR resourcing agencies. Twenty years later, he oversees a team of coaches, trainers, auditors, researchers, and strategists who help organizations move diversity work from policy into practice, which is the exact gap he and I spent most of this conversation unpacking.

He’s the author of Demystifying Diversity and Yemen Proud, the latter drawing on the two and a half years he spent as a teenager in Yemen that shaped so much of how he sees community and belonging today. His work has earned him the Global Diversity Leadership Award from the Global HRD Congress. In recognition of his contribution to equity, diversity, and inclusion across Milton Keynes and beyond, he was awarded an MBE and later an honorary doctorate from the Open University.

True to what he told me about visibility and generosity, Gamiel ensures that a meaningful share of Diversity Marketplace’s work, including full audits, goes to charities. You can find him and his newly redesigned site at diversitymarketplace.co.uk, and connect with him on LinkedIn.

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Resources:

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, referenced by Gamiel as a formative story from childhood

• Beyond Race and Gender by R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr. (1991), referenced in our discussion of how little the dominant frame in DEI has shifted since its publication

• The Rivers of Blood speech by Enoch Powell, referenced as a historical parallel to today’s political climate

• The UK’s Equality Act 2010, and the earlier Commission for Racial Equality, discussed as an example of enforcement that has weakened over time

• The Equality and Human Rights Commission, formed in 2005 by merging several UK equality bodies

If this conversation shifted something for you, the way it did for me, share it with someone who's trying to figure out where their organization actually stands. And if you haven't already, subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next.

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I wrote a book

There’s a moment in writing a book where you realize you’re not just making an argument. You’re chasing something. It occurs as hidden at the time, but it is there. I had that experience while working on Reconstructing Inclusion.

I was building a careful, layered case for why DEI had been operating on the wrong level, with the wrong structure, too much passion, not enough reason. Khalil Gibran said about passion and reason in The Prophet, “For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.”

What I didn’t know yet was that the thing I was chasing had a name. A name that accounts for many things and yet can be condensed into one idea.

That name is mattering.

Not belonging. Not inclusion. Not psychological safety, as important as all of those are. Mattering. The everyday experience of knowing that your presence creates value for others, and that value is real to the organization and real to you.

In this episode, I trace the path backward through Reconstructing Inclusion, pointing to the places where mattering was already there, already being argued for, waiting to be named. And then I want to talk about why this is not just an intellectual exercise. Because in the moment we’re in now, with AI asymmetrically reshaping the nature of work, geopolitical complexity following people through the doors of organizations, and institutional trust at historic lows, mattering is not a nice-to-have.

It is a relational imperative. If you need to use the word, “strategic” in front of imperative, it would be appropriate. And, I propose that the relational aspect might be more critical than the strategic one. We all know you can’t have one without the other. . .Right?

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The Critique That Built the Foundation

Reconstructing Inclusion opens with a provocation. I meant it to be one. I wanted to put into words something I’d been feeling for years: that for all the good intention driving the so-called DEI field, the infrastructure to make the aspirations real simply wasn’t there.

“Despite this growing importance, there have been very few frameworks to advance the work beyond historical attachment to representation. Words like belonging and equity have been added to the aspirational outcomes, but the pathways to make this accessible, actionable, and sustainable have not matched the aspirations. With such enthusiasm, it is possible that this is our last and best chance to save DEI from death by a thousand platitudes.” [00:05:00]

Death by a thousand platitudes. I meant that.

My colleague Dr. Jonathan Ashong-Lamptey talks about that line from my text often—he knows how intentional it was and how urgent it felt to me. What I was describing was what I called ceremonial DEI (aka so-called DEI and Orthodox DEI): a practice that signals commitment but builds no fundamental infrastructure.

Organizations could tell you their DEI goals but not what behaviors were expected of their most influential senior leaders and influential actors. They had belonging in their value statements with no way to measure whether people actually felt like they mattered. The whole first section of the book is a deconstruction. Throughout the book, I take apart the concepts the field had come to lean on- belonging, diversity, meritocracy, equity, intersectionality- and ask whether they actually work in the ways we’re using them.

The answer in most cases: not as practiced.

Take meritocracy. The real equation isn’t capability plus effort equals merit. It’s capability plus effort plus network access plus proximity to decision-makers. And those last two variables are not equally distributed. They accumulate through informal relationships, golf outings, drinks after work, the conversations that happen when some people are in the room and others aren’t. That is a mattering argument, even though I didn’t call it that. People whose contributions are never made visible to those who could act on them are experiencing a mattering deficit. Not because of their capability, but because a system routes significance through channels most people can’t access.

The Three Moments I Was Writing About Mattering Without Knowing It

Looking back now, I can see mattering threaded through the book long before I had language for it. Three moments stand out.

The first is in a chapter called “Overstanding Exclusion.” I opened it with a passage from William James, written in 1890. Even accounting for the language of his time, what he describes is the most dehumanizing experience he could imagine:

“No more fiendish punishment could be devised were such a thing physically possible than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof... a kind of rage and impotent despair would err long well up in us, from which the cruelest bodily tortures would be a relief, for these would make us feel that however bad might be our plight, we had not sunk to such a depth as to be unworthy of attention at all.” [00:11:00]

What I understand now is that this is a clinical description of what researchers call anti-mattering. Gordon Flett, one of the top researchers in the mattering construct, identifies anti-mattering not simply as the absence of mattering, but as the active experience of invisibility, insignificance, and dismissal.

Kipling Williams confirmed in a lab that social exclusion activates the same brain regions as physical pain. The brain isn’t metaphorically hurt by being rendered invisible. It is physiologically hurt. I was writing about ostracism. What I was really pointing at was anti-mattering.

The second moment is in the chapter on Social Capital. It contains the only place in the entire book where I use the word “mattering” directly. One sentence:

“While mattering to one’s in-group has value, it is also possible that in the accumulation of bonding social capital, people can become rooted in their own identities to such an extent that there is little perspective that makes its way in or out.” [00:14:00]

That one sentence is perhaps the thesis, at least one of the theses, of what I’m building toward next. Mattering to your in-group is not enough. It is not sufficient. For organizational mattering to be real, your significance has to travel beyond the close network, reach the people with institutional power, influence over your next opportunity, the capacity to act on what you bring.

The third moment is in the book’s opening description of Reverend John T. Olds, the pastor I grew up with. He used to say from the pulpit: let people know not only that you are thankful to them, but that you truly appreciate them. He meant say it and show it.

Zach Mercurio, one of the key mattering researchers I cite in my ongoing work, names “see and hear people” and “affirm their significance” as the first two behaviors of his framework. Reverend Olds was embodying that long before any academic framework gave it a name. I stored that story for a book I hadn’t written yet.

Why Mattering Is the Variable Organizations Are Missing Right Now

Mattering isn’t just the next evolution of inclusion work. It is the specific variable organizations are missing in this exact, urgent moment.

Consider what organizations are navigating all at the same time. Large language models are changing the nature of work faster than most workforce planning anticipated. And the question isn’t simply which tasks AI will handle, as real and necessary as that question is. The deeper one is harder:

“When AI handles an increasing share of execution, what gives people significance? What gives people meaning? What tells someone their presence in the organization creates something that would not exist without them?” [00:19:00]

Rosen Kellerman, and Seligman put it directly in Tomorrowmind: developing a sense of mattering is particularly necessary to weather the frequency of role changes that AI ascendancy will require. A psychologist and cognitive scientist are telling organizations that mattering is a strategic variable for the AI transition.

And then there’s what’s already showing up inside organizations. Zach Mercurio, citing 2025 HBR coverage on mattering at work, reported that 30% of employees feel invisible, 65% feel underappreciated, and 82% feel lonely. The great resignation, quiet quitting, the slow erosion of engagement scores despite constant investment: these are not pay problems or perk problems. They are mattering deficits.

In the book, I wrote about a data scientist, a brilliant friend of mine, who identified a need for AI and machine learning capabilities around 2015 and 2016. He shared his findings across a heterogeneous, curious network of colleagues. Central leadership said, “Oh, that’s cool,” and moved on. By the time the organization caught on, competitors had moved ahead. He had left.

That story isn’t about one person. It’s about what happens when the informal networks through which significance travels are too narrow to carry the contributions an organization actually needs.

The organizations that navigate this moment well won’t just have better AI strategies or better geopolitical risk frameworks. They will have built the conditions where people believe their presence is significant enough to bring their full capacity to problems that are genuinely novel, genuinely emergent. You need trust to do that. And trust is built when people know they matter.

What Mattering Infrastructure Actually Looks Like

Mattering infrastructure isn’t a program. It’s a set of behaviors and design conditions that, taken together, make people’s significance visible and real.

Zach Mercurio distills the research into three leader behaviors. I want to name them clearly as they’re actionable right now, today, or on Tuesday morning, in whatever configuration your team works.

First: see and hear people. Not just acknowledge presence, but engage with what people actually think, what they’re working on, what they find challenging. This is about paying attention in a way that communicates that someone’s interior experience of the work matters to you. American Express documented a 50% reduction in voluntary attrition after leaders specifically changed this behavior. Good people always have options. When they don’t feel treated as significant, they have one foot out the door.

Second: affirm people’s significance. Name what someone did and why it mattered, specifically, in the moment. Not “great job.” Something that sounds more like this:

“The way you framed that for a client shifted the entire conversation. That is the reason we moved forward.” [00:28:00]

Specificity connected to impact is what makes recognition real rather than performative. The Greek word kleos means what others hear about you, the external recognition of excellence. That is what this kind of affirmation creates. It is not a performance. It is a signal.

Third: scale mattering organizationally. Connect individual work to organizational purpose. Task to project to outcome, consistently, so people can see the thread between what they do in a small piece and the larger whole. Mercurio calls this laddering. I argued for the structural version of this in the Reconstructing Inclusion chapter on “Inclusively Aligned Organizational Design.” The point is: structure creates behavior.

If your organizational design doesn’t create conditions for contribution to be visible, if decisions are made in networks most people can’t access, you are building a system that systematically prevents people from mattering. Don’t consider this a moral argument. It’s an argument for evolved work design. And it has a co-created solution that can emerge.

The Mattering and Performance Audit is a diagnostic I’ve built for organizations ready to find that solution. It surfaces where trust, contribution, and performance are cracking before the breakdown shows up in engagement scores or exit interviews. In three to four weeks, you get a leadership readout with prioritized early actions.

This is a performance diagnostic, not a program or initiative. It turns out the conditions that make people matter are the same conditions that build organizational performance.

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Key Takeaways

1. Mattering is the foundation, not just another framework. Belonging, inclusion, psychological safety: all of these matter. But mattering is the underlying condition that makes them possible. The everyday experience of your presence creating value for others is the foundation that inclusion efforts have been missing.

2. Ceremonial DEI built aspiration without infrastructure. The critique in Reconstructing Inclusion still stands. Good intentions didn’t build the pathways to make inclusion accessible, actionable, or sustainable. Mattering infrastructure is what those pathways actually look like.

3. Mattering to your in-group isn’t enough. For organizational mattering to be real, significance has to travel. It has to reach the people with power to act on what you bring. If informal networks are too narrow or too bonded to carry diverse contributions, you have a design problem with a design solution.

4. The AI transition makes mattering urgent, not optional. When execution increasingly belongs to AI, what gives people significance becomes the strategic question. The research is clear: people need to know their presence creates something that wouldn’t exist without them.

5. Mattering infrastructure has three behavioral entry points. See and hear people. Affirm their significance specifically and in the moment. Connect individual work to organizational purpose so significance scales beyond the interpersonal. These are not soft skills. They are strategic leader behaviors with documented performance outcomes.

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Resources:

• Tomorrowmind by Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin Seligman. Contains direct research linking a sense of mattering to navigating the AI transition. Referenced for the point that mattering is a strategic variable, not just a well-being concept.

• Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. Foundational work on bonding and bridging social capital, which shapes the organizational argument for why closed networks produce mattering deficits.

• An Introduction, Review, and Conceptual Analysis of Mattering as an Essential Construct and an Essential Way of Life, Gordon Flett 2021

• The Power of Mattering at Work, Zach Mercurio 2025

• The Mattering and Performance Audit. A diagnostic tool for organizations ready to surface where trust, contribution, and performance are breaking down before it shows in lagging indicators.

If this conversation was useful to you, share it with someone asking the same questions. And if you're ready to diagnose where mattering is breaking down in your organization, let's talk.

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I wrote a book

Fred Falker walks into every conversation as a quiet disruptor. With years of experience as an organizational development consultant and former Director of Workforce Development at the Saint Louis Zoo, he’s watched the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) field build elaborate frameworks around what he believes is a fundamentally flawed premise: that we’re divided by our differences.

But Fred’s not interested in defending the status quo or offering another diversity training model. Instead, he’s spent the past years developing what he calls “The Distance Paradigm,” a framework that flips the entire conversation about inclusion.

We’re not divided, he argues. We’re separated. And that distinction changes everything about how organizations can actually build genuine connection.

What makes this conversation urgent right now is that it speaks directly to crises I’m seeing in organizations everywhere. People are questioning whether they matter in the age of AI displacement. Burnout is accelerating because people don’t feel significant. Leadership is anxious about how to address this, but they’re looking for solutions in the wrong places. Fred’s framework offers something genuinely different. Not another initiative. Not another training program. But a fundamental reordering of how we think about leadership, connection, and what inclusion actually requires.

In our conversation, Fred unpacks how the field has been solving the wrong problem, why mattering is more important than you think, and what it actually takes to build organizations where people know they matter. This is the conversation that could change how you think about your work.

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Why We’ve Been Solving the Wrong Problem

The inclusion field has operated for decades under a single assumption: if we can help people understand and appreciate differences, we’ll build connection. But Fred challenges this premise at its foundation. The problem isn’t that differences exist. The problem is that we’ve mistaken separation for division, and once we do that, we start looking for solutions in the wrong places.

“Nature doesn’t draw lines. We draw lines. And we draw lines in order to stay safe, in order to help our kids stay safe. But we’re always in relationship with one another, and that relationship is determined by differences only if we let it.” [00:12:00]

We all draw lines as parents, teachers, and leaders. That’s not the problem. The problem is when we believe the lines are real, when we accept them as fundamental truths about human nature rather than tools we’ve created for specific purposes. Fred is saying something radical here: the lines only determine our relationships if we let them. We have a choice about that.

The real issue comes when organizations put the category before the person. I asked Fred to explain what happens in that moment, and his answer was direct.

“It’s when the lines take away options, when we put the line before the person, the label before the person, the box before the person, then we never actually see the person. As soon as we saw each other as people, the only way we can do that is by treating each other fairly, treating each other as human beings, caring about each other.” [00:13:00]

I’ve watched this happen in organization after organization. They put people into demographic categories, job classifications, identity groups, and never actually see them as individuals. The box becomes more real than the person. And once that happens, genuine connection stops. You’re managing a demographic instead of relating to a human being.

What concerns Fred most is that the field has been trying to force change through judgment and pressure instead of invitation and connection. This is where the DEI movement went wrong, he told me.

“It has failed to see that people aren’t likely to be told how to behave. When you tell a group of people that you are wrong, you’ve always been wrong, there’s something in you that makes you wrong, and that now it’s a new day and your anger doesn’t matter to us—that doesn’t work.” [00:21:00]

The field has been doing something fundamentally misguided. It’s been trying to shame people into change instead of inviting them into connection. And that’s never going to work because human beings don’t change when they’re judged. They change when they’re seen. When they know they matter.

Mattering Is a Core Part of the Foundation of Belonging, Not the Outcome

Mattering isn’t something leaders create through programs or initiatives. It’s a condition people feel when they genuinely know they’re valued. And it’s far more fundamental than belonging.

“When you get out of the hole, inclusion makes sense, belonging makes sense, mattering makes sense. These are things that touch us as individual human beings. And so if I’m going to reduce the distance between myself and you, then part of that is making sure I’m understanding you enough to know what matters to you.” [00:43:00]

What Fred describes here is something most organizations don’t prioritize. It’s not about understanding generic human needs. It’s about knowing—actually knowing—what matters to this particular person. What makes their work worthwhile? What gives them a sense of significance? That requires attention, care, and genuine relationship.

When I asked him to be specific about what mattering looks like in practice, he painted a picture that every employee should experience.

“I matter when I’m doing work that is worthwhile to me. I matter when my leader cares about me as a human being. I matter when I’m around people that I care about and who care about me. I matter in a place where I feel that I can grow, I can expand, I can be challenged.” [00:47:00]

This isn’t an abstraction or a philosophical idea without grounding. It’s reality. Work that feels meaningful. People who actually care about you. The ability to contribute something that matters. And all of it happens in the context of relationship, not in isolation.

When I brought up the crisis I’m seeing in organizations right now around AI displacement and people questioning their significance, Fred brought it back to what he sees as foundational.

“I have to be in relationship with people. For those conditions to occur, they don’t happen outside of relationships that matter. When we think about distance, we’re always thinking relationship always comes first. So it’s in the context of a relationship do I matter.” [00:46:00]

Organizations are trying to manage AI anxiety through communications strategies and upskilling programs. But Fred is saying the only thing that actually addresses significance anxiety is genuine relationship. Without that, all the policies in the world won’t change how people feel or how they show up in their work.

The Distance Paradigm Changes Everything

The distance paradigm sounds deceptively simple until you realize it reorganizes how you think about every leadership question. We’re not divided by our differences. We’re separated by emotional distance. And that distance is something we can intentionally close through relationship and genuine care.

