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

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Activism strives to shame society collectively into changing their behaviour and motivating others to act, which it has by opening the conversation.

Equity involves providing equal access, treatment, opportunity, and advancement for every employee, eliminating obstacles to success.

Before starting any EDI work, Zheng lays out how you must determine whether you are a low, medium, or high trust organization. If you don't have an expert, you need to bring in a third party advisor or make sure that their name comes up for consideration before that group's been established. And yet, despite the lack of progress, they remain optimistic that “people can change and grow, that systems can adapt to undo inequity rather than perpetuate it, and that we can both build and fight our way to a better world. Zheng is the first practitioner I have seen use an organizing framework to meaningfully and measurably impact change in organizations! In low-trust environments, their advice is to get to a medium-trust environment by having leaders cede power to the advocates and follow their lead; the leaders have lost trust so nobody will follow them, so better to follow somebody else who may have that trust.

So everybody that's listening to this, I think of Lily as such a light in our conversation about this field.

Lily instead starts from the basics of defining measurable impact outcomes for diversity, equity and inclusion, and then lays out strategies and tactics for moving organizations towards those outcomes. If we are not collecting data at the outset to gain a baseline and then regularly reassessing where we are at in achieving our goals, we won't be able to determine if we have achieved what we set out to and are ready to move on to the next step. I see too often people having these really ambitious intentions, setting out really to make better organizations and make better teams, become more inclusive people.

The book emphasizes the importance of going beyond superficial diversity efforts and offers a step-by-step approach to creating lasting change within an organization. They don't pretend that it is easy, but they do show what is possible while acknowledging that this work is constantly evolving; and we must evolve along with it. And we don't understand, not enough people understand how to make organizational change, and we don't talk about that enough in the DEI space because it's so much more visible and flashy and profitable to over focus on the very first spark of a movement than it is to carry that movement through all the different aspects of organizational change making. Those with formal power might play the roles of backers, builders or reformers, while those with informal power can fit into other roles without necessarily being the fire-breathing advocate e.And at the end of the day, what was one of the most sobering things to realize was that we didn't actually have very much impact at all.