Good Work In Bad Times: How to Advance DEI Under Any Label

As an equity & inclusion practitioner, it’s disheartening to watch all the good DEI work of the last decade get attacked and dismantled by the current administration.

But the way I see it, this moment also presents a huge opportunity to deepen and strengthen the work of DEI. 

Many of the old tools we’ve relied upon, like anti-bias training, affirmative action, and DEI offices and officers, are no longer available to us. Even the labels of “DEI” or “diversity, equity and inclusion” now represent a liability for many organizations.

But DEI as a label was always fragile & at risk of being targeted by outside policies. A culture of equity & inclusion, on the other hand, is much more resilient. 

I like to think of the last 10 years of DEI progress like mushrooms popping up across a forest. Each DEI initiative, leadership position, program, vision statement, and strategy is another individual mushroom.

Now think of the current attacks on DEI like some sort of bladed machine sweeping through the forest and clear-cutting all those mushrooms at the stem.

It’s a painful image – but it’s not the end of the story. Because as any gardener, forager, or The Last of Us fan will tell you, a mushroom is only the surface-level fruit of a much deeper network of structural pathways called mycelium. 

Mycelium is a living network of underground filaments that underpin entire forest ecosystems. Not only does mycelium produce mushrooms, but it provides nutrients, water, structural support, and information to trees, animals, plants, waterways, insects, lichen, bacteria, and more. 

Mycelium holds the soil together, and it helps the entire forest thrive.

Our next chapter of DEI needs to be modeled after mycelium, not mushrooms. We need to go underground and start nourishing equity & inclusion at the root of all our organizational work, under any label we can find.

When we approach DEI like mycelium, we turn our focus to the connective tissue of the organization: the culture, pathways, and systems that keep it running. We focus on infiltrating DEI into everything we do, just as mycelium supports growing trees, filtering water, feeding animals and nourishing plants. 

DEI as most orgs have done it was always vulnerable to attack.

Like most DEI practitioners, I used to take a “mushroom-first” approach. Back in 2016 when I was advocating for equity & inclusion in my own workplace, a dedicated DEI office or leader seemed like the most effective strategy to bring about lasting change.

But as we’re seeing now, a mushroom-first approach ultimately renders DEI vulnerable to attack. It localizes DEI into one niche, and neutralizes its ability to effect meaningful, lasting change throughout the organization.

The present moment asks us to learn the hard lessons from our mushroom-focused approach, and pivot towards a deeper strategy that integrates DEI into the cultural fiber of the organization, in ways that can’t be easily targeted by an external backlash.

Here’s how to take DEI underground in your org

Right now, we need to invest in systems and structures that build DEI as a byproduct, not an end goal unto itself. For example:

• Building psychological safety is great for product innovation and employee engagement. It also helps surface marginalized perspectives and builds deeper inclusion.
• Agile team practices are essential for helping companies respond to volatile markets and seize opportunities for growth. They also help empower frontline team members, who are more likely to be BIPOC and/or women.
• Empowered decision making is critical for mitigating risk and promoting organizational agility. It’s also effective at mitigating implicit bias and incorporating diverse/marginalized perspectives into organizational decisions.

The everyday team practices that support these goals form August’s “mycelium.” Each practice, from Safe to Try to Even Overs to Meeting Cadence and more, form a strand of connective fiber that holds our organization together. 

The DEI attacks will be good for DEI, in the end 

The attacks on DEI are devastating. Good people are getting fired. Important programs are being dismantled. Language is being weaponized. I don’t want to diminish these harms.

But the backlash is happening because DEI is working. The visibility of DEI efforts of the last decade led to real, measurable progress that shifted the culture towards a fairer, more inclusive future. 

And because DEI opponents can’t halt the culture (the mycelium), they’re focused on attacking the label (the mushroom).

But these surface-level attacks on DEI are creating a constraint that I think will ultimately bring us closer to achieving real equity & inclusion in the end.

When you have to pursue DEI without calling it DEI, you have no choice but to find creative ways to infuse DEI into the unspoken substance of your work. This, paradoxically, is the ultimate goal of DEI – to normalize it as an inextricable component of the shared culture!

Take McDonald’s, for instance. The global giant that has emerged as a surprising role model for what a mushroom-to-mycelium transition in DEI can look like.

McDonald's recently announced its plan to evolve its DEI priorities away from public DEI initiatives, and towards systemic integration of inclusion goals into operational procedures.

The anti-woke media celebrated this as a win in the fight against DEI. But if you read the actual letter, as Doug Melville argues in his excellent Forbes piece on the subject, it’s clear that McDonald’s is using this moment to deepen its commitment to DEI, rather than divesting from it. 

Constraints have always sparked innovation, from the birth of modern medicine to landing on the moon. Constraints have also powered incredible resilience against oppressive odds, from the French Revolution to the Underground Railroad to #MeToo and beyond.

Resistance, when harnessed strategically and purposefully, fosters growth and transformation. Ask anyone who does weight training at the gym. 

Or, ask any mushroom farmer who pulls mushrooms in order to foster the growth of more mushrooms. 🍄

DEI is working. It’s time to commit, not back away.

White supremacist patriarchy is powered by ambiguity and silence. The more language we have to talk about inequity and injustice, the less power the oppressors have. 

That’s why the DEI label is such a threat to the racist/sexist/ableist status quo. It gives us all a shared language for talking about the entrenched oppression that for centuries was rendered culturally invisible.

But shared language itself was never the goal of DEI. Equity and inclusion is the goal. And with the language under attack, we now need new approaches to DEI that can’t be targeted or undone with the stroke of a pen.

Right now, the best strategy is tactical, not optical. Don’t worry about changing hearts and minds. Don’t aim for the moral high ground. Focus on tangible areas where you can make progress, under whatever label necessary. For example:

• Advocate for salary transparency in the name of merit-based rewards. 
• Plug agile team practices in the name of business development. 
• Promote psychological safety for the sake of colorblind inclusion. 

Build DEI into your systems of operation, by whatever name you need to call it in order to get the job done. This is the mycelium approach. This is open, agile, and human-centered work. And it will ultimately help us build a more equitable and inclusive world, in practice and in name.