“We connect as human beings. We do not connect as members of the different groups, tribes, or boxes. And as long as we think we do, all we do is harden the silos of difference, and hardening the silos of difference keeps us perpetually in conflict with one another.” [00:18:00]

This is the fundamental insight. Conflicts perpetuate because we believe the boxes are real. But what if they’re not? What if they’re just stories we tell ourselves that keep us separated? The halfway house example Fred uses illustrates this perfectly. When they changed from an “us-versus-them” dynamic to recognizing shared humanity, the outcomes transformed dramatically.

“When we changed that from not us and them to us. We went from sending 50% back to prison to sending 4% back. That required that we change how we thought about the work. We did not have control over them. They were always in control of themselves. When we connected with them as human beings, then they had to connect to each other as human beings.” [00:09:00]

That fifty to four percent shift wasn’t luck or sentiment. It’s what closing the distance looks like. When you stop seeing people as objects to control and start seeing them as human beings with agency and dignity. When they know they matter to you, behavior changes. Rules become easier to follow because people care about people who care about them.

“The only way you can get to know me is by getting close enough to me as a human being to connect with me. And you do that by hearing my stories, by listening to me, by being open enough yourself for me to start seeing those things in you. Our relationship is either strong or it’s not strong. It is resilient, or it’s not resilient. Our relationship is the thing that we tackle.” [00:33:00]

This is the practical application. Relationships are strong or weak, warm or cool, resilient or fragile. That’s what matters. Not the categories people belong to. Not the differences we assume divide us. But the actual quality of the connection between human beings.

Real Inclusion Work Requires Connection, Not Judgment

By the time we got to what needs to change in inclusion work, I had fundamental questions. If the paradigm itself is the problem, what does responsible inclusion work even look like? Fred’s answer was clarifying: the DEI field needs to stop defending and start questioning itself.

“The struggle is to be seen doing something, resisting working hard. We’ve been engaged in the struggle since the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s and 2000s. If you’re not trying to change something and produce different outcomes then you’re missing what John Wooden said: Don’t confuse doing stuff with accomplishment.” [01:15:00]

This landed hard for me. The field has been doing visible struggle for decades without producing fundamental change. We’ve been busy but not effective. We’ve been loud but not transformative. Activity isn’t accomplishment.

Fred was even more direct about what actually changes people.

“If you actually think that somebody is going to change because you’re scolding them, you’re simply not paying attention. They change when you connect with them as a human being. You change when you see them as human. Suddenly they’re not the worst person in the world, and you’re not the worst person in the world. Now our stories about each other can begin to change.” [01:15:00]

What works is connection. What works is seeing each other as human. What works is the possibility of changing our stories about each other. Not judgment. Not shame. Connection.

“It requires honesty. It requires that you allow inquiry to go on. It requires that you have conversations, and that you allow somebody inside of the tent to have these conversations. Because I’ve never been in the field, I don’t count, so I’ve never been bombarded with people calling me a traitor.” [01:07:00]

The DEI field’s biggest failure wasn’t any particular practice. It was that the field stopped questioning itself. It protected positions instead of pursuing truth. Transformation requires allowing disagreement, permitting questions, and being willing to say we got something wrong. Without that willingness, we stay stuck in the same paradigm.

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Key Takeaways

1. Mattering is the foundation of belonging, not an outcome of it. You can implement every inclusion policy in the world and still have people not feel they matter. When people genuinely matter to each other, everything else becomes possible.

2. The box is a tool we created and can stop using. We don’t have to lead with the category. We can choose to see the person first. That single shift changes the possibility of connection.

3. The distance paradigm says we’re separated, not divided. Distance is something we can close through relationships and genuine care. Division is something we believe is fundamental. Those are completely different problems.

4. Real inclusion work is about closing emotional distance, not managing categorical difference. What builds belonging in organizations is people knowing they matter. That requires leaders willing to care about people as human beings.

5. The DEI field’s biggest failure was self-protection instead of self-examination. Transformation requires allowing disagreement and being willing to admit we got something wrong.

About the Guest

Fred Falker is President of Falker Consulting Group, Inc., a consulting and human resource development training firm, and former Director of Workforce Development for the Saint Louis Zoo. With over 30 years of experience as an organizational development consultant, he has helped organizations with performance management, customer service, and inclusion and diversity consulting. His work at the Saint Louis Zoo focused on establishing the organization as one of the best places to work, serve, and volunteer in the country.

Fred has developed and introduced a fundamentally new approach that goes beyond today’s anti-racism and unconscious bias training. Instead of focusing on the differences between people, Fred focuses on the distance between them and the behaviors that drive genuine connection, inclusion, and belonging. This framework, known as The Distance Paradigm, challenges the foundational assumptions of mainstream diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work.

His thinking stands apart from conventional approaches in its insistence that connection flows from genuine relationship and care, not from awareness training or representation metrics. Fred’s willingness to challenge the foundational assumptions of an entire field marks him as someone more interested in transformation than in comfort.

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Resources:

• Robert L. Williams and Black Psychology Foundations - Fred cited Williams as one of the founders of Black psychology, who developed intelligence-testing instruments to demonstrate that differences don’t equal deficiencies. This foundational work shaped Fred’s approach to organizational thinking about difference.

• Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” - Fred used this as a reference to explain how we might question whether the differences we perceive are real or constructed.

• Arie de Geus’ “The Living Company” - Used as a metaphor for thinking about organizations as living organisms where people genuinely care for and about each other.

If you’ve been feeling stuck in inclusion work, if you’ve been questioning whether what you’ve been told to do actually moves anything forward, this conversation might be exactly what you need.

The real question is: are you ready to put the person before the box? Are you willing to build organizations where mattering is the foundation, not the afterthought?

Subscribe to the Reconstructing Inclusion Podcast to keep exploring what real transformation looks like.

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I wrote a book

Here’s the thing about the diversity space: we’ve been measuring the wrong things for decades. We’ve been counting heads in categories and calling it justice. But what if justice was never about representation? What if the whole framework needed to be rebuilt around something more fundamental?

I had a conversation with Dr. Steve L. Robbins, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Steve is a communication scientist, social psychologist, and neuroscientist who stumbled into the DEI space almost by accident. He doesn’t call himself a diversity expert. He calls himself a student of human behavior. And honestly, that distinction matters more than it might sound.

Steve grew up in inner-city Los Angeles after immigrating from Vietnam at age five. His story is not a simple one. His stepfather was abusive. His half-sister disappeared and is believed to have been killed. His mother, in the depths of severe depression, took her own life in 1991, just months after he got married and started graduate school at Michigan State University. What came out of that grief was a lifelong study of self-talk, the brain, and what it actually takes for human beings to feel like they matter.

What we talked about in this episode cuts across the neuroscience of pain and belonging, the limits of social justice framing in organizational settings, the ancient brain versus the modern brain, and why storytelling might be the most underused tool in the inclusion practitioner’s toolkit. This one is worth your time.

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Why the Early Diversity Movement Got the Measurement Wrong

One of the first things Steve said that made me stop and say, “You’re the first person besides me who has ever said that on my podcast,” was his point about the early diversity movement doing a disservice. Not because social justice is wrong. But because the indicator of justice got confused with the actual work.

“If those two movements were the catalyst for the work, it was constructed around justice, social justice, and fairness. But I think where we went wrong is we said that from a science perspective, the indicator of justice is how many people we have in certain categories. And that’s a bad indicator of justice.” [00:12:00]

That framing stuck with me because it names something I’ve pushed back on for years. Representation for its own sake is not justice. It’s optics. When you build the entire infrastructure of diversity, equity, and inclusion around demographic counts, you end up with an approach that fights back against itself depending on who’s in the room. Steve put it plainly: if your audience believes life isn’t fair and doesn’t resonate with a social justice lens, you’ve already lost the room before you’ve said anything useful.

The key insight here is not that social justice framing is wrong but that it’s audience-dependent. And most practitioners have never done the work of adapting the message. That’s not care. That’s preaching.

The Brain Doesn’t Do Diversity. It Does Tribe.

One of the most clarifying things Steve said was about how the brain actually processes what we call “diversity dimensions.” Race, gender, department, geography, whether you grew up in rural or urban America, the brain reduces all of it to one binary: are you in my tribe or not?

“Every dimension of diversity, whether it’s race, gender, what department you work in, what country you live in, any dimension of diversity, our brain breaks all that down into insider versus outsider. Our brain is always asking, ‘Are you part of my tribe or not part of my tribe?’” [00:10:00]

This is where Steve’s work gets interesting, because if the brain’s operating logic is always tribal, then leading with racial or demographic categories as the primary organizing principle of inclusion work may actually be reinforcing the very thing it’s trying to dismantle. We’re re-tribing people by the way they look rather than creating conditions where the brain experiences a broader definition of tribe.

Steve also brought in Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman’s neuroscience research to explain why exclusion is not a soft issue. When someone feels excluded, the same regions of the brain light up as when they experience physical pain. The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the right ventral prefrontal cortex activate in both cases. Pain demands attentional resources. You can’t optimize, collaborate, or perform when your brain is simultaneously managing safety signals. The cost is real, and it lands on the bottom line. Steve’s go-to move with skeptical leaders is sports. How important is mental state on the court? They always say it’s everything. Then apply that same logic to the workplace. Once you do, the business case for belonging writes itself.

The HERO Skills and the Ancient Brain Tax

Steve introduced his framework: HERO Skills, which stands for Humility, Empathy, Reflection, and Open-mindedness. The foundational skill of the four is reflection.

“We react without permission. Our ancient brain reacts without permission. Conscious permission. Response is more deliberate and intentional.” [00:29:00]

The ancient brain, what Daniel Kahneman calls System One, runs 70 to 80 percent of our waking hours. It’s fast, automatic, emotionally reactive, and built for the Serengeti, not a 2026 workplace. The problem isn’t that it exists. It’s that we don’t notice when it’s driving. Reflection is how the modern brain catches up.

I mentioned that I’d seen something Andreessen wrote about never self-reflecting, never being introspective, and that he thought it was unhelpful. Steve’s response was direct. If someone has enough power that they feel no cost to their choices, they stop updating their behavior. And the people around them start walking on eggshells. The cost isn’t felt by the person who refuses to reflect. It’s absorbed by everyone else. That’s an organizational pathology, not just a personality quirk. And right now, I see it everywhere.

Preparing the Pond: Why Environment Determines Whether People Stay

Steve shared a story from his book, What If: Short Stories to Spark Inclusion and Diversity Dialogue.

He has a pond on his property in Michigan. It has bass and sunfish, hardy fish that can tolerate wide temperature swings. But Steve grew up fishing for trout on the West Coast, and he wanted trout in his pond. Problem: trout suffocate above 70 degrees. They need cooler water and more oxygen. A local expert told him what to do to prepare the environment. Steve bought hundreds of trout. He never prepared the pond.

“I wanted the trout, but I didn’t make their environment hospitable to them. Not because I didn’t want to. It wasn’t intentional that I put them in dangerous environments. I really wanted them, but I just didn’t do what I was supposed to do.” [00:16:00]

Organizations do this constantly. They recruit for diversity and wonder why people leave. They want different perspectives and different backgrounds, but they haven’t changed the temperature of the water. What Steve adds is the part that usually gets cut: if you prepare the environment for the trout, you also make it better for the bass and the sunfish. Creating conditions where people who are different can thrive actually improves the environment for everyone. That’s not a soft argument. That’s systems thinking applied to human performance.

Storytelling as an Inclusion Technology

I asked Steve about S2S Studios, a filmmaking company he started that hired primarily women with four-year degrees in film who could only get work as makeup artists on set. The idea was simple: people whose stories don’t get out there need mechanisms for them to be told.

“S2S stands for Something to Say. It was about storytelling for people whose stories don’t get out there and aren’t often heard by enough people.” [00:38:00]

This matters because the brain is wired for narrative. Story is how information survived before computers. The brain evolved to understand and retain information through story because it reduces uncertainty. And organizations that don’t hear the stories of the people inside them aren’t just being impolite. They’re making worse decisions. They’re sitting on perspectives and insights that represent competitive advantage, and they’re not converting it because they haven’t created the conditions for those stories to be told or heard.

I believe inclusion is a willingness to be influenced by the so-called other. Storytelling is the mechanism. And right now, too many organizations are buying compute and missing the gold mine already in the room.

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Key Takeaways

1. The brain reduces all diversity to tribe. Before any organizational logic kicks in, the brain is asking one question: insider or outsider? Inclusion work that doesn’t address this binary at the neurological level is working around the actual problem rather than through it.

2. Social pain is processed as physical pain. Exclusion, incivility, and being made to feel like an outsider activate the same neural pathways as being physically hurt. Attentional resources consumed by pain cannot be used for performance. This is the real business case for belonging.

3. Reflection is a skill, not a personality trait. The HERO Skills framework grounds reflection as the foundational capacity for catching the ancient brain before it reacts. Organizations and individuals that stop reflecting stop learning. And the costs are carried by the people around them, not the person who refuses to update.

4. Preparing the environment is the actual work. Wanting diversity without changing conditions is like putting trout in a 75-degree pond. What you do for the fish that need different conditions makes things better for every fish. Inclusion isn’t about accommodating outsiders at the expense of insiders. It’s about raising the baseline for everyone.

5. Storytelling is an underused inclusion technology. The brain evolved for narrative. Perspectives that never get told are perspectives that never get integrated. Organizations miss strategic insight when they don’t create conditions for diverse stories to be heard and valued.

About the Guest

Dr. Steve L. Robbins is a communication scientist, social psychologist, and cognitive neuroscientist who has spent decades studying one question: why do smart, well-intentioned people still get in their own way?

His academic background across communication science, social psychology, and cognitive neuroscience forms the foundation of everything he does. But his entry into this work wasn’t purely academic. It was personal. His life experiences shaped a deep commitment to understanding human behavior from the inside out, and that authenticity shows up in every room he walks into.

Dr. Steve is an internationally recognized speaker and workshop facilitator whose presentation style has been described as a mix of Bill Nye the Science Guy, Saturday Night Live, and The Big Bang Theory. For more than two decades, he has worked with organizations including Coca-Cola, Disney, Microsoft, NASA, Walmart, Toyota, Amazon, Ford, and the NBA, helping them build high-performance environments where the human brain can actually do its best work.

His signature frameworks, the HERO Skills (Humility, Empathy, Reflection, and Open-Mindedness) and the 3R’s of Intentional Behavior (Recognition, Reflection, and Response), give leaders and teams a practical, science-grounded path to better decisions, stronger relationships, and cultures where people genuinely want to show up.

Learn more at S.L. Robbins & Associates.

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Resources:

• HERO Skills Framework by Dr. Steve L. Robbins: Humility, Empathy, Reflection, Open-mindedness. The model Steve uses with organizations to shift from reactive (ancient brain) to intentional (modern brain) behavior. Reflection is the foundational skill.

• “What If: Short Stories to Spark Inclusion & Diversity Dialogue” by Dr. Steve L. Robbins. The book Steve references throughout, including the rainbow trout story. Highly recommended as a practitioner resource.

• “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. Steve’s reference point for the ancient brain / modern brain distinction. Kahneman calls them System One and System Two. The framework maps directly onto how we understand reactivity and reflection.

• “On Caring” by Milton Mayeroff. One of my favorite philosophy texts and one I return to often. It articulates caring as a reciprocal, interdependent way of being. Mayeroff argues that to truly care for someone is to help them grow, and that in their growth lies your own.

• Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion on social pain and the neural overlap between physical and emotional pain. If you’ve never looked at this work, it is worth an hour of your time. It changes how you understand what exclusion actually costs.

If you found value in this conversation, subscribe to the newsletter and share this post with someone in your organization who needs to hear it. The work of building cultures where people actually matter is ongoing, and it's better done together.

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I wrote a book

For many years, and particularly over the past six years, the predominant characteristic of programs related to inclusion or so-called DEI has been to operate on a paradigm of distinguishing one group identity from another, flattening many into binaries positioned as opposites.

It hasn’t been helpful. In fact, it has fueled division, emboldened bad-faith actors, and amplified silliness from the mouths of “influencers” who have captured the narrative of inclusion.

Those who considered themselves anti-DEI had never practiced any sort of organizational development beyond what they might have been required to do for compliance reasons when working for larger U.S. corporations. That didn’t stop them from taking an authoritative tone about what they perceived DEI to be. In the process, they collapsed anything related to it into a frame that met their objectives, be they attention, political expedience, or, for the most fervent anti-DEI actors, well-paying jobs.

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So, what is the interdependence problem?

In a system, there are parts and wholes. The relationship between those parts determines much of what transpires within that system. That is also contingent on the perspectives held by actors in the system and the distinctions they draw among those parts.

Interdependence exists whether we want it to or not. It creates the possibility for both collective opportunity and systemic failure. Which of those outcomes one gets depends on the diversity in the system, the rules of interaction and engagement, and how feedback is processed.

Donella Meadows said, “We can’t impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.”

This is the nature of interdependence. Genuine transformation cannot be imposed on a system. It has to emerge from within it. Listening, discovering our respective properties and values, can work together for something much greater than a solo opinion, action, or individual aspiration can generate.

During the global pandemic and right after the death of George Floyd, the opportunity to address the ever-lurking vestiges of race and racism led to marches around the world. What came out of those marches was not a transformative way of talking, listening, and learning about race and its inevitable consequences and how we can make a shift. Rather, what emerged was a power vacuum that a few actors, mostly in good faith but not necessarily with deep discernment or wisdom about likely tradeoffs, began to fill.

The conundrum deepened as those who gravitated toward that vacuum, driven by a desire to be a voice for the voiceless and a stand against oppressive systems, failed to stop and consider their vision and who needed to be part of it. Many were animated by a quote from Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.”

