Map Your DEI Journey: 3 Key Insights

This month True North EDI hosted our first webinar of 2024, “Where do we go from here? Mapping the DEI Journey,” and the turnout and response was fantastic! It’s always wonderful to uncover and present a topic that resonates with so many. If you missed it, don’t worry, we’re giving you access to a video recording of the webinar as well as the DEI Roadmap we created and shared with attendees.

The tool was designed to help organizations locate themselves on the DEI journey. It has two sections: the first page identifies the essence of each of its five phases and takes you from “discovery” to “implementation,” and the second, outlines (perhaps more importantly for some) the impediments that can keep organizations from meaningful progress at each phase and the cultural/emotional impacts of those impediments on communities.

Here are three key insights that emerged during the webinar.

They represent overarching themes that came up during both the presentation as well as the Q&A.??

1. Communicate the ‘Why’

Purpose is key. We spoke about this briefly in our 6 Coaching Insights for Today’s Leaders, but it continually presents itself as a vital understanding in our work with clients. DEI for DEI’s-sake doesn’t go very far and may even result in a complete failure to launch. Before starting a DEI process, you don’t know what you don’t know. Not only is that okay, but it’s worth communicating. The question is: what do you know? You may know the organization or company has no history of making explicit values of equity, belonging, or diversity. You may know that patterns of discrimination have been made visible for you. You may simply know that there are signs that who you say you are or wish deeply to be aren’t aligning with your actions and/or what’s being said about you. These are all fair reasons to integrate DEI into the tapestry of who you are as an organization. Sure, there is a business case for “diversity.” Yes, you, like we do, might feel a deep moral imperative to promote DEI within professional communities. But grand ideas are fleeting. What and who do you hope to be on the other side of this work???

2. Momentum over Urgency

The value of urgency is a tricky one. Many clients we work with – especially those we supported in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the unprecedented summer that followed – feel a sense of urgency to make meaningful change. This webinar fell a day after the 4-year anniversary of the world shutting down in March 2020 (an ironic notion given the maxim about hindsight). While nothing feels completely clear about the past four years or who we are as a society on the other side of it, we have learned valuable lessons. One thing we’ve uncovered is that clients often report a lack of urgency when what they are really sharing is a lack of and desire for a sense of momentum. Urgency relates to the speed or pace at which something happens, while momentum refers to a feeling of ongoing force or forward movement. And while urgency has a real place in any work related to equity and justice (there are situations in which there are no reasons to wait any longer), it is an exponentially more common desire with our clients that the work is moving forward in a meaningful and thoughtful way. This requires organizations not only to take ongoing action, but to incorporate ongoing communication as part of that action. If the ultimate goal of our field is not simply change but transformation, we must contend with the reality that transformation represents a process, and processes require time. Urgency for its own sake has the potential to motivate actions and behaviors that run counter to equity work by bulldozing past inclusive processes.??

3. Embrace Balance

When it comes to those elements that might represent an impediment to meaningful progress in DEI work, lack of balance shows up multiple times on our roadmap. The notion of balance is an ever-present conversation for us at True North EDI not only with our clients, but our internal team work as well. During the webinar, Erin invoked Audre Lorde’s ideology of the “master’s tools” and offered that we can’t expect to create equitable communities if we employ the same inequitable value systems, structures, and tools that created the current inequitable landscape. Part of True North EDI’s mission is to ensure that the work and practice of DEI is holistic and balanced. That mission is meant to confront, counter, and reimagine the current system in which people’s bodies are regarded as disposable or objectified, where the intellectual reigns supreme and the emotional is an inconvenience at best, and where, ultimately, people are only as valuable as what they can produce. DEI journeys must be holistic if their desired outcomes are to take root. That includes skill and knowledge development, action-planning, and even assessments must incorporate a value of balance. All the corners of who we are as human beings and communities must be looked at as part of the whole and taken into account as we collectively design a future in which everyone can thrive.

This roadmap represents a work in progress for us at True North EDI and it’s just the beginning. Our goal is to continue to elaborate and iterate so that its contents move from bird’s-eye view to a closer look at the ins and outs of a DEI journey, its pitfalls, and its possibilities. If you want to know more about how True North EDI can support you on your journey, we’d love to hear from you.??

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