Dei Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right

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Zheng recommends leaders with formal power put skin in the game by making commitments with consequences, and creating and empowering stakeholder groups to hold them accountable.

Lily’s inclusion of the historical context around DEI (from Reagan to present day) is a great addition. Before starting any EDI work, Zheng lays out how you must determine whether you are a low, medium, or high trust organization. DEI is a complicated concept, and organizations have (or haven't, depending) grappled with the struggle of how to integrate and use DEI in their work, strategies, products, etc. I thought maybe we had really this had been discovered to be more central to the way business works and the way leaders lead and the way that they generate colleagueship. Then it gets into a really complex process of negotiation where people figure things out, when people try to put new policies into practice.Lily shows readers that these days are not that far in our rear view mirror and, perhaps, vestiges still haunt our present day thinking. This was a clear and readable introduction to DEI work with practical and meaningful advice on how to achieve impact from DEI interventions, rather than just hoping for results based on good intent. iv) Stakeholders' roles presented in chapter 7 link stakeholders' movement and the organization's role. It's so true, like what you say, making it boring because it is the scut work is looking under every rock for the inequities that exist and how processes can be evaluated and redesigned so that they generate better outcomes. We also need: white people, men, cis-gender people, straight people, non-disabled people, neurotypical people, Christian people, and more to make sure that the world we design together doesn’t just put new people in charge of broken systems but truly designs something better for everyone.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.That implicit belief is getting really challenged by newer generations of workers, by younger employees, by queer and trans folks, by people of color. But when half-baked and under-developed strategies are implemented, they often do more harm than good, leading the very constituents they aim to support to dismiss DEI entirely.

The book advocates for sharing not only successes but also failures and lessons learned, building trust through transparency. And so Lily, you and I were talking about how the book is both, I guess, hard-hitting but also accessible. However, it doesn’t push the needle enough to be considered the innovative and provocative work of a DEI change maker (and maybe Lily didn’t want it to be and that’s totally ok).In medium-trust environments, small wins are crucial to rebuilding trust reserves, while low-trust environments may require ceding power to disadvantaged groups to initiate bottom-up change. Zheng takes a systemic approach in understanding an organization’s structure (centralization and formalization of decision making, and complexity of organization), culture (how distanced are those in formal power from the front line workers, how unified and interdependent do people in the organization feel, and how much do they try to avoid uncertainty and failure), and strategy (the choices that people with power make).

I'm giving this warning and cautionary tale, but also laying out, like you have done, all of these mechanisms to investigate, to explore, to try on trying to make it as easy as possible to step into the costume, even if it doesn't feel like it's native to you, but step into it, try it on, hey, it might fit. We at Penguin Random House Australia acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Traditional Custodians and the first storytellers of the lands on which we live and work. We honour Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' continuous connection to Country, waters, skies and communities. The first one being what I'm hearing as why didn't things change as much as they could have in 2020?Because I think this is something that's deeply prized by incoming talent and younger generations, and yet they're coming into this sort of antiquated system and then they're trying to challenge the system. So someone that you should absolutely follow, listen to, learn from, and just tune into the dialogue around you, Lily, because it is, it's awesome. And some organizations did ride the wave of Black advocacy to change decision-making practices, to change DEI initiatives and so on and so forth.