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What wasn’t repeated, and likely wasn’t read by most using that quote to stir emotion, was the entirety of the August 3, 1857, speech. Perhaps one of the greatest speeches from one of the greatest human beings in world history, it was about the necessity of struggle. Written at a time when abolition efforts were accelerating among European countries (eight years before the passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution), particularly the British Empire, which had enslaved millions across the world, it told the story of the men and women, freemen and enslaved, privileged by the color of their skin and disadvantaged by it, who worked in solidarity toward the end of chattel slavery. He did not hold back on what that would take. The sacrifice, the inevitable struggle, the necessity of a conviction that might result in unrecoverable loss.

Douglass, naming those who had put everything on the line, said:

“Hence, my friends, every mother who, like Margaret Garner, plunges a knife into the bosom of her infant to save it from the hell of our Christian slavery, should be held and honored as a benefactress. Every fugitive from slavery who, like the noble William Thomas at Wilkes Barre, prefers to perish in a river made red by his own blood to submission to the hell hounds who were hunting and shooting him should be esteemed as a glorious martyr, worthy to be held in grateful memory by our people. The fugitive Horace, at Mechanicsburg, Ohio, the other day, who taught the slave catchers from Kentucky that it was safer to arrest white men than to arrest him, did a most excellent service to our cause. Parker and his noble band of fifteen at Christiana, who defended themselves from the kidnappers with prayers and pistols, are entitled to the honor of making the first successful resistance to the Fugitive Slave Bill.”

To read that passage now is to be stopped cold by the depth of what those people carried. The literal soul-in-the-game of those he names is beyond comprehension for most of us. It is a weight that should accompany any invocation of Douglass’ words.

What is also striking is that both those who support and those who oppose so-called DEI could find meaning in that speech. Douglass evokes Lajos Kossuth, who led the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 against the Austrian Empire. He references the grit of the Turks, who were knocked down repeatedly across 350 years of war with Russia, and kept rising. He invokes Daniel O’Connell, whose nonviolent mass mobilization and moral force efforts led to the Catholic Relief Act of 1829. The speech is clearly framed for the greater good of humanity.

And the passage that most needed to lead the anti-racism discourse of 2020 was not the kind of quote that ends up on signs or in social media posts. I wish it had been so. My belief is that it would have produced a more productive and unified way forward in addressing inequity. If the narrative about transcending our incomplete understanding of race and racism could have started with reading that speech in its entirety, we would be further along. Together.

Had the excerpt below served as the rallying cry, contextualized to the current day, the result would not have been contention, political bad faith, and a reinforcement of division. It would have set us up to address the inequalities now emerging through AI and the companies profiting from it, companies largely indifferent to who gets displaced in the process.

The passage that needed to lead said:

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.”

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Here is the conundrum: the very work that both pro- and anti-DEI actors argue over must be practiced in an interdependent way to have any meaningful impact. There is no version of this that works any other way.

If the impact of so-called DEI was little more than legal risk mitigation, personal or political gain, with little to no genuine improvement in the lives of people, their communities, and the organizations they work within, then whatever persists from it will produce net negative results. There is no other probable outcome.

Whether anti-DEI or pro-DEI, interdependence is at play. Both sides are operating without recognizing that planetary existence, let alone inclusion, is a “We” thing. Not a both-sides thing. Something closer to a spherical reality, one where you cannot locate a “side” no matter where you stand.

We draw lines in our heads. In reality, the lines don’t exist. Fred Falker, who has joined me on the Reconstructing Inclusion podcast and will return for another episode, holds the philosophy that we are not divided by our differences; we are separated by distance. Using the nine-dot puzzle as a metaphor, he illustrates in his TEDx talk how our perceived limitations most often exist only in our minds.

Anti-DEI and Pro-DEI, and perhaps a third category of the simply indifferent, are caught in what Dr. King called an inescapable network of mutuality:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States [or on the planet for that matter] can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

So-called DEI, as it was commonly understood and practiced from 2020 onward, was destined for its current state. The framing was too narrow, the coalition too thin, and the resistance to perspectives outside a particular anti-racist discourse left little room for the kind of broad engagement that transformation actually requires. Now, as the rhetoric of recent years faces mounting scrutiny, including more consistently from DEI advocates (other than me), there is a genuine opportunity to reframe.

It won’t come through legal mandates or training programs alone. It will require us to reckon with a conundrum co-created by all of us, rooted in the failure to acknowledge that our collective mental models have produced the current state of our organizations and institutions. The only way to transform those models is together.

Together doesn’t mean agreement. It doesn’t mean shared ideology. It means that people on every side of this issue become willing to recognize that the sides themselves are an illusion. An incomplete perception of human reality and the complexity of the systems we all inhabit.

We are constantly reinventing our perception of the system and nudging it in directions we rarely fully understand. The more we recognize how our perspectives are entangled with the perceptions of those we call other, the more we open ourselves to being influenced by them. That opening is where possibility lives. It is the move from clinging to a fragment of reality toward embracing the whole of it, with all the messiness that entails. To do that consistently and with intention is, I consider, the pathway to being the change we seek. A pathway to transformation that can endure the tests of these times.

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This episode almost didn’t happen. Peter Swimm and I first tried to record back in December and had every technical issue you could imagine. After more than an hour of conversation, I looked up and realized I’d never hit record. I told people afterward it was the best podcast I’d never made.

So when Peter came back for round two, I was ready. Hearing some of it a second time made it land with more impact. Reframing almost always leads to hearing more of what was always there.

Since I wrote, Reconstructing Inclusion and the chapter on AI and [so-called] DEI, there’s been a version of the AI and inclusion conversation that stays pretty surface-level.

Diverse hiring at tech companies and beyond. AI being bias amplifiers. Those things matter, but they’re not the whole picture. The gap that few people name is deeper than that: it’s about who shapes the logic of the system, who gets consulted when something breaks, and who gets quietly failed when the technology works exactly as designed, just not for them.

Peter Swimm has been working at that gap for over three decades. He’s the founder of Toilville, a consultancy that builds conversational AI systems across contact centers, healthcare, retail, and beyond. He was doing this work before most people had a name for it. He also grew up on Devon Avenue in Chicago’s West Ridge neighborhood, a street where you can walk from the Israeli neighborhood through Indian, Pakistani, Korean, Serbian, and Polish communities all the way to Lake Michigan. That backstory shapes everything about how he thinks.

What I appreciate about Peter is that he works inside the industry and stays genuinely skeptical of it. He’s asking who gets harmed when systems fail, whose perspective shaped the algorithm, and why moving fast so often ends up meaning moving past accountability. That’s the through line for everything we got into.

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The Cart Is Leading the Horse

Early in the conversation, Peter pushed back on the idea that AI is just something happening to us. His whole practice is built around a different question: does this technology actually fit how people work, or are people bending themselves to fit the technology?

He used a framing I’ve been thinking about ever since. At [00:10:00]:

“Tech in large part, especially SaaS services, try to be like Walmart to people as opposed to being a nice tailored suit. And that’s just because it’s hard to do all that at scale. But also now we have the ability to make frameworks that you can tailor something incredibly bespoke and it’s not gonna cost a hundred thousand dollars and take six months.”

I think about this with my own work all the time. The tools I’ve tried to build into my business, the systems I’ve tested, so much of that friction comes from trying to stuff what I actually do into a container that was built for someone else’s workflow. Peter’s example of his insurance broker client makes it concrete: the guy’s whole value is in being present with clients, knowing their families, building real relationships. Not in being a good note-taker. So Peter built him a system where he just shows up and talks, and the transcription does the rest. That’s not replacing the human. It’s clearing space for the thing only the human can do.

What he said right before that is worth holding onto too:

“Technology will make you work faster, but not necessarily better. And I think there’s also you need to find out if I can do things ten times faster, what if I stay at the same speed and do it five times better?” [00:08:00]

Speed has become the whole metric in this moment. Peter’s asking us to at least consider the other option.

Devon Avenue and the Algorithm

This was the part of the conversation I keep coming back to. Peter grew up in a neighborhood so diverse that diversity was just the world. His first-grade teacher was Korean-born, his fourth-grade teacher was from the Philippines. He was a “white” kid in a school that was 60% female and 75% non-white, and he didn’t think about it because it was just where he lived.

Then he moved and realized that’s not most people’s experience.

He uses Devon Avenue as shorthand for what it actually means to have real diversity of perspective inside a system. Not a United Colors of Benetton campaign. The kind of embedded, lived-experience diversity that changes how you see a problem before you start building.

Here’s what he says about why that matters technically. At [00:25:00]:

“When we talk about hallucinations, they’re almost like bias at scale, because there’s no one around to read and say, oh yeah, that law thing you cited in court doesn’t exist.”

That’s isn’t a simple glitchy machine, it’s a people gap. Peter raised the SAT question that surfaced years ago: which of these places can you cash a paycheck? Options included a bank, a credit exchange, and a liquor store. The liquor store was marked wrong. But in a lot of American cities, liquor stores that cash checks are more accessible at 2 a.m. than any bank. Nobody who wrote that question lived near one. The gap wasn’t in the data. It was in the room where the question got written.

That’s what happens when you build without “Devon Avenue” represented. Systems that work fine for the people who designed them and quietly fail everyone else.

This is way beyond the hiring argument. It’s not just about what identity characteristics are placed on your team. It’s about whether those people have genuine access to decision-making, or whether they’re there for representation purposes while the core logic gets set by a narrower group. At [00:45:00]:

“When we talk about having diverse voices, it’s also implied that they have diverse opportunities to express their diverse voices... there’s no shielding from barenaked facts policy.”

Celebrating a 0.5% diversity increase when you’re at 11% in a county that’s 73% non-white is not a win. It’s a data point that needs to be interrogated. What part of the county has a say in the policy decisions of the majority?

What Happens When It Doesn’t Work?

This is the question Peter says almost never gets asked. The first question in any project is “what you want to build?” The second question is “what happens when it doesn’t work?” And in his experience, that second question gets skipped constantly.

At [00:28:00]:

“If I was building a building and they had a bunch of rules for fire regulations, you would have to have all those in place before they let you inhabit the building. And I think technology should be held to the same standard.”

He walked me through a real case: a food ordering bot that launched with terrible customer satisfaction scores. The team spent an hour in a meeting talking about training data and AI improvements. Peter finally asked what happens when an order is wrong. The answer was that the customer had to call the store. “Was that in the bot? No. So the system could take your money but had no path to fix a mistake.”

A hypothetical failure mode? No. It’s the default failure mode of technology built for a demo rather than for real people navigating real problems.

And here’s where it connects to inclusion directly. The people who know where the system actually breaks are usually the frontline workers. The customer service rep who’s handled every edge case, whose knowledge of what goes wrong is precisely what you’d need to design something that works. At [00:18:00]:

“There are people there that were genuinely really good at their jobs. And those are the people that I think of as: how do we protect them and how do we get them amplified?”

That question is the inclusion question in the AI conversation that most people aren’t asking.

They Need Us More Than We Need Them

This might be the most reorienting idea in the whole episode. We were near the end of the conversation and Peter said something that stopped me. I asked him to say it again.

At [00:51:00]:

“If they didn’t need us, they would be able to train entirely on open domain data made before the 1800s. They have 30,000 years of human civilization they could have trained with. But it didn’t work because they need constantly new and evolving data. Society is not a piece of amber, it’s constantly changing.”

Sit with that for a second. The companies positioning themselves as landlords of the new economy need our attention, our conversations, our daily behavior to keep their models current. Without fresh human-generated data, the systems lose relevance. That’s not a small leverage point.

Peter isn’t naive about what these companies have in terms of capital and influence. But he’s also seen enough hype cycles to know that platforms come and go. He’s had a LiveJournal, a MySpace, a Facebook, a Twitter. The social graph isn’t the platform. It’s you and your people. At some point, if the bar is bad enough, you find a new bar.

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Key Takeaways

1. Faster is not the same as better. The pressure to use AI for speed is real. But the question worth asking is: what if you stayed at the same speed and did the work five times better?

2. Hallucinations are bias at scale. When the people building systems don’t have Devon Avenue in their life experience, they build for a narrower world. Diverse representation in hiring is a start. What actually changes the output is whether those voices shape the decisions.

3. Build for failure from day one. “What happens when this doesn’t work?” is the question that separates a demo from something real. If AI is touching people’s lives, someone needs to answer that before launch, not after the satisfaction scores come in.

4. We have more leverage than the current narrative suggests. AI companies need fresh human-generated data to stay relevant. That’s a negotiating position, not just a nice idea.

5. The goal is to amplify what only humans can do. Find the people who are genuinely good at their jobs and build systems that clear space for them. That’s a better north star than replacing as much as possible.

About the Guest

Peter Swimm is the founder and CEO of Toilville, a consultancy helping organizations use AI without losing the institutional knowledge and human expertise that actually make them good at what they do. He’s spent over 30 years in tech, including a decade specifically in conversational AI, building systems for companies like Walmart, Chipotle, and Lowe’s before leading generative AI work at Microsoft Copilot Studio. He co-founded Talkabot, the industry’s first dedicated conversational AI conference, and got his start teaching Chicago communities how to use the internet at the public library in 1996. His core belief hasn’t changed since then: the best systems amplify human excellence rather than replace it. You can reach him at toilville.com.

Peter is a vocal advocate for ethical, human-centered AI implementation. He argues that truly inclusive AI isn’t just about auditing for bias after the fact. It requires diverse voices shaping the logic of systems from the start, building in accountability for when things go wrong, and designing technology that works for the people least likely to be in the room when decisions get made.

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Resources:

• Toilville — If you’re at a nonprofit or just starting and have questions about AI and automation, Peter answers his own email. Find him at toilville.com.

• Richard Feynman’s autobiography (Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!) — One of the books that shaped how Peter thinks about systems and the relationship between science, culture, and the limits of expertise.

• Nick Seaver’s work on algorithmic systems — Seaver’s anthropological research on how algorithms are built through collective authorship, often producing outputs that are unpredictable even to the people building them. I referenced this in the conversation in the context of governance and who actually shapes the code.

There’s more in this episode than one listen fully absorbs. Share it with someone in tech, someone in HR, or someone building an inclusion strategy who hasn’t yet grappled with what AI actually means for their work.

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I wrote a book

What kept surfacing was how often we conflate two things that are not the same: belonging and mattering. People can feel like they belong to a team and still not believe their perspectives are being considered. That gap is real, and the cost of it is tangible. In organizations navigating uncertainty, restructuring, and the growing presence of AI in knowledge work, it’s compounding in ways most leaders aren’t seeing yet.

When I say mattering matters, I’m not talking about morale. I’m talking about a survival instinct we’ve been ignoring at work.

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The Financial Services Team and the Running Faucets

A few years ago, I worked with a financial services leadership team. Experienced people, long tenures, strong relationships. By every visible measure, they were healthy. Then pressure hit, in the form of an ambitious long-range plan with no extra resources to execute on it.

What I started picking up in the margins, during breaks and one-on-ones, was that real concerns were never making it into the room. Questions about whether the plan was realistic. Assumptions nobody had stress-tested. Their chief legal officer, probably the most vocal person on that team, told me there were things he didn’t feel he could say out loud in a meeting.

What was happening wasn’t cruelty or exclusion. It was what Gordon Flett calls “anti-mattering”: the accumulated experience of feeling invisible or insignificant. Flett’s research is clear that this is not a morale problem. It produces allostatic load, the physical toll chronic stress places on the body. And it rarely announces itself:

“Most leaders I work with genuinely care about their people. But anti-mattering is rarely the result of one dramatic moment. It builds slowly, and by the time it shows up as silence or people going adrift or disengagement, the faucet has been running for a long time.” [00:11:48]

That image comes from a story Zach Mercurio tells. A five-year-old told his mother he didn’t feel as loved as his brothers. When she asked why, he said: when my brothers talk to you, you turn off the kitchen faucet to listen. When I talk, the water keeps running.

Most of organizational life is full of running faucets. The people holding back in your meetings aren’t disengaged. They’ve just stopped believing the room needs what they have.

Belonging Gets You In. Mattering Is What Happens Next.

Belonging asks: am I welcome here? Mattering asks: am I consequential here? You can answer yes to the first and no to the second, and when that happens, something dims inside people that is hard to recover without intentional effort.

Mercurio’s indispensability test captures this well. Belonging is being picked for the team. Mattering is the felt sense that the team would be genuinely incomplete without you, specifically. Most people, if they sit honestly with that question, aren’t sure they’d pass. That uncertainty is doing real work underneath every meeting and every moment when someone had something to say and kept it to themselves.

Isaac Prilleltensky’s definition sharpens it further: mattering is feeling valued by the people around you and adding value to the people around you. It’s not about being appreciated in a general sense. It’s about clarity that you’re contributing something outcome-changing that would be missed if you weren’t there.

And we are born needing this. Mercurio talks about the grasp reflex, the instinct newborns have to reach toward someone when you put a finger out. None of us would have survived infancy without mattering enough to someone to keep us alive. It doesn’t disappear when we join organizations. It gets suppressed when the environment doesn’t meet it.

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The EQ-CQ-Mattering Chain

Emotional intelligence and cultural intelligence show up in a lot of organizations’ inclusion and leadership work. What I’ve been working through is where mattering sits in relation to both.

Goleman’s EQ framework, self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, motivation, and social skills, is the internal infrastructure that makes mattering possible. But there’s a gap inside the EQ conversation we underemphasize: knowing what you bring is not the same as believing you can deploy it.

“I’ve worked with highly self-aware people who couldn’t articulate their strengths clearly and consistently held back in high-stakes rooms. They just went silent, not because they lacked insight, but because they had stopped trusting that their contribution would change anything. The awareness was intact. The agency was not.” [00:17:46]

Bandura’s work on self-efficacy explains this: when people stop believing their actions lead to outcomes, they stop acting. Right now, with uncertainty around what AI changes, many people are revising that internal evidence downward. That’s a self-efficacy crisis running underneath what looks, on the surface, like a culture or engagement problem.

