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

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But I feel like sometimes really easy for practitioners to spin their gears and to say a whole bunch of really meaningful, powerful things that don't actually mean anything. So everybody that's listening to this, I think of Lily as such a light in our conversation about this field. I also saw it as a very strong approach to change leadership in general and will be using it in my PD going forward. And I've deleted the whole thing and been like, I can replace this with one paragraph saying this thing is broken. In high-trust environments, where stakeholders trust leaders to recognize problems and follow through on commitments, change is relatively linear: “Assess the Present”, “Tell a Story”, “Experiment Carefully”, and “Iterate, Celebrate (successful outcomes) and Reiterate”.

And so I want to talk about it more and talk about you and how would you introduce yourself for those who are listening that don't know you and your work and how you identify and something about why this is your life's work. And more broadly, I see a lot of frustration and disengagement and distrust of organizations and leaders directly associated with this sort of constant failure of our ability to turn our intentions into the impacts we want. To me it's extremely cutting edge, and your book is going to be a wonderful addition to the bookshelves. A really solid look at diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs—effective strategies, the well-intentioned-but-lacking, and the stuff that simply falls flat.And yet all that we teach bears repeating and it's always new audiences and audiences may not have heard it ever. Then it delves into the DEI initiatives at organizational level, which were more nuanced and detailed. ii) The book reminds us how power is embedded in systems, why we need to create a power map when creating any change effort, and how the interaction among strategy, power, and structure allows to backward design outcomes. Power distance refers to the degree in a society to which people are more or less comfortable with hierarchy, with power differences. 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).

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. And I think you can look at the companies that took action in 2020 and almost directly tie back that action to the efficacy of the Black employee resource group or the DEI council or whatever Black employees were advocating for at the time. DEI Deconstructed analyzes how current methods and "best practices" leave marginalized people feeling frustrated and unconvinced of their leaders' sincerity, and offers a roadmap that bridges the neatness of theory with the messiness of practice.

This book will be something I refer back to and use to evaluate other DEI books, initiatives and trainings.

Simply implementing common best practices, without first getting a clear picture of your specific organisation, is a recipe for failure. It's when there is a really big event, when there's something that shakes the foundations of the corporate world, I think we need to recognize that outrage by itself is not enough to change systems. Though meant for practitioners and facilitators, I thought it was incredibly interesting and thoughtful from a layperson perspective and gave me a lot of insight into the field, what it can accomplish, and how much further it still has to go.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 hate to say people eat it up because they're like, "Yeah, I don't know what any of those words mean. And I think one of the big reasons is because we had a lot of outrage and a lot of, I think very right shift energy and frustration and momentum but we didn't understand any of the levers. And so some of the tension is that the new societal pressure to make inequities go away is butting up against these long standing, sometimes decades long hierarchies within organizations, within institutions, within government, within academia, within industry that have unspoken rules about who it is that deserves to be on top.