Cultural intelligence adds what EQ alone can’t address. Your relational skills have to travel. What reads as empathy in one context can land as intrusive in another. CQ is what makes mattering portable, allowing you to create the conditions for others to feel significant across difference, not just within the familiar.

The chain: EQ helps you know your value and gives you the agency to bring it into the room. CQ helps you carry it across differences and deliver it in a form people can receive. Mattering is the confirmation that it landed.

In a world where machines are taking on more of what we used to call intelligence work, that chain is the most important capacity we can develop.

The “If It Weren’t for You” Practice

Mercurio identifies three things that create mattering in practice: being noticed, being affirmed, and being needed. The practice I’ve been using with teams is deceptively simple: “If it weren’t for you.”

Pick a colleague and complete the sentence with real specificity. Not “you’re a great team player.” The question to anchor on is:

“What did they do? Why did it matter? What would have been missed or lost, or maybe even could have gone off the rails without them? What’s their impact?” [00:24:57]

In a session with a financial services team, a senior researcher said to a junior colleague: “if it weren’t for you challenging my assumptions about transaction cost modeling, I would have recommended deploying a strategy with negative expected returns after costs. Your rigor saved us from a multimillion-dollar mistake.”

That is not a compliment. That is confirmation of significance. Mattering made visible.

From a life sciences team, a director to a regional salesperson: “if it weren’t for your clinical expertise and that challenging conversation with the cardiology department, we wouldn’t have secured their partnership. Your ability to translate complex science into clinical value is irreplaceable.”

Irreplaceable. That word lands in a way nothing generic ever could. It’s the direct opposite of “cog in a machine,” and it’s what people are most hungry for right now, when everything around them is asking whether they’re still needed.

Who on your team needs to hear the specific version of how they matter? Not next week. Today.

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Key Takeaways

1. Belonging and mattering are not the same thing. Belonging asks if someone is welcome. Mattering asks if they’re consequential. Teams can score high on belonging and still be quietly losing the most valuable thing their people have to offer.

2. Anti-mattering builds slowly and shows up late. By the time someone goes silent or disengages, the faucet has been running for a long time.

3. The EQ-CQ-mattering chain is what machines can’t replicate. EQ gives people the agency to bring their value into the room. CQ helps them deliver it across difference. Mattering is the confirmation it landed.

4. Specificity is what makes recognition land. A clearly named consequence rebuilds self-efficacy and loosens the protective behaviors that keep people from showing up fully.

Resources:

• Zach Mercurio’s work on mattering, including the “noticed, affirmed, and needed” framework

• Isaac Prilleltensky on mattering as feeling valued and adding value

• Gordon Flett’s research on anti-mattering

• Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence (EQ) framework

• Cultural intelligence (CQ) framework by Soon Ang, Linn Van Dyne, and David Livermore

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I wrote a book

I have been sitting with a distinction for a while now that I think is extremely relevant for the moment we are in. It is the difference between belonging and mattering.

First, I want to be clear: I am not here to knock belonging. Being welcomed, included, seen as part of something real, that is foundational. None of what I am about to say changes that.

But belonging alone is not enough for what is happening in the world of work right now. We need to face that reality.

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The question underneath the question

Belonging asks: Am I welcome here?

Mattering asks: Am I consequential here?

Those are measurably different questions. You can belong to something and still feel peripheral to it. You can be warmly included and still feel like a cog in the always-on organizational machine.

I have talked to people and worked with teams that performed as a team that gets along well, said the culture was fine, that nobody was being excluded, and still felt like their presence was not meaningfully changing anything.

That is an acutely discomforting place to be. And it is more common than many who have anchored on the belonging conversation, particularly in the rush to rebrand so-called DEI efforts, tend to acknowledge.

Isaac Prilleltensky, one of the leading mattering scholars, defines mattering as: feeling valued by the people around you and adding value to the people around you.

That two-part definition is important. It is not just about being appreciated. It is about contributing something that people actually receive. Something that changes outcomes. Something that would be missed if you were not there.

Right now, with the reshaping of human contribution, organizations are wrestling daily with trade-offs about their workforce. Many people are genuinely asking themselves whether their role still counts. It is a mattering question that sits differently from a belonging question. People are not just asking if they belong somewhere. They are asking if they are unique. Those are not the same thing, and we must stop treating them as if they are.

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What I keep seeing in organizations under pressure

I have been working in the people experience, culture, and inclusion space for a couple of decades, across many industries and local and global cultures. The recurrent pattern is clear: when people do not feel valued and useful, they protect themselves. They stop saying what is true. They say aye! in meetings and let decisions drift. They go quiet exactly when the team needs them at their most incisive and vocal.

When truth disappears inside a team, delivery suffers. Every time. That is not an abstract culture problem. It is a mattering problem. People do not show up fully in rooms where they do not believe their presence is making a difference.

I recently ran open sessions with over a hundred professionals in and outside of the HR, culture, and inclusion space from around the world and asked them to say in one word: What shows up most when pressure rises at work?

What came back was: conflict, egos, fear, micromanagement, silence, avoidance. Every one of those is a symptom of people not feeling valued, secure in role, or significant enough to bring the truth into the room. They are protecting themselves because the environment is not confirming their mattering.

Let me also comment on AI directly, as it is almost a requirement when writing about organizations. AI does what it does increasingly well and exponentially faster than humans.

What it cannot do is the sense-making that happens when a colleague finally reveals what they were holding back and the room has to digest it. No machine can output what a unique mental model that doesn’t exist beyond an individual’s embodied experience can.

Moments of realness shift conversations and are irreplaceable. The people who create those moments are the ones who feel like they matter. They believe their voice will land somewhere, with someone, on something of significance. That is leadership. Title and hierarchy are beside the point.

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Where EQ and CQ come into this

We stack two things in the culture and inclusion pile fairly naturally: emotional intelligence (EQ) and cultural intelligence (CQ).

EQ, in Goleman’s framing, gives you self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and social skills. Through the lens of mattering, EQ helps you know, with confidence that comes from deliberate practice, what you bring to the table each day. Without self-awareness, you cannot accurately read your own contribution. Without emotional regulation, you cannot receive honest feedback about it. Without cognitive and/or compassionate empathy, you cannot create the conditions for others to recognize how they matter to those around them. Several components of EQ are foundational to the infrastructure that makes mattering possible.

But knowing what you bring is only half of it. The other half is believing you can actually deploy it. That is the self-efficacy piece, and it is where many people get stuck.

Self-efficacy, the belief in your capacity to act and produce a [desired] result, is what turns awareness into agency. You can know your strengths and still hold back in a meeting because you have stopped trusting that your contribution will make a difference. That is especially common in environments where people have been laid off, roles are shifting, and AI is doing things that used to (and likely still does) require more of their expertise. People have self-awareness. Their agency has gone quiet. Without agency, mattering stays potential. That potential rarely, if ever, emerges fully expressed.

This is why creating the conditions for mattering is not just about recognition. It is about restoring people’s belief that what they do is consequential. That their judgment is needed. That what they are thinking of saying is worth saying. When that belief is alive, people act. When it is not, we get silence, drift, and avoidance.

Cultural Intelligence (CQ) in the Ang, Van Dyne, and Livermore framework adds what EQ alone does not fully cover. Your emotional attunement and relational skills have to be calibrated to context. What reads as empathetic in one culture can land as intrusive in another. What counts as strong communication in one organizational subculture might read as too blunt or not direct enough somewhere else. Your mattering has to travel. CQ is what makes it portable.

So here is the chain, not strictly causal but associated and likely correlated: EQ helps you know your value. CQ helps you deliver it across the tensions and complexities of difference and similarity. Mattering is the confirmation that it actually landed somewhere real, for someone real, and that you received something real back.

In a world where machines are taking on more and more cognitive labor, that human chain is the most important thing we can develop in ourselves and in the leadership we cultivate. Build all the agents you desire; the winners of the AI race will learn faster than their competition how relational humans drive the loop that AI accentuates. Not the other way around. Those taking this route will experience some version of FAFO.

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Something you can do today

One practice I use with teams is called ‘if it weren’t for you.’ It sounds simple. It is. But the impact is not simple at all.

You think of a colleague, a direct report, someone you work alongside. And you complete this sentence specifically, not generally: “If it weren’t for you…”

Not: you are a great team player. Not: I appreciate you. Specifically. What did they do? Why did it matter? What would have been missed, lost, or gone off the rails without them?

Here is an example (lightly edited to anonymize it) from a session with a financial services team. A senior researcher said to a junior researcher: “If it weren’t for you challenging my assumptions about transaction cost modeling, I would have recommended deploying a strategy with negative expected returns after costs. Your rigor saved us from a potentially multi-million dollar mistake.”

The intention was not to give a compliment. The purpose is a confirmation of consequence and articulation of value. The junior researcher now knows, in concrete terms, that their presence changed an outcome. Mattering was made visible.

Here is another one from a life sciences team (also anonymized). A director to a regional salesperson: “If it weren’t for your clinical expertise and that challenging conversation with the cardiology department, we wouldn’t have secured their partnership. Your ability to translate complex science into clinical value is irreplaceable.”

That word, irreplaceable, sticks to your ribs. It is durable and signals uniqueness. It is the direct opposite of cog in a machine.

What I want you to notice about this practice goes beyond the recognition itself. When someone receives a specific, consequence-named affirmation of what they did, it does not just make them feel good in the moment; it reinforces their belief that they can do it again. That their judgment is reliable. That their voice and contributions produce outcomes. That is self-efficacy being reinforced in real time, through a sentence. It is agency being mirrored for someone who may have quietly stopped trusting their own.

Picture someone to whom you can say this today. Who on your team needs to hear the specific version of how they matter?

The mattering question

Did a team, team member, or colleague come to mind while reading the above?

The one that looks fine until pressure hits.

Does that team know what it would lose without each person in it? Does each person know, specifically, what they uniquely bring and why it matters to the people around them? Not in a general way. Specifically.

That is the mattering question. And I think it might be the most important inclusion organizational capacity development and if I may, “inclusion” question we have right now. Not because belonging does not matter. It does. Belonging is the soil. Mattering is what grows in it and the fruit it produces, in a virtuous loop.

In the world we are in, the growth question is not just what grows. It is who grows. And “who” means everyone.

If this question is sitting with you, come work through it live.

On April 23, I am hosting a LinkedIn Live session called Stand and Deliver: Face Reality. Win Together.

It is where this conversation gets practical. You will leave with at least one ritual you can bring into a real meeting that same week.

It is free. It is live. Bring the team that came to mind.

📅 Thursday, April 23 2:00 PM Zurich / 1:00 PM London / 8:00AM New York

Join me live!

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There is a word from linguistics that I discovered some years ago and recently came back to when I try to explain what inclusion actually is and what it actually does.

That word is polysemous.

Something is polysemous when it carries multiple, deeply connected meanings at the same time, attached to the same thing, in a way where understanding one meaning helps you understand the others.

A polysemous word doesn’t mean one thing or another. It means several things simultaneously, and those meanings are not accidental ingredients.

They are entwined.

Inclusion, properly understood, is polysemous. This is not a cute metaphor from a consultant trying to justify his work with an obscure word that is unfamiliar to most. We’ve had enough of that in the people and culture space and if you’ve ever read my book, Reconstructing Inclusion, or anything else I’ve written you know I suffer no fools when it comes to bullshit terms, approaches, or silliness.

That inclusion is polysemous is a concise and precise way to describe what makes inclusion strategically irreplaceable and why, at the very moment organizations are cutting back, they are diluting something that needs to be at full strength.

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The definition I work from

My working definition of inclusion: any action that creates the conditions for people to thrive and organizations to be generative or to generate “thick value.”

Notice what that definition does not say. It does not say “representation.” It does not say “belonging programming,” or “ERG participation,” or “unconscious bias training.”

It says any action, that is, a daily manager habit, a design decision, a meeting norm, a promotion criterion. And it says that action has a dual purpose: human thriving and organizational value generation.

Not one, then the other. Both. Simultaneous consequences of the same act.

Let me be precise about what I mean by “creating the conditions for people to thrive.” else skeptics rightly (and/or conveniently) push back.

The practitioners who ran the programs now being dismantled also believed they were creating those conditions. So what makes this different?

The difference is in what the conditions are designed to produce.

Orthodox DEI created conditions for representation; that is, getting people in the room. What I am describing creates conditions for contribution, getting what people know into the decisions that matter.

Representation asks who is present. Emergent inclusion (my framing of the work I’ve done for many years) asks what is being surfaced, by whom, and whether the organization is structurally (structure creates behavior) capable of receiving it.

Those are not the same question, and the distance between them is where most inclusion efforts have quietly failed.

Simultaneity and interdependence are core principles in which the elements of a system have various multilinear connections, acting on one another and the system as a whole. The web of causality metaphor lands well with polysemy and thus inclusion.

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What is “thick value”?

In 2009, Umair Haque began writing about what he called thick value: the deep, enduring human worth of a thing to everyone, as opposed to thin value, the isolated monetary value of a thing to shareholders.

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz had explored the concept even earlier, observing that any object or behavior carries not just functional or material value, but symbolic, emotional, social, and aesthetic value all at once.

One fitting image Haque’s idea offers is baklava. You cannot eat baklava one layer at a time. You cannot separate the phyllo from the nuts and the honey and call what remains baklava. The layers are enfolded. They are the thing.

This is how thick value works: the financial, functional, emotional, and social layers of value don’t stack politely on top of each other. They are fused and infused with one another in an inseparable way; otherwise, naming the separate pieces of the collective thing and still calling it the thing would be inaccurate. They are the ingredients, not the collective, stick-to-your-teeth yuminess of baklava.

When you reduce an exchange to its price tag alone, you haven’t analyzed it. You’ve damaged it.

What thick value looks like inside a room

I spent nearly two years observing a senior leadership team at a global pharmaceutical company. Once a month, they gathered for a decision board meeting: physicians, PhD scientists, department heads, all evaluating drug discovery projects at various stages of the pipeline. My colleague called it one of the most expensive meetings in the organization. He wasn’t wrong.

My role was to observe how they engaged with the junior teams who came in to present their science. Their levels of curiosity. Their ways of expressing institutional preference. Whether they were genuinely asking questions or simply delivering verdicts. Then I gave them feedback, in real time, throughout the day.

At first, it was exactly what you might expect from a room full of accomplished experts. They were critical. They weren’t curious. They told people what to think rather than asking what they needed. The presenters left with answers, but not always with clarity, and especially not with new questions to consider in their work going forward.

Over time, things shifted. The senior leaders started opening presentations differently: “What would be most helpful to move your project forward today, from us?”

They started asking about the teams behind the science, not just the science itself. They started seeing what was between the lines.

What changed was not the science. The science was always there. What changed was their ability to read the map that the junior teams already had. Those teams, the ones closer to the ground and closer to the actual experimental work, were the ones who could see around corners. They always could. But the senior people around the table had not consistently created the conditions for that intelligence to surface.

Once those conditions existed, the value that had been sitting dormant in the organization began to move.

That is the gold in the building. And the senior leaders, for all their expertise, were not the only ones who could find it. In fact, they were often the last ones to see it, until inclusion created the conditions for it to become visible.

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I remember one afternoon stepping out of one of the all-day meetings I was there to observe to work with a more junior team on cognitive bias, specifically confirmation bias, and how it was shaping the way they evaluated options on their projects.

When I returned to the senior leadership room, the dynamic had unraveled. The head of that disease area, a brilliant and deeply decent human being, had gotten into his zone. He was loud, forceful, filling the room with his certainty; he even pounded on the table as I was heading to my seat. And nobody was fully following him.

I sat down behind him, and all of a sudden, the eyes in the room started to gaze past him toward me. He turned around. “Oh, shit. Hi, Amri.”

He laughed. So did the room. But what that moment did, quietly and without drama, was remind him of everything we had been working on together. The behaviors shifted almost immediately. It wasn’t anything I’d said. Rather, it was a result of the conditions we had built together over months, which were real enough to be activated by a single reminder.

That is what thick value looks like inside an organization that is genuinely building inclusion habits.

It doesn’t always look like a transformation. Sometimes it looks like a turn of the head and an “Oh, shit” moment.

Why inclusion is irreducibly polysemous

What happens when a people manager or influential contributor genuinely practices inclusion? They create conditions for contribution, lower the social cost of dissent, and signal that a person’s viewpoint is not just tolerated but needed.

Functionally, the organization gains access to ground-level intelligence it cannot buy or manufacture. Managers get better data. Unknown risks surface before they compound. Decisions improve and stick.

Emotionally, the person in that exchange experiences something that researchers like Zach Mercurio and Isaac Prilleltensky call mattering, the felt sense of being noticed and affirmed as a unique contributor.

This is not a soft perk. It is one of the most powerful drivers of discretionary effort, motivation toward purpose, and retention available to any organization.

Socially, trust accumulates. The norms of a team shift. It becomes safer for others to tell the truth. The ecosystem changes, and the change is compounding.

These three layers are not separate outcomes of three separate interventions. They are the same actions, generating multiple simultaneous meanings. That is polysemy. That is thick value.

And this is exactly why inclusion cannot be fully financialized. You can measure engagement scores, retention rates, decision quality, and revenue per employee, and you should. But those metrics are traces of something that cannot be reduced to any one of them. The moment you try to “prove ROI” (unless it includes return on intangibles—the other ROI) by collapsing inclusion to a single strand, you are describing baklava by its calorie count and wondering why the recipe is unconvincing.

Let me also address something directly, because executives have asks me this, and they are right to.

Everything I have described — curiosity, lowering the cost of dissent, noticing contribution, surfacing what people know — sounds a lot like what we used to call good leadership. So why call it inclusion at all?

Here is why. Leadership, as it is typically developed and evaluated, is interpersonal. It operates at the level of one manager and their direct relationships. What inclusion adds is the systemic dimension. It asks whether the organization’s structures, norms, and habits are built to receive truth from people who are not already in the inner circle.

A brilliant manager can create a pocket of thick value inside a system that (mostly without knowing) suppresses it everywhere else. Emergent inclusion is the work of making that pocket the norm rather than the exception.

Good leadership operates at the level of the organization/complex adaptive system, not just the individual parts. Parts and whole. That distinction matters enormously when you are trying to build something that holds under pressure.

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What mattering actually costs when it disappears

Julia was a high performer. Her team loved her. Then Carrie arrived.

Carrie was extroverted, vocal, immediately visible in every room. Julia was quieter, the kind of person who waited until everyone else had spoken, then said the most incisive thing. For a while, that had been recognized. After Carrie arrived, it stopped being noticed. Including by their manager.

The thing is, in this case (and I would say the majority of others), there was no villain. Carrie didn’t do anything to Julia. Julia’s manager wasn’t indifferent. They were just not paying close enough attention to what was changing. That inattention or selective attention is the point.

The anti-mattering cycle rarely begins with an act. It begins with drift. A quiet shift in who gets seen, who gets called on, whose energy fills the room. And because it is gradual, nobody flags it until the cost is already compounding.

Julia began to check out. Not dramatically. Not in a way that showed up immediately on any dashboard. But I ran into her one day, and she was flat, which was never her. She was always the person who had something warm, bright, and helpful to say. Instead, she told me she had a new team member, she didn’t like her, and she was going to stay away from her.

My response: I told her to spend more time with Carrie. She didn’t like that answer. She stopped our informal check-ins for a while.

Some months passed. Carrie relocated to the Cambridge, Massachusetts, site where Julia and I worked. I suggested again that this might be the moment. A few weeks later, I started seeing them together in passing.

Another month or so after that, Julia told me she had become Carrie’s onboarding buddy. They were working on projects together. The team noticed. They knew Julia hadn’t been fond of Carrie, and they watched her show up consistently and generously anyway.

What followed was a promotion. Travel to other sites. Access to the kinds of projects that change a career trajectory.

Julia won. Not because the organization fixed something. But because she understood, intuitively (and perhaps with a bit of my encouragement), what the research confirms: mattering is reciprocal.

You add value to those around you; in return, you receive value. When she created the conditions for Carrie to thrive, she re-entered the mattering cycle herself.

The work bestie that emerged, and the research on work friendships as one of the strongest predictors of contribution and satisfaction, was not a nice outcome on the side. It was made possible through the mechanism of mattering.

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That is an anti-mattering cycle interrupted. The cost of not interrupting it, in disengagement, in the quiet withdrawal of the best thinking, in talent that simply stops contributing at the level it is capable of, is the return on intangibles that organizations are hemorrhaging right now, quietly, without a line item to show for it.

The strategic implication

Among S&P 500 companies, use of the acronym “DEI” dropped by 68% from 2024, and 21% reduced or removed DEI-related metrics and targets. Companies halved the number of DEI metrics tied to executive compensation, and mentions of DEI in S&P 500 annual filings averaged about four times in 2024, down from twelve and a half times in 2022.

The rollbacks are real.

And honestly, some of what is being rolled back deserved/needed to go. Orthodox DEI, with its near-exclusive focus on group identity, grievance, and performative programming, was largely hollow. The focus on ERGs as endpoints rather than starting points was at best decorative. The unconscious bias training that peaked, plateaued, and repeated itself for two decades without changing the conditions that produce bias was compliance-grade at best.

It wasn’t all bad, it just got stuck. It became like a tree whose soil eroded, without roots deep enough to sustain it as the substrate disappeared.

When something is that unanchored from real organizational function, it is easy to remove. It was post-it-noted on, not built-in.

What is being lost alongside it? This should concern every leader, regardless of where they stand politically, as inclusion is a set of capabilities that allows people to surface reality, influence one another, and create the conditions for thick value. That is a structural need and reality that we are dismantling at precisely the moment we need it most.

When I reach out to prospective clients now, I watch something revealing happen in real time. They see the word “inclusion.” Most times they only see “DEI” as a loose idea framed by pro versus against binaries without distinctions beyond such narratives. And before they have read the next sentence, the door closes. “We’re not in the market for that right now.”

One person put it to me with unusual honesty: “Our leadership got spooked, or they never fully understood or believed it in the first place.”

That sentence, if one can say it about their organization, is a self-diagnosis. If your leadership never fully understood or believed inclusion needed mindful prioritization, what they were practicing was always skin-deep. And skin-deep things, in the organizational sense, almost always collapse under pressure. That goes beyond the political and straight into value.

The AI alignment argument no one is making

Here is the argument I have sparsely and feel deserves far more attention than it is getting.

I will use the cliche that “we are in a period of extraordinary investment in AI adoption.”

The organizational priority, across virtually every sector, is speed: how quickly can we integrate these capabilities, how fast can we move downstream with them? I understand the urgency. I also think it is creating a dangerous and growing blind spot.

AI is very good at finding patterns in what people have already said, documented, and recorded. What it cannot access is what people are choosing not to say. And in most organizations, the gap between what people know and what they are willing to put on record is significant.

That gap is not a technology problem. It is a conditions problem. It is the accumulated weight of every meeting where the truth was too costly to speak, every decision where the person closest to the problem stayed quiet because the room did not feel safe enough for candor.

The further downstream your AI adoption travels without aligning with what I call the organizational mind — the aggregate of your internal stakeholders’ mental models with all of their influences, preferences, conditions, and unspoken realities — the further you get from capturing your greatest value.

Your AI is not working with incomplete data because the technology is limited. It is working with incomplete data because the people feeding it have learned, rationally and experientially, that telling the full truth carries a cost. A cost that many, especially now, see no benefit in paying.

Inclusion, as I define it, is the platform that changes that calculation. It lowers the cost of honesty. It raises the value of dissent. It creates the conditions where the organizational mind becomes legible to itself and to the tools it is deploying. Without it, you are running the most sophisticated pattern-recognition technology in history next to a dataset that has been quietly edited by every person in your organization who stopped trusting that speaking up was worth it.

The return on intangibles that organizations are chasing right now, the differentiation, the adaptability, the capacity to move with complexity, cannot be extracted from a workforce that feels it has stopped mattering. You cannot have one robustly without the other.

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What I call emergent inclusion and why the name matters

Orthodox DEI has largely operated as though inclusion were fragile: a compliance layer, a sentiment metric, a PR posture in reaction to heated moments. This is how it gets cut in a downturn despite years of investment and earnest effort. Brittle things are easy to remove because they were not built to carry stress, especially the unexpected kinds.

What I call emergent inclusion, inclusion designed to actually produce the conditions for human thriving and organizational thick value, is structurally different. It is load-bearing precisely because it is polysemous. You cannot remove it without simultaneously degrading your decision quality, your organizational trust, and the mattering experience of your people.

The layers go together.

I have been pushing this boulder uphill for a while. When I wrote Reconstructing Inclusion, my working definition was already in a naturally deliberate contrast with what the field was selling.

I started doing this work in 2003, at the forefront of unconscious bias work, when it occurred as genuinely new and genuinely useful. I watched the field narrow over the following two decades. I watched the anti-racism wave of 2020 accelerate the narrowing because it brought in practitioners without discipline, without long-term thinking, without reckoning with the trade-offs.

Now, what I believe is that there has never been a better time for a reframe. The very thing that cleared the field, the collapse of orthodox DEI under its own hollowness, is the opening for emergent inclusion to step into. If we can help organizations understand what they are actually losing, not symbolically but structurally, we can advance this work to a place where it has never been before.

Emergent inclusion is accessible to everyone. It is a ‘we’, not an isolated ‘me’ or a ‘them’. It is actionable because it is explicitly there to create value for the organization and return that value to its people. It is sustainable because it is aligned with organizational purpose. And it transcends geography. Context leads. The principles stay constant; the practices adapt to the territory.

When organizations get this right, inclusion wins. And when inclusion wins, everyone wins.

One more thing

One of the reasons I use this definition of inclusion rather than the more conventional ones is that it refuses thinness. It insists that any action worth calling inclusive must create conditions. It must do something structurally generative, not merely representationally symbolic. And it names both the human and the organizational stake in the same breath, because they are always present together — in every decision, every conversation, every moment when someone chooses to speak or stay quiet.

When inclusion is polysemous, you can no longer treat it as one thing you trade off against another. You cannot say “we prioritize performance or inclusion” any more than you can say you prefer the nuts or the honey in your baklava.

The layers are enfolded.

That is exactly the point.

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There is a concept in architecture called the curb cut. Those gentle dips between the sidewalk and the road were designed for wheelchair users. But they help everyone — strollers, bikes, hand carts, people distracted on their phones. Nobody is inconvenienced. Everybody benefits.

That principle, design for the edges and you improve the center is at the heart of what Dr. Jennifer Sarrett brings to inclusion work. And it is exactly the kind of reframe the field needs right now.

Jen and I met after she attended one of our Elevating Your Inclusion Edge sessions and reached out. Turns out we are both Emory people, both public health practitioners, and we share the same restlessness with reactive, performative DEI. This conversation goes into the places the field has been avoiding: what universal design actually offers organizations, where DEI has earned its own backlash, why social determinants matter more than we admit, and why research has to come before any solution.

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Universal Design: Building for Everyone Before Anyone Has to Ask

Jen came to DEI from disability advocacy and autism education — fields where she had already spent years thinking about how designed environments either include or exclude people by default. When she encountered DEI work, she was struck by how reactive it was. Organizations were waiting for something to go wrong before taking action. She had been working with a framework built to prevent that entirely.

At [00:08:00], Dr. Sarrett said:“How can we predict where there might be barriers to somebody or a type of person? And go ahead and design to increase accessibility that will funnel down or trickle down to increase accessibility for everybody. Without making it more difficult for anybody.”

This is what I find so compelling about her approach. We typically design for the assumed majority and scramble to accommodate everyone else. Universal design flips that. Start with the people who face the most friction, and what you build ends up serving everyone better. That questioning of the status quo wherein asking why we do things a particular way and what we are actually trying to create is something the inclusion field has not done nearly enough of.

The Reactive Trap: Why DEI Has Been Failing on Its Own Terms

When I asked Jen what she would have done differently, she was direct: she would have started questioning the field’s approaches earlier. DEI has largely been reactive, responding to legislation, incidents, public pressure, and that structural problem produces structural limitations.

At [00:28:00], Dr. Sarrett said:“The efforts often aren’t embedded. So they’re training programs, one-off things that aren’t really tracked internally or actually turned into action. The field of DEI isn’t very good at explaining to those in power how it works for them as well.”

It created, as Jen put it, a sense of punishment and blame. The sustainable alternative: show how a high-engagement, low-turnover, genuinely collaborative culture works for everyone.

Social Determinants and the Limits of Identity-Category Thinking

I say this often: disparities do not equal discrimination. When we see differential outcomes, the reflexive move is to attribute them entirely to discrimination against protected identity categories. That framing misses most of what is actually driving things.

At [00:20:00], Dr. Sarrett said:“Of course there are sites and causal links with discrimination that lead to disparities, but not all of them. I always encourage people to think back to the foundation, to the core. Who created the systems that we’re living in now?”

The systems we inhabit were designed by a narrow slice of humanity, and those designs carry deep assumptions about independence, self-sufficiency, and what success looks like. Jen’s public health background makes this concrete: in Georgia, health disparities track heavily with housing, income, education, and access — social determinants that do not sort neatly by race or any single identity category. Shifting to this frame does not dismiss structural racism. It opens up a richer, more actionable conversation about building systems that actually serve everyone.

Research First: You Cannot Skip the Diagnosis

Jen does not walk into a client engagement and start building solutions. She starts with document reviews, surveys, interviews, and focus groups — working directly with team members, not just leadership, because that is where the real picture lives.

At [00:35:00], Dr. Sarrett said:“Without that, I would’ve done some random team building. At some point as a person who does their work based on evidence, you can’t skip that part. Because it also tells you what you’re trying to move toward.”

A recent client surfaced two dominant themes from her research: no knowledge documentation system, and widespread role clarity issues. Neither is a conventional DEI problem, but both carry serious inclusion consequences. You only find them if you look. I have been parachuted into engagements without that foundation, and you cannot build a case study from them. Research is not overhead. It is the thing that makes everything else work.

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Key Takeaways

1. Design for the edges, improve the center. Building for the people who face the most friction almost always produces something better for everyone. That is the curb cut principle applied to organizations.

2. Reactive DEI is structurally limited. Sustainable inclusion has to be embedded from the start, in policies, practices, and culture design — not activated only when something goes wrong.

3. Disparities are not a single-cause problem. A social determinants lens gives us better tools and more honest conversations than defaulting to discrimination as the only explanation for outcome gaps.

4. Everyone has a diversity story. Making the case for how inclusive cultures benefit everyone — including those in power — is not a compromise of DEI’s values. It is the strategy that actually works.

5. Diagnose before you design. Research is the foundation, not the preamble. You cannot build the right solution without first understanding what is actually happening on the ground.

About the Guest

Dr. Jennifer Sarrett is the founder and lead consultant at Disruptive Inclusion, an organizational culture strategy firm. She holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies, with a background spanning systems thinking, social science, bioethics, medical anthropology, and public health. She spent time at Emory University’s Center for the Study of Human Health, where she led the design of their health equity curriculum and programming.

Her methodology, “Organizational Culture Design,” is grounded in Universal Design principles: building workplaces that are as accessible and inclusive as possible for everyone, without creating barriers for anyone. She has worked across academic, clinical, and public health environments, advising leadership teams on inclusive strategy. She also publishes a weekly LinkedIn newsletter, Science of High Performance, on culture design in health and science industries.

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Resources:

• Vulnerability and Social Justice - legal scholar Martha Fineman’s framework challenging liberal constructions of independence, in the context of designing supportive rather than authoritative systems

• The Science of Systems Thinking - Dr. Derek and Dr. Laura Cabrera; referenced in the context of organizational complexity and neurodivergent ways of knowing

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You’ve probably seen the headlines everywhere: “Trump Administration Abandons Anti-DEI Court Battle. But the Damage Has Already Been Done.” The framing assumes the real drama was always legal.

It wasn’t.

Many of us in the field already knew that DEI initiatives weren’t illegal. What they were was politically expedient. They became that way partly because many people in the DEI space didn’t question their own approaches in a way that would have required real change.

While we were busy arguing about what would hold up in court, something else was happening inside organizations. Sense-making was deteriorating. Trust was thinning. People increasingly felt replaceable. Under pressure to do more with less, organizational health started looking fragile.

That’s the damage that’s already been done. Not legal. Organizational.

The question now isn’t whether DEI was lawful. The question is whether we’re willing to evolve the field, or whether we’re just going to repackage the last 40 or 50 years of work and call it “progress.”

What I’m seeing right now leans heavily toward repackaging.

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Organizations Lost the Ability to Make Sense Together

When people reference that headline, they usually mean reputational damage, political backlash, legal risk. All of that is real. But it misses the deeper issue.

Many organizations have lost the ability to make sense of competing realities. They’ve lost the ability to hear uncomfortable information without freezing up. Lost the ability to hold differences without rushing to solutions. There are no solutions, as Thomas Sowell says. “There are only trade-offs.”

When people feel replaceable, it’s not a “culture” problem you fix with better surveys. It’s a structural signal that something fundamental has broken down. Trust isn’t an intangible nice-to-have. It’s what allows organizations to function under pressure.

The focus on legal compliance was understandable. Boards care about risk. Executives want defensibility. But here’s the trade-off: legal frameworks tell you what not to do. They don’t tell you how to think together. They don’t help people surface competing truths. They don’t build trust.

We basically asked compliance to do the work of culture and capability. That was never going to work.

The Predictable Turn to Legality

The legal spin was predictable from the moment the first executive order hit on January 22nd, 2025. Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow’s work stepped into that moment and did what law does well. They defined boundaries, clarified constraints, reduced uncertainty.

For those unfamiliar, they’re both professors at NYU and attorneys who’ve been doing work around fairness. Yoshino is well known for taking Erving Goffman’s work around “covering” and making it mainstream. They’ve stepped into this moment, advised boards. As a result, many boards rejected anti-DEI proposals (at least to some extent) based on their counsel.

More recently, we’ve seen critiques from inside the house. Lily Zheng’s “FAIR Framework” is managerial, pragmatic, and legitimacy-seeking. Yoshino and Glasgow’s “How Equality Wins” is legally durable, universalist, and risk-aware. They aren’t the same arguments because they’re responding to different pressures. But they share a timing problem.

These critiques are correct. Some even overlap. But the warning signs were visible years ago. By 2021, by 2022. Post-George Floyd, the warning signals were so loud, I don’t see how we ignored them.

A Field That Stopped Evolving

When I was drafting Reconstructing Inclusion, my concern wasn’t backlash. My concern was stagnation. The field wasn’t evolving fast enough to keep up with the complexity organizations were facing.

I’m not questioning whether the frameworks from Yoshino, Glasgow, or Zheng are wrong. All frameworks are wrong, including mine. Some are useful.

What I’m questioning is whether they’re sufficient for now. Whether they’re actually evolutionary or whether they’re just stabilizing a system that’s already failed under pressure.

Let me say plainly how we went off the mark: DEI didn’t falter because it demanded too much. It faltered because it demanded too little of organizations as systems.

We were not thinking systemically.

In 2020, the predominant rhetoric (post-Floyd, middle of pandemic mayhem) was systemic racism. Race is a made-up system. So, to say systemic racism (over and over again, pummelling the eardrums of the converted and resistant), isn’t a wrongheaded thing to do. But, is it useful?

Now, everybody’s talking about systems as it relates to inclusion and diversity. It is interesting because, until last year, people in DEI were generally talking only about systems as if they were being imposed on someone. So “systemic racism” is the closest we got to systems thinking, but it framed the system as “over there causing problems to these people over here.”

The notion of influencing systems and structures, along with their respective mental models, to move desired ideas and ways of seeing, being, and doing in a particular direction has not been common in so-called DEI.

To state the obvious, a system is never about one piece. And while inclusion work was (and, in too many cases, still is) collapsed into one thing (hiring from less represented groups), it is essential that we acknowledge that (almost) everybody, if not all who engaged historically in DEI work, contributed to where we are today. I’m saying it as taking full accountability for where we are, knowing we have to go further.

How We Lost Our Way

Too often, comfort was confused with safety. We talked about being “comfortable with discomfort”, but it was usually somebody who believed they were morally right telling someone else they needed to be uncomfortable.

People started confusing representation with robustness. Moral clarity replaced inquiry. There was a certain group that felt they had moral authority over others, oftentimes because they disagreed with their assertions. Disagreement was treated as risk rather than data.

Inclusion became something to manage. A program rather than something that builds capacity for organizations to navigate complexity.

The whole work of inclusion lost its connection to how organizations actually function. When your mental model and reality are off, it’s hard to get something to shift. The shift has to be in you. You have to be able to see that reality.

We often perceive reality as “this” or “that”, and we’ve often operated from a binary notion of reality. And, DEI folks have done so, knowing the flaws of that thinking, even castigating others for doing so as it relates to gender.

But that’s reality. We don’t have to like it, but it’s happening. Fairness, inclusion, representation, equity. It still needs to be framed with reality.

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From Ideology to Infrastructure

This is where the Emergent Inclusion Framework comes in. I’m not putting it out there as a rebrand.

I’ve been doing this work for years. I don’t think I emphasized enough that if you build certain capabilities, you can adapt to what’s coming. What hit us right now is forcing adaptation. But we need to be re-oriented to the reality of where your organization is right now.

Not trying to cajole the organization to do more of the work we did in the past. But asking: where does inclusion solve a problem that an organization is facing?

A crisis of people feeling significant. A crisis of people being unable to make sense with each other. A crisis of being overwhelmed because there are fewer people doing more with less. Inclusion can address those things.

When it comes to inclusion, let’s ask these questions:

1. Can people say what is? Can they talk about reality versus just what’s safe?

2. Can feedback be treated as something we should all ask for, rather than a threat? The thing I love that’s coming to the forefront is that we can be critical of what happened. It wasn’t so safe not that long ago. I’ve lost some followers because I’ve been honest about it. But it can’t just be about something that makes us feel good. It needs to be about a reckoning from within. Are we evolving the field? Or are we just repackaging? Old wine, new wineskins.

3. Can differences be mined for insight? Or do we just manage them away. Sometimes that means your perspective will be wrong. In fact, it’s better to probably just think my perspective is incomplete, so there’s some wrongness to it. We want to mine for those incomplete pieces. We can gather enough to start making a puzzle so we can all move into the center of the labyrinth together.

4. Can organizations think together without collapsing into paralysis? We’ve had a lot of paralysis. Can we think together in a way that doesn’t get us stuck? We mine the perspectives, not manage them away.

When Inclusion Works

When inclusion works, it produces better-informed decisions. It produces bolder action. When people can make sense with each other, they act in a way that actually gets you where you want to be. Rather than just following whoever had more power or was simply louder in the room. When inclusion works, it increases retention through mattering. It’s one of the concepts central to moving forward in the inclusion space.

Better-informed decisions, bolder action, greater retention. Not just internal stakeholders. All those who touch your organizational ecosystem.

This moves us away from ideology and into infrastructure. Creating structures that create the behaviors we want, to get the outcomes we need. Of course, fairness matters. Legality matters. But neither creates robustness on its own.

The question this moment is asking: do we want inclusion to be defensible? Or do we want organizations that can function under strain, under stress, under uncertainty?

Uncertainty’s not going away. Difference is not going away. Stress is not going away.

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Key Takeaways

1. The real damage wasn’t legal, it was organizational. While we focused on courtroom battles, organizations lost their ability to make sense together, build trust, and hold difference productively. Legal compliance cannot substitute for organizational capability.

2. A field that stops evolving collapses under its own weight. DEI didn’t fail because external forces took it down. It failed because we didn’t demand enough of ourselves systemically. The warning signs were visible years before the political backlash hit.

3. We confused programs with capability building. Comfort was confused with safety, representation with robustness, and moral clarity with inquiry. Inclusion became something to manage rather than something that built organizational capacity.

4. Emergent Inclusion is about building adaptive capability. Instead of asking organizations to do more of what we did in the past, we need to ask: where does inclusion solve actual problems organizations face? Sense-making, mattering, adaptability, and trust under pressure.

5. The choice is between defensibility and functionality. We can aim for inclusion that holds up in court, or we can build organizations that function under strain. Legal frameworks and fairness matter, but they don’t create robustness on their own.

6. This is our moment to evolve or continue repackaging. “The damage has already been done” is a warning, not a verdict. What we do next determines whether we learned anything.

Resources:

• Reconstructing Inclusion by Amri Johnson

• How Equality Wins by Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow

• Lily Zheng’s “FAIR Framework”

• The Emergent Inclusion Framework

What capability is your organization building right now? Where are you seeing the shift from ideology to infrastructure happening, or not happening? Leave a comment below.

If you found value in this conversation, share it with colleagues who are wrestling with these same questions. We need more people willing to evolve this work, not just rebrand it.

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I wrote a book

The headline above is being read as a legal conclusion, as if the central question of the last several years was whether diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives would survive judicial scrutiny.

They were always going to.

Most people working seriously in this field understood that even DEI efforts heavily focused on representation were not illegal. They were politically expedient and politically convenient to contest. Legal debate consumed attention not because the law was unclear, but because legality offered a way to avoid a more difficult reckoning.

While we argued about courts, shareholder votes, and compliance, something more consequential was unfolding inside organizations.

Sense-making eroded.
Trust became fleeting.
Alignment grew brittle.
People increasingly felt replaceable and undervalued.

That is the damage that has already been done. It is not legal damage. It is organizational damage.

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Inclusion drifted away from its essential function. At its core, inclusion is not a moral posture or a compliance strategy. Inclusion is any action that creates the conditions for people to thrive and for organizations to be generative, create “thick value” in the sense articulated by Umair Haque, and fulfill their purpose both including and beyond profit.

When inclusion is understood this way, it becomes inseparable from organizational health. It shapes how people make sense of complexity, how decisions are informed, how action is taken, and how value is created over time.

Instead, much inclusion work became flattened. In some cases, it was reduced to group identity representation metrics. In others, it was narrowed to legal defensibility. Both approaches miss what organizations actually need in moments of pressure and uncertainty.

Now, as companies pull back DEI programs or rebrand them under safer language, the field faces a choice.

Do we evolve, or do we repackage?

There is a growing wave of critiques that offer fairness, equality, or pragmatism as correctives to past DEI practices. Many of these critiques are not wrong. But they arrive late. The warning signs were visible years ago when I was writing Reconstructing Inclusion, when sense-making was already weakening and when organizations were losing the ability to hold difference, tension, and ambiguity without freezing or fragmenting.

Evolution requires more than new language. It requires a different center of gravity.

Organizations do not fail because they lack statements of values. They fail because they lack the capacity to generate value together under real conditions. That includes disagreement, pressure, incomplete information, and competing demands.

This is where Emergent Inclusion becomes relevant. Not as a rebrand of DEI, and not as a retreat to legality, but as a recognition that inclusion must function as a generative system. A system that helps people add value, feel valued, and contribute meaningfully to a shared purpose.

Fairness matters. Legality matters. Representation matters.

But without the conditions for people to thrive and for organizations to create “thick value”, none of these are durable. Repackaging without evolution only delays the next fracture.

The damage that has already been done is a warning. The question now is whether we will treat it as such.

A forthcoming podcast episode will explore this in greater depth.

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What are the chances that two people from neighboring states in America’s heartland would meet on a shuttle bus in Almaty, Kazakhstan? Yet that’s exactly how I met Joy Elizabeth Buckner, an encounter that would challenge my assumptions about education, diversity, and what it truly means to create inclusive systems.

Joy, whom I fondly call as “Denver,” is an educational consultant who has spent nearly 13 years living abroad, currently based in Dubai. But this isn’t a typical expat story. Joy’s journey from Colorado to the Middle East, working across 25+ countries, has given her a front-row seat to how different cultures approach difference itself, particularly neurodivergence, a topic that’s become central to her life’s work.

As someone who has dyslexia, Irlen Syndrome, and wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until age 45, Joy brings both professional expertise and lived experience to conversations about inclusive education. She hosts “The Joy of Neurodiversity” podcast, where she’s on a mission to build belonging and show dignity to the brilliance of neurodivergent thinkers, a population that represents 20-30% of us, though you wouldn’t know it from how our systems are designed.

We met at the World Inclusion Congress in Almaty, an experience that proved revelatory for both of us. While I’ve spent years working in diversity, equity, and inclusion, I found myself surrounded by educators who weren’t obsessed with categorizing people into boxes. Instead, they were focused on the who, seeing whole humans, whole systems. It was refreshing in a way that made me realize how much we’ve lost our way in the Western DEI space.

Joy articulates something profound: our educational systems, our workplaces, and our communities are designed for the middle, the “typical” brain, the “average” learner. But when we design for the margins, when we truly create conditions where neurodivergent thinkers can thrive, everyone benefits. It’s the principle of the rising tide, and it’s time we started building our boats differently.

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From Categories to Humans: How Education’s Approach to Difference Is Evolving

When I asked Joy about how she’s seen education evolve in its approach to diversity, her response cut straight to the heart of why so many of our efforts have fallen short.

“I think in the states, diversity was really looked at from a narrow term. So either looking at race or language, sometimes disability, it was more about categories, not so much about humans. Now I see people recognizing brains and bodies and cultures and contexts and histories, and more so looking at lived experience.” [00:12:00]

Her observation hit me hard because it mirrors what I’ve been wrestling with in my own work. We’ve become so focused on what categories people fit into that we’ve lost sight of who they actually are. Joy’s experience working internationally has shown her a different approach, one that considers the full humanity of each person rather than reducing them to demographic checkboxes.

But she also didn’t sugarcoat the challenges. She shared her frustration with how far apart practices remain from country to country. In the UAE, neurodivergence is recognized as a difference to be accepted. Yet in neighboring countries, she encounters resistance: “You’re just too smart to be neurodivergent” or “We don’t have neurodivergent people here.” The disparity reveals how much work remains in shifting from deficit-based thinking to difference-based understanding.

What struck me most was Joy’s clarity about where the resistance lives. Teachers, she argued, aren’t necessarily the driving force behind change. They’re “creatures of habit” who default to what they’ve historically done. The real momentum, she’s found, comes from parents and ministries of education, which then trickles down to classroom practice.

Teaching to the Middle: Why Our Educational Systems Fail Neurodivergent Learners

One of the most powerful moments in our conversation came when Joy challenged a fundamental assumption about how we educate.

“I don’t feel like we’ve changed the way we educate for hundreds of years. We might have put it in a new box or dressed it up a little bit differently, but at the heart of it all, we teach to the middle. We build societies to the middle. We’re never really always looking at the margins.” [00:15:30]

It wasn’t just an observation. It was an indictment. And she’s absolutely right. Despite all our innovation in technology, curriculum design, and pedagogical theory, we’re still fundamentally organizing education around the mythical “average” student. Everyone else is expected to somehow miraculously adapt.

Here’s the thing: we know better. Research consistently shows that when you design for the margins, when you build systems that support the most misunderstood thinkers, the overlooked learners, everyone benefits. It’s universal design in action. Yet we continue defaulting to what’s “easier” or more “efficient.”

I had to push back on her use of “easier,” and Joy immediately corrected herself: “I don’t think it is easier if you know how to shift it.” That distinction matters. Teaching to the middle isn’t actually easier. It just feels familiar. It’s what we’ve always done, and that familiarity masquerades as simplicity.

The real challenge, Joy explained, is that most educators aren’t as educated as they should be about neurodivergence and other differences. Less than 20% of teachers feel prepared to work with neurodivergent students. A 2024 poll of UK university students found that 64% had never even heard the word “neurodivergence.” These aren’t just statistics. They represent a massive blind spot in our educational systems.

From Margins to Movement: Joy’s Framework for Inclusive Innovation

At the World Inclusion Congress in Almaty, Joy presented a talk called “From Margins to Movement,” outlining her framework for addressing neurodivergence at a systemic level. What she shared wasn’t abstract theory. It was a practical roadmap built from years of front-line experience.

“My talk was really looking at what can we do to address the margins. I have a framework that looks at four different pillars: empowered, equipped, voiced, and connected.” [00:20:30]

Each pillar serves a specific purpose in moving beyond surface-level awareness. The “empowered” pillar focuses on consulting, training, and reshaping systems, mindsets, and beliefs about learners and society. It’s the deep work of transformation, not just wearing crazy socks for autism awareness week, but fundamentally rethinking how we understand and value neurodivergent minds.

The “equipped” pillar provides tools and inclusive content for schools, homes, and communities that create deeper understanding. It’s about giving people what they actually need to support neurodivergent individuals, whether they’re educators, parents, or the neurodivergent individuals themselves.

“Voiced” is where Joy’s storytelling platform comes in: her podcast, speaking engagements, and efforts to reframe the narrative around neurodivergence. She understands that changing systems requires changing stories, shifting from deficit-based language to celebrating the brilliance of different ways of thinking.

Finally, “connected” addresses a critical gap. There’s a huge ecosystem of people doing amazing work in this space, but they’re fragmented. Joy is working to create spaces where these collaborators can come together, share insights, and amplify each other’s impact.

What makes this framework powerful is that it moves beyond awareness to action. As Joy put it, we keep things surface with awareness weeks and policies, but we’re not getting to the root of what neurodivergence actually is and what neurodivergent people actually need.

Mattering Matters: Why Neurodivergent Children Need Extra Proof

When we turned to the concept of mattering (feeling valued and adding value to those around you), Joy’s response was both honest and heartbreaking.

“I don’t think that we’ve yet built a system that consistently fosters a sense of mattering with all children, especially not neurodivergent children. Most schools, most systems are designed around the middle, the typical learner, the typical brain, and the belief that those on the margins will just somehow miraculously adapt.” [00:28:30]

That wasn’t pessimism. It was clear-eyed assessment from someone who has worked in education for 25 years across dozens of countries. And it led to one of the most profound insights of our conversation.

“Other people can tell you that you matter. Other people can tell you that you belong. Other people can tell you that you’re valued. We need proof. Neurodivergent people need extra proof.” [00:34:30]

I felt that deeply, especially as a parent of a six-year-old who’s had multiple evaluations but hasn’t been definitively diagnosed with anything specific. My son tells me things like “Daddy, I really want to do this thing, but just my brain, there’s something in my head.” He recognizes something about how he works, and Joy’s words helped me understand why simply telling him he matters isn’t enough.

Joy’s own story illustrated this perfectly. Growing up with dyslexia and Irlen Syndrome, not diagnosed with ADHD until her mid-40s, she was labeled as “naughty and bad and disruptive and lazy.” The story she hears repeatedly from neurodivergent individuals is the same: “We were lazy, we were defiant, we didn’t try hard enough.” Yet as she powerfully stated: “If you were in my brain and you knew how hard I was trying in class, in school, in life, I was trying so hard just to try to feel normal.”

The conversation about her family dynamics revealed another layer. Joy knew without doubt that her family valued her. But knowing intellectually that you’re valued and feeling it in your bones are two different things, especially when your brain navigates the world differently than everyone else’s.

Penguining and Other Gifts: Reframing Neurodivergence as Brilliance

One of the most delightful parts of our conversation came when Joy introduced me to the concept of “penguining,” a phenomenon common in ADHD brains that beautifully illustrates why neurodivergent thinking is often misunderstood.

“Neurodivergent people do something called penguining. You start here in a discussion, and then neurodivergents go down and they’re thinking deeper, connecting dots in their brain, and then they pop up and say something that makes absolutely no sense to people listening. But they’ve already had the whole thought process.” [00:37:00]

That metaphor immediately connected to my experience with my son, who tells me “I love patterns, daddy.” He sees connections that aren’t obvious to me, makes leaps that seem random until you understand the internal logic he’s following.

As Joy described it, kids get in trouble for this, and then later the parent or teacher realizes, “Oh wait, that’s brilliant. That makes so much sense.” But by then, the child has already been labeled as defiant or off-topic.

Joy’s personal example was equally illuminating, and frustrating for those around her. She described figuring out what someone is going to say while they’re still saying it, already understanding their point and wanting to respond to it before they’ve articulated it. “I want to show you that I value what you’re saying by demonstrating that I understand,” she explained, “but I cut you off, and it drives people nuts.”

All of this connected directly back to our discussion of mattering. Joy put it plainly:

“That’s why it’s so difficult for neurodivergents to feel like we matter. Because we’re not always understood. It seems like we’re going off topic, but we’re not. And then you feel misunderstood. Then your brain starts working: Am I making sense? Do I sound crazy?” [00:39:45]

The toll of masking, of covering up these natural ways of thinking to fit what people want you to be, becomes immense over time. Joy spoke about looking back now and understanding “that’s why I do this” about so many of her behaviors and patterns. The self-awareness comes, but often after decades of trying to force yourself into a neurotypical mold.

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Key Takeaways

1. Neurodivergence is part of the human story, not a separate category. Twenty to thirty percent of the population is neurodivergent, and we all fall somewhere on the spectrum between neurotypicality and neurodivergence. The more we develop language and understanding around this reality, the more we can build compassion and curiosity and design environments where everyone can thrive.

2. Design for the margins, and everyone benefits. Our educational systems and workplaces are built around the mythical “average” person, expecting those on the margins to adapt. But when we design for our most misunderstood thinkers and overlooked learners, we create healthier, more humane systems for everyone.

3. Surface-level awareness isn’t enough. Awareness weeks, crazy sock days, and policies are a start, but they don’t address the root of what neurodivergent people actually need. Real change requires reshaping systems, mindsets, beliefs, providing practical tools, amplifying neurodivergent voices, and building connected communities of practice.

4. Neurodivergent individuals need proof that they matter. While neurotypical people might accept verbal affirmation of their value, neurodivergent people often need tangible evidence: actions that demonstrate they’re seen, understood, and valued for who they are, not despite their differences.

5. Teachers need better preparation. Less than 20% of teachers feel prepared to work with neurodivergent students. That’s not a failure of individual educators. It’s a systemic gap in how we train and support people who work with diverse learners. Parents and ministries of education often drive change that then trickles down to classroom practice.

6. Different isn’t deficit. The shift from deficit-based thinking to difference-based understanding is crucial. Neurodivergent brains aren’t broken or less-than. They’re different, often seeing patterns and making connections that others miss. Reframing this as brilliance rather than disability opens up entirely new possibilities.

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About the Guest:

Joy Elizabeth Buckner is an international educator, speaker, and founder of Buckner Education with over 25 years of experience across more than 20 countries. Her global journey has given her a rare panoramic understanding of how learning systems, and society at large shape human potential, and how they overlook the brilliance of minds that don’t fit the traditional mold.

A proudly neurodivergent thinker with dyslexia, ADHD, and Irlen Syndrome, Joy uses her lived experience as both compass and catalyst. She dismantles outdated assumptions about who gets to succeed in school and society, and helps redesign environments where diverse minds can lead, innovate, and thrive.

Joy is the creator of The Joy of Neurodiversity podcast and community, a space where lived experience, science, and design come together to expand how we understand and support the full spectrum of human minds. Through her work with schools, ministries, and global organizations, Joy is shaping a future where human diversity is a strength we design for, not a challenge we manage.

Resources:

• “Shantaram” by Gregory David Roberts – Joy’s all-time favorite book, a thousand-page journey about reinvention and resilience

• The Joy of Neurodiversity Podcast – Joy’s platform for building belonging and showing dignity to neurodivergent thinkers

• World Inclusion Congress, Almaty, Kazakhstan – held last October 2025, with over 5k participants from 100+ countries

• “Covering” by Kenji Yoshino – Explores how people hide aspects of their identity to fit in, building on Erving Goffman’s work

If this conversation stirred something in you, I’d love to hear about it. Share this post, leave a comment, or reach out. Subscribe to stay updated on future episodes and insights.

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I wrote a book

In February 2024, the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency arrived with extraordinary promises. DOGE, as it was called, would save the federal government trillions of dollars. It would eliminate waste, cut bureaucracy, and prove that business efficiency could transform government operations. The message was urgent: move fast, cut deep, don’t look back.

By March 2025, DOGE was gone.

The savings? Minimal. The disruption? Profound. Federal workers were laid off without process. International aid frozen mid-distribution. Critical services halted while consultants argued over spreadsheets. The people who understood how government systems actually functioned—the institutional memory, the relationships that made things work despite bureaucracy—were never consulted. They were treated as obstacles to speed rather than sources of essential context.

DOGE’s failure wasn’t about insufficient urgency. It was about urgency divorced from judgment. The leaders assumed they knew what needed to be cut. They perspective-took—projecting their understanding of efficiency onto complex systems they’d never inhabited. What they didn’t do was perspective-get: actually ask (at least not sufficiently) the people working inside those systems what they knew, what context they held, what would break if you moved too fast.

This is what happens when urgency becomes the only value.

And it’s happening in organizations everywhere, accelerated by our current obsession with efficiency. Urgency is treated as neutral, as if “fast” means the same thing across cultures, functions, and power structures. It doesn’t. Urgency is culturally constructed. It’s shaped by values, context, and whose perspective gets centered in decision-making. When we fail to interrogate how urgency operates inside our systems, we don’t just deprioritize inclusion. We actively undermine it.

The question isn’t whether organizations will move quickly. The question is: whose urgency are we centering? And who pays the cost when speed outpaces perspective?

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What Efficiency Taught Me About Time

For years, I’ve helped organize large-scale educational events—one- to five-day classes and youth camps—for up to 300 people with a spiritual community I’ve been part of for over twenty years. Many in this community have lineage from Confucian Asia: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Singapore. As an American and an entrepreneur, I once saw (and sometimes reflexively still revert to) urgency as a virtue.

The first few times we planned together, I was quietly frustrated.

The event would be drawing near—sometimes just weeks away—and we’d still be deliberating. In meetings, everyone would have input. Ideas that seemed settled would get reopened. Someone would contradict the group sentiment, and rather than tabling the concern to keep things moving, we’d explore it. Fully. Together.

I saw it as inefficient. We were moving too slowly. We’d never be ready.

I was wrong.

When the events happened, they worked. Not perfectly—nothing planned, whether tightly or loosely, is ever perfect. But when something inevitably went wrong, you’d never know it.

One year, we had a transportation plan, but somehow overlooked a large group arriving at different airports. Five people noticed independently. Without being asked, they organized a solution: their own vehicles, two borrowed vans from other community members, and a coordinated pickup and drop-off schedule. They saw the gap, created the plan, communicated it, and executed it—all while the rest of us were focused on other aspects of the event.

It was seamless.

The deliberation we’d put into planning hadn’t been about perfection. It had been about creating the conditions for people to contribute meaningfully when urgency actually arrived. That slow, sometimes maddening front-end work built something I initially couldn’t see: shared context. Common understanding. Trust that allowed anyone—or five people, or ten—to fill gaps without missing a beat.

What I once considered a lack of urgency was actually an intentionally cultivated superpower.

Each time I participated in an event, this reality was reinforced. Eventually, I stopped questioning it. I adopted the approach in both my professional and personal life. Because what I’d learned was this: the interactive approach takes more time at the outset, but it creates conditions for people to say what’s there. To surface what they know. To contribute their context before decisions are made.

In my community, we had shared goals. The urgency was real—300 people attending a transformative experience. But we stayed open. We made space for perspective-getting rather than rushing toward action.

And when urgency actually hit? We could move.

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The Problem with Empathy

Much of Orthodox DEI work emphasizes empathy as the bridge across difference. “Put yourself in their shoes,” we’re told. “Try to feel what they’re feeling.”

Empathy has value. But under conditions of urgency, it’s insufficient. I have written about this, and I expand on the ideas from that article below, placing greater emphasis on certain points from my last book. So, here’s why:

Empathy is projection-prone. When I try to put myself in your shoes, I’m still seeing through my context—what Danish journalist Tor Nørretranders calls exformation: all the information I’ve already processed and discarded to arrive at my current understanding. So when I imagine what I’d feel in your situation, I’m not actually accessing what you feel. I’m imagining what I would feel if I were you. That’s projection, not understanding.

Empathy is feeling-focused, not context-focused. Empathy says, “I understand you’re stressed by this timeline.” That’s nice. Perspective-getting asks, “What am I missing about why this timeline feels impossible to you that I can’t see from my position?” One acknowledges feelings. The other, surfaces hidden, implicit, or unarticulated information.

Empathy can’t operate at speed. In urgent situations, there’s no time for the deep emotional labor that empathy requires. But there is time to ask: “What’s your read on this? What aren’t we seeing?” Perspective-getting is faster than empathy because it’s inquiry-based, not immersion-based.

Empathy can compromise judgment. Recent research by Todd Kashdan and colleagues at George Mason University found that interventions aimed at increasing empathy toward political outgroups sometimes reduced people’s ability to discern when criticism was warranted. In trying to be understanding, people became less discerning. They sacrificed sound judgment for emotional gratification.

Curiosity, by contrast, allows you to seek understanding while maintaining the capacity for critical assessment. As Kashdan’s research shows, curious people have “lower levels of politically motivated reasoning and more non-defensive listening goals.” They can stay open and stay sharp.

This distinction is important in matters of urgency because speed amplifies the need for judgment. When you’re moving fast, you can’t afford to be wrong. But you also can’t afford to be so empathetic that you ignore what your gut—or your colleagues—are trying to tell you.

Perspective-getting offers a different path: structured curiosity that surfaces context without sacrificing discernment.

(So-called) DEI In Practice

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The CQ P.E.A.K. Principles: A Framework for Urgency

Cultural Intelligence—what David Livermore, Soon Ang, Linn Van Dyne, and others have researched for decades—offers a more rigorous approach to navigating difference under pressure.

At its core, CQ recognizes that behaviors, including urgency, are culturally shaped. What feels decisive to one group feels reckless to another. What seems collaborative to some seems maddeningly slow to others.

As Livermore observes: “What feels efficient to some may feel reckless to others.”

This isn’t a personality thing, it’s a cultural one. And when urgency increases, cultural differences don’t disappear; they intensify.

The CQ P.E.A.K Principles from my Emergent Inclusion Framework build on this foundation, offering four interrelated dimensions for working with urgency in culturally complex environments:

P = Perspective-Getting (Not Just Taking)

Perspective-taking assumes you can imagine someone else’s view from your position. To hypothesize.

Perspective-getting recognizes that you need to ask.

Kashdan’s research revealed a striking finding: people systematically underestimate how open-minded others in their group are. Across political orientations, people assumed their peers were more closed, more rigid, and less curious than they truly were. When researchers corrected this misperception—showing people that their colleagues were actually more open than assumed—curiosity increased. People became more willing to learn rather than just be persuaded.

The same dynamic operates around urgency. Leaders assume they know how their timeline feels to the implementation team in Singapore, the compliance officer in Frankfurt, the frontline workers in São Paulo. They perspective-take: “If I were them, I’d see this as reasonable.”

But they haven’t asked.

Perspective-getting means explicitly surfacing context: “What does this timeline mean to you? What am I missing about why this feels [fast/slow/impossible] from your vantage point?”

It means recognizing and, at times, articulating openly that you don’t know. And then finding out.

E = Exformation (The Context We Discard)

In his 1991 book The User Illusion, Tor Nørretranders introduced the concept of exformation: all the context, knowledge, and processing we discard before we speak.

I first encountered Nørretranders’ work while researching the origins of a statistic frequently used in unconscious bias training.

Unconscious bias training (typically one-off events) became ubiquitous in the 2010s. I started doing it in 2003 in one of my first diversity and inclusion roles.

Some organizations are still doing it even though research says that a one-time intervention does the opposite of its intent. There is evidence of ineffectiveness; however, there are cases where it can have positive impacts when done with sustainability in mind.

My personal opinion is that if a firm determines that it wants to do training in cognitive bias, the learning requires that it be incorporated into decision-making frameworks that help shape changes in learning and mental models that are applicable. Otherwise, it is entertaining and informative, but not instrumental to altering individuals or the organizational mind (structure).

The widely cited statistic above was that consciousness processes about 11 million bits of information per second, whereas we can communicate only about 40-50 bits per second. The rest? Discarded. That discarded context (the exformation) is what gives our words meaning.

When two people share common exformation, when they’ve worked together for years, when they share cultural reference points, when they’ve built relational depth, communication is efficient. A raised eyebrow conveys volumes. A three-word phrase lands with full meaning.

But when disparate? When you’re new to the team, or from a different function, or shaped by different cultural norms about time? Those same three words mean something entirely different. Or nothing at all.

Think of exformation as an infinite vertical line passing through a horizontal plane. The plane is the information you share, the words you say, the memo you write, the deadline you announce. Where the line intersects the plane is where meaning gets made.

If you and I have common exformation, if our vertical lines are close together, the intersection is wide. Lots of shared meaning. If our exformation is disparate, if our lines are far apart, the intersection is a single point. Minimal meaning. Maximum misunderstanding.

Urgency magnifies this problem. When you’re moving fast, you don’t have time to build common exformation. You assume it exists. And when it doesn’t, you interpret people’s confusion as resistance, their questions as obstruction, their slower pace as incompetence.

The CQ P.E.A.K. approach, which enhances one’s capacity to view the world through culturally intelligent lenses, treats exformation-building as essential infrastructure rather than an optional nicety. You create space for people to share context before urgency hits. You ask: “What do you know about this situation that I don’t? Who is not in the room, who is impacted by this decision, and needs to help us make sense of it? What’s in your head that hasn’t made it into the room yet?”

As Nørretranders writes: “It is not what we say to each other every day that establishes all the meaning and beauty and truth our everyday conversations contain; it is everything we think before we speak.”

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A = Adaptation and Cognitive Reframing

Once you’ve gathered perspective and surfaced exformation, you have to be willing to change your mind.

This is where many urgency-driven initiatives fail. Leaders ask for input. They checked the “consulted” box on a RACI slide, but the timeline was already set. The decision was already made. The input becomes performative rather than generative.

Adaptation means you’re genuinely open to reframing the situation based on what you learn. It means recognizing that your initial read on urgency might have been shaped by your cultural norms, your functional priorities, your position in the hierarchy.

Culturally intelligent leadership practices what Kashdan calls “willingness to be influenced contrary to strongly held beliefs” (I say that leadership connotes a “willingness to be influenced by the so-called other”). Leadership holds convictions lightly enough to adjust when confronted with better or even contradictory information.

Under urgency, this looks like:

• Adjusting timelines when you learn they’re based on faulty assumptions

• Changing the sequence of decisions when you realize critical stakeholders are being bypassed

• Slowing down one part of a process to speed up the whole

• Naming when your urgency is about your anxiety, not the situation’s actual requirements

Adaptation isn’t indecision. It’s responsive leadership. It’s the difference between “we decided this is urgent, so it is” and “we thought this was urgent; here’s what we learned that changed our thinking.”

K = Knowledge (Cultural and Individual)

The Knowledge dimension, which is part of the Cultural Intelligence Center’s/Livermore’s CQ, and the CQ P.E.A.K. Principles, includes two critical elements: understanding cultural patterns and norms, in this case around time and urgency, and recognizing the uniqueness of individuals who don’t fit those patterns.

Cultural patterns matter. Livermore’s research shows that speed orientations differ systematically across cultures. Some cultures (often including the U.S., Germany, and Switzerland) treat speed and timeliness as proxies for competence (e.g., delays on trains or trams can prompt apologies in Switzerland). Fast decisions signal confidence. Slow deliberation signals weakness.

Other cultures (including many Asian, Latin American, and African contexts) treat relationship-building and consensus as prerequisites for action. Moving fast without this foundation isn’t efficient; it’s reckless. It undermines the very trust that enables execution.

Neither is right nor wrong. Both are functional in their contexts. But when they collide under urgency, one tends to dominate. And it’s usually the cultural orientation of whoever holds power.

But individuals are complex. I’m American. Raised in urgency culture. And yet, over twenty-five years in my Confucian Asian community, I’ve become much more high-context, much more deliberative than many Americans. My cultural background doesn’t determine my relationship to time. My experiences do.

This is where curiosity becomes essential. You can’t just Google “How do Japanese people view deadlines?” and think you understand your colleague from Tokyo. You have to ask her. You must remain curious about how her individual context, her exposure to multiple cultures, her functional training, and her personality shape her experience of urgency.

The Knowledge dimension requires holding cultural patterns and individual complexity simultaneously. It means using cultural intelligence as a starting point for inquiry, not an endpoint for assumptions.

And it means recognizing that curiosity—genuine, Kashdan-style curiosity that seeks to understand rather than confirm—allows you to navigate the space between pattern and person.

How CQ P.E.A.K. Works Together

The five dimensions are mutually reinforcing:

• Perspective-getting surfaces what you don’t know

• Exformation explains why you didn’t know it (disparate context)

• Knowledge helps you interpret what you’re hearing through cultural and individual lenses

• Adaptation lets you adjust based on what you’ve learned

• And curiosity (woven through the K) keeps you open enough to do all of this without defensiveness

Without curiosity, perspective-getting becomes interrogation. Without awareness of exformation, adaptation feels arbitrary. Without cultural knowledge, you misinterpret the signals you’re getting.

But together? They create what my spiritual community demonstrated: the capacity to move with urgency when it matters most because you’ve built the shared understanding that enables coordinated action.

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What This Looks Like Monday Morning

If you’re a CHRO, head of Learning and Development, or senior leader responsible for culture, here’s how you start:

1. The Exformation Audit

Map your last three to five “urgent” decisions:

• Who initiated the urgency?

• Who was consulted before the decision was made?

• Who was bypassed? Why?

• What context might those bypassed people hold that you don’t?

Look for patterns. Is urgency consistently defined by the same cultural group? The same functions? The same seniority level? If so, you’re perspective-taking at scale. You’re assuming one group’s urgency is universal.

2. The Perspective-Getting Protocol

Before declaring something urgent, institutionalize three questions:

First: “What does ‘urgent’ mean to [name specific stakeholder]?”

Don’t say “the Asian offices” or “frontline workers.” Name actual people. Be specific. If you can’t name them, you don’t know who’s affected by your urgency.

Second: “What context about this timeline am I missing?”

This isn’t rhetorical. Write down what you think you know, then go find out what you don’t know. Treat it like due diligence. Because it is.

Third: “If I’m wrong about the urgency, who pays the cost?”

DOGE’s leaders were insulated from the consequences of their speed. Federal workers weren’t. Citizens across the globe weren’t. Harm was done. Suffering continues.

When urgency goes wrong, the cost rarely falls on the people who set the timeline. Make that visible. Decide if you’re comfortable with that distribution.

Then—and this is critical—actually ask those stakeholders. Don’t assume you know what they’ll say. Ask. Listen. Adjust.

3. The Cultural Speed Inventory

Assess your leadership team’s cultural orientations toward time:

• Who comes from high-urgency cultures where speed signals competence?

• Who comes from relationship-first cultures where deliberation signals respect?

• How are decisions currently made when these orientations clash?

• Whose speed orientation is treated as “the standard”?

Then, in your next strategic decision, make the cultural assumptions explicit.

Try this framing: “Our U.S. headquarters wants this decision in 30 days because we’re trying to hit Q2 targets. Our Singapore office needs 60 days because local regulation requires stakeholder consultation that can’t be rushed. Both are legitimate urgencies. How do we bridge this?”

When you name the cultural dynamics at play, you create space for perspective-getting rather than cultural domination. You signal that different approaches to time are strategic differences, not performance failures.

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The Questions That Reveal Disparate Exformation

As you implement the CQ P.E.A.K. approach, these diagnostic questions help surface when urgency is undermining inclusion:

On your last urgent initiative:

• Did the people most affected by the timeline help set it?

• What percentage of your leadership team thought the pace was appropriate vs. reckless?

• Whose concerns were dismissed as “resistance to change” rather than explored as information?

About your organizational culture:

• When someone says “this is moving too fast,” do you interpret that as a data point or a complaint?

• Do leaders get rewarded for speed regardless of quality of execution?

• Can people challenge urgency without career consequences?

About power and speed:

• Who has the authority to declare something urgent in your organization?

• Whose urgency consistently “wins” when timelines conflict?

• When was the last time a senior leader slowed down because someone junior asked them to?

If you can’t answer these questions, you don’t know how urgency operates in your system. And if you don’t know how it operates, you can’t lead it responsibly.

What DOGE Can Teach Us

The Department of Government Efficiency failed not because government can’t be improved. It failed because urgency without perspective-getting is just speed without judgment.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy had no skin in the game. They weren’t federal employees whose livelihoods depended on getting this right. They weren’t the family members of people relying on frozen international aid. They weren’t the institutional memory that held government systems together despite bureaucratic dysfunction.

They had urgency. They had efficiency frameworks. They had spreadsheets and Grok.

What they didn’t have was curiosity about what they didn’t know.

They never asked: What context are we missing? Whose perspective haven’t we gotten? What does “waste” mean to someone who’s worked inside these systems for twenty years vs. someone who’s been here twenty days?

They (kind of) perspective-took. They assumed. They moved fast.

And they failed.

This is the cautionary tale for every organization that chased efficiency in 2025 and into 2026. Speed is seductive. Urgency feels like momentum. But when urgency becomes the only value, you stop asking the questions that actually create sustainable change:

• Whose urgency are we centering?

• What context are we missing?

• Who’s been excluded from defining what “fast enough” means?

• And who’s going to pay when we’re wrong?

The Invitation

Leadership practice of perspective-taking doesn’t slow organizations down. It creates conditions that enable them to move with greater capability.

They build the shared exformation that allows teams to adapt when urgency strikes. They create conditions in which five people can independently solve a transportation crisis because everyone understands not only what we’re doing but also why it matters and how we work.

They recognize that urgency without cultural intelligence (CQ) isn’t progress. It’s cultural dominance disguised as speed.

My spiritual community taught me that what appears to be inefficiency up front is, in fact, infrastructure. The deliberation that initially frustrated me wasn’t slowing us down. It was building the superpower that let us move seamlessly when it mattered.

That’s what inclusive urgency looks like. Not slower. Not less decisive. But grounded in the recognition that speed without judgment breaks things (often without culpability).

And the organizations that will endure this era of acceleration will not be the ones that moved the fastest. They’ll be the ones who learned to move with discernment, accountability, and shared responsibility.

Because urgency is not neutral. It never was.

I hope this was helpful. Make it a great day. ✌🏼

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There’s a question that keeps circling back in my mind: If I could go back knowing what I know now, what would I have done differently?

A colleague said something recently that hit me hard. He told me that organizational purpose had been usurped by organizational optics. Those words landed.

For years, I watched organizations treat inclusion work as crisis management. They’d implement just enough to deflect criticism, look progressive, avoid controversy. Minimal investment with maximum visibility. But it rarely touched the fundamental structures, mental models, or capabilities that actually help people thrive in complexity.

Now we’re watching the backlash unfold. The resistance that simmered quietly has erupted. Those of us who believed in creating genuinely inclusive workplaces have to grapple with an uncomfortable truth: we may have contributed to the very resistance we were trying to overcome.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: uncertainty demands diversity. The more complex our challenges get, the more we need multiple perspectives, approaches, and ways of thinking. These aren’t separate issues. They’re fundamentally connected. Yet somehow, our field managed to package this truth in ways that created division instead of collaboration, resistance instead of engagement, and way less progress than what seemed possible.

This is my honest accounting of what happened. It’s drawn from conversations with critics and supporters of this work, patterns I’ve seen across industries, and a willingness to look at where I personally fell short, and where we collectively missed the mark. Because without being real about our mistakes, we have no foundation for building something better.

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When Optics Replaced Purpose: The Performative Turn

Summer 2020 opened a window that I’d never seen before in my career. Organizations were scrambling to respond to George Floyd’s death and everything that followed. People with all kinds of backgrounds rushed in to fill the void. Some had deep expertise, others were driven by passion alone. The impulse made sense. The execution? That’s where things went sideways.

The work quickly became about diagnosing problems instead of building capability. Instead of getting people across organizations talking about what actually needed to change structurally, all the energy went into articulating the problem of systemic racism. And look, I need to be completely clear here: racism is real. People racialized as Black and non-white have faced and continue to face serious challenges. But when systemic racism became the explanation for every single organizational dynamic, the whole analysis collapsed.

“Instead of enrolling people in a conversation about what organizations structurally needed to change, there was a tremendous amount of energy talking about the structural problem of systemic racism.” [00:05:00]

I remember being on these virtual meetings from Switzerland, looking at the gallery view on my screen. Half the senior leaders would be multitasking on their laptops, popping in with a comment here and there, but never really present. The pattern that showed up in my one-on-one conversations afterward was revealing.

Some leaders were actively opposed. They’d tell me straight up: “This isn’t helping.” And here’s the thing that surprised me: these people were actually the most useful. They’d say things like, “We’re temporarily massaging feelings without getting at what would actually create different conditions.” They weren’t dismissing emotions. They were questioning whether our approach could create lasting change.

“But there was another group. I’ll call them the passively opposed. They’d make ambiguous statements. They’d ask derailing questions cloaked in neutrality. One person told me, my group is fine, we’re like the United Nations. We all get along and focus on getting our jobs done.” [00:07:00]

The passive opposition was way more destructive than active resistance. These people weren’t looking for understanding. They weren’t examining their thinking. They used ambiguity as a shield, derailing things without looking like they were opposed.

And here’s where I have to own my part: a lot of practitioners, including me at times, didn’t listen well to either group. We didn’t ask deeper questions about what they believed and why. That failure left people convinced this work was pointless, and the ones with enough power started systematically shutting it down or putting it on a shelf.

The seeds of what we’re dealing with today got planted in those moments when we failed to connect.

The Fallacies

I’ve been deep in Thomas Sowell’s Social Justice Fallacies lately. Sowell’s a conservative economist, and you don’t have to agree with everything he says. But his examination of how well-intentioned efforts to address inequality can backfire? That demands serious attention from anyone doing this work.

Three fallacies he lays out cut right to the heart of where inclusion work went off track.

The Chess Pieces Fallacy assumes people should be distributed proportionally across all outcomes and positions, like we’re interchangeable game pieces. But that ignores reality. People have different interests. They come with different preparation. They make choices shaped by culture, circumstances, individual preferences. When we see statistical disparities and immediately call it discrimination without looking at all these other factors, we’re making this mistake.

The idea that “disparities don’t equal discrimination” makes a lot of people in our field uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable sometimes. But it’s true. And when we try to engineer proportional outcomes, which is what many people thought equity meant (I never did, but that’s how it got interpreted), we often create the exact resentment and division we were trying to prevent.

“When we see statistical disparities and immediately conclude their evidence of discrimination, without examining all these other factors, we’re committing this fallacy. Disparities don’t equal discrimination.” [00:11:00]

The Zero-Sum Fallacy was everywhere in the work I saw. It’s the belief that if one group advances, another group has to lose. This framing showed up constantly. The hidden assumption that addressing historical disadvantages for one group meant taking resources or opportunities from another.

But organizational capability doesn’t work that way. When you actually build inclusion skills, the capacity to manage complexity, navigate across difference and similarity, create conditions where people can thrive, everyone’s capacity grows. We’re not fighting over a fixed pie. We’re making the pie bigger.

The Knowledge Fallacy might be the one that hits closest to home. We acted like we had all the information needed to engineer social outcomes. The perfect training module, the right policy framework, the correct intervention would produce the culture we wanted.

“But cultures are emergent. They arise from thousands of interactions and formal networks, unspoken norms. Top-down engineering rarely produces what we intend. It usually produces unintended consequences we didn’t anticipate because we couldn’t possibly know all the variables at play.” [00:13:00]

Cultures emerge from thousands of daily interactions, informal networks, unspoken norms. You can’t engineer that from the top down. What you get instead are unintended consequences you never saw coming because you couldn’t possibly know all the variables.

When people challenged these assumptions, the practitioner community (myself included) often failed to actually engage. We’d label the pushback as “resistance” or diagnose it as “fragility.” Those labels didn’t open up dialogue. They shut it down. And when people feel labeled and dismissed instead of heard and engaged, the damage goes way beyond any single conversation.

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What I Would Have Done Differently: A Personal Accounting

So here’s my reckoning. If I could go back five years with what I know now, what would I change?

First: I would have validated the legitimate critiques before they turned into full backlash.

The case of Richard Bilkszto still haunts me. He was a teacher in Toronto at an anti-racism workshop. He challenged something the facilitator said. Instead of engaging with him respectfully, she publicly humiliated him. She used his comment as an example of what’s wrong. His point was reasonable. He deserved to be treated with dignity, not shamed. And here’s the irony that cuts deep: if someone had treated a person of color that way, nobody would’ve defended it.

“The tragic result was that Richard Bilkszto lost his job as an administrator and ultimately took his own life. He had vulnerability in that moment, his identity, his belief, and what he did and how well he did it was shattered. Education was his life.” [00:16:00]

Bilkszto lost his job. Education was his whole identity, his life’s work. Eventually, he took his own life. Look, I know multiple factors contributed. But he was clearly hanging by a thread, and this experience might have been what pushed him over the edge.

The facilitator showed some passive compassion afterward, maybe worried about liability. But the broader practitioner community? We didn’t take real responsibility. I didn’t take enough responsibility. We failed to acknowledge that this approach to anti-racism work was actively harmful. If I could go back, I would’ve spoken out way more forcefully in practitioner circles. I said something at the time, probably lost some relationships over it. But I should’ve been louder, clearer, more insistent.

When critiques of the Kendi and DiAngelo frameworks got louder, I would’ve joined those critics more explicitly. Those approaches weren’t helpful. They felt good to some people, made their creators a lot of money, but they weren’t creating the conditions we claimed to want. They were like incense. Nice smell that fades quickly without leaving real change behind.

Second: I would’ve been way clearer about what inclusion and diversity actually require.

Inclusion, when you really think about it, means any action that creates conditions for people to thrive. All people, not just certain groups. I would’ve established clearer principles from the start: the value of hearing different viewpoints, even ones we disagree with. The necessity of keeping humanity as the fundamental frame instead of organizing everything around group identity.

Think about athletes for a second. What fans see on the field (goals scored, passes completed) is only part of what makes peak performance possible. Behind the scenes, athletes put massive energy into injury prevention. Physical therapy. Stretching routines. Exercises that keep them flexible and strengthen connective tissue. They condition their bodies to handle the sudden movements that could otherwise break them.

“When people are playing on a football pitch, obviously scoring goals and passing and all that is good. But there’s a lot of stuff that players have to do behind the scenes to prevent injury... That’s what our work could be. That’s creating the conditions, for everyone.” [00:22:00]

Inclusion work should work like that injury prevention. It’s the often invisible investment that lets people perform at their highest level without breaking down. It creates resilient conditions where everyone can contribute fully.

I would’ve spent way more time exploring moments when people felt they truly mattered. When leaders did things that helped them grow. How people flourished and what made that possible. Who helped them feel valued and how we could build those experiences into the system. I wouldn’t ignore problems, but I would’ve balanced problem-focus with understanding how to create more conditions for thriving.

Third: I would’ve gotten way more specific about building actual capabilities.

Instead of trying to change mindsets or impose frameworks, I would’ve focused relentlessly on skill development. Cultural intelligence (not surface-level awareness about other cultures, but real capability to navigate across difference and similarity). Perspective-taking that goes beyond empathy to genuinely understanding how others see situations differently and why. Skills for understanding context, how systems and history shape what’s happening now. The ability to look at situations from multiple angles and adjust our approach together. Asking questions that actually reveal understanding instead of just pushing our own views. Deep listening as something you practice and get better at, not just a performance.

“These are just a few things that I would’ve been mindful and thoughtful of, and all of these are a part of my Emergent Inclusion Framework.” [00:24:00]

And above everything else, I would’ve made civility and dignity absolute requirements. Not nice-to-haves or aspirational values. Non-negotiable foundations for any conversation or intervention. I can’t say this enough times because when it’s missing, nothing else works.

Why This Moment Actually Holds Promise

Here’s what keeps fascinating me after years of talking with executives across different industries: the idea of building organizational capability to manage the tensions and complexities of difference and similarity? I’ve never gotten pushback on that. Not once.

Every leader I’ve talked to, whether they’re openly supportive of inclusion work or skeptical of DEI initiatives, agrees that organizations need this capacity. They see that these capabilities are in short supply. The challenge isn’t whether these skills matter. It’s how we talk about them, frame them, and actually develop them.

“No executive I’ve ever talked to has said that that’s not something organizations need to be equipped to manage. All of them have agreed. They were clear that as collective human communities such capabilities weren’t in large enough supply.” [00:27:00]

There’s real consensus around what capabilities matter, how to figure out who has them, how to reward people who demonstrate them, how to build them internally, and how to spot talent that already has them. People get it intuitively. These inclusion skills (call them relational skills, durable skills, human capabilities, whatever) work like organizational superpowers.

The timing with AI and increasing uncertainty makes this moment particularly interesting. As AI’s role expands, the distinctly human stuff becomes more valuable, not less. The ability to think clearly through complexity, understand how systems work, exercise good judgment in relationships. These capabilities matter more as technical tasks get automated.

Even people bullish on AI acknowledge this. Yeah, there are doomsday predictions about wholesale job elimination (often pushed by AI companies whose whole business model depends on replacing workers). But machine learning experts in universities are pushing back on those scenarios. The consensus that’s emerging goes like this: technical skills combined with relational and inclusion capabilities equals real organizational advantage.

The case for building genuine inclusion skills has maybe never been stronger. The demand has never been higher. The question is whether we’ll show up to this moment with the same approaches that created backlash, or whether we’ll build something actually different.

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Key Takeaways

1. Purpose over optics. Too many organizations treated DEI as optics management. Do just enough to avoid pressure, look good, manage the headlines. That approach undermined the real work and helped create the backlash we’re seeing now. Actual inclusion work means changing fundamental structures, not just managing appearances.

2. Listen to the real critique. Both active and passive opposition contain important information. Our failure to engage respectfully with pushback, to label it as “resistance” or “fragility” instead of actually hearing it, was one of our biggest mistakes. When someone has a legitimate concern, they deserve legitimate engagement.

3. Watch out for the fallacies. The chess pieces fallacy (people should be distributed proportionally), the zero-sum fallacy (one group’s gain requires another’s loss), and the knowledge fallacy (we can engineer culture from the top) all shaped how this work went wrong. Disparities don’t automatically mean discrimination. One group’s success doesn’t require another’s failure. And you can’t manufacture culture through policy alone.

4. Build real skills, not just frameworks. Instead of imposing frameworks like anti-racism training, focus on building actual capabilities: cultural intelligence, perspective taking, understanding context, adaptability, sophisticated questioning, deep listening. These skills help everyone navigate complexity, and they’re what organizations actually need.

5. Make civility and dignity non-negotiable. Creating conditions where people feel they matter, where their contributions get recognized, where dignity is protected. That’s the foundation everything else builds on. Without it, no framework or intervention will work.

6. The opportunity is right now. Despite the current backlash, uncertainty is creating real demand for the skills that genuine inclusion work develops. Technical skills plus relational capabilities equals organizational power in the age of AI.

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Resources:

• Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell. A fact-based look at how well-intentioned approaches to inequality can backfire.

This is my last podcast episode for 2025. What a year it’s been. Challenging, clarifying, exhausting at times. I’ve come out stronger, though honestly, not every day feels that way. But something’s shifting. I can feel it.

My hope for 2026 is that we find the courage to come together for real conversations. That we actually invest in building these capabilities instead of just talking about them. That we find a way to get unstuck from this contentious cycle that’s keeping everyone trapped. I really believe we can move into the next phase of this work, one that’s grounded in building actual capability instead of performing for optics.

If this hit home for you and you want to keep the conversation going, consider subscribing. Let’s figure out together what the future of this work looks like. Anchored in our shared humanity, honest about how complex this all is, and committed to creating conditions where people can actually thrive.

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