Nobody Needs DEI Anymore

In the fall of 1987, a meeting took place on the twelfth floor of a Dallas office tower that no one remembers anymore.

“We’re flying the plane. But no one likes being on it.”

What happened next wasn’t especially dramatic. There was no press release. No task force. No consultant hired to teach people to communicate better. Instead, the company did something very quiet.

They changed how teams were staffed.
They rewrote performance evaluations.
They restructured how flight leads conducted their briefings.
They altered the system—not the slogans.

And something happened. Complaints fell. Retention improved. A sense of calm returned. No one called it a diversity initiative. There were no trainings or logos. But inside the system, people started to feel safer. More included. More seen.

It was, in hindsight, a kind of inclusion.
But not the kind that comes with a banner.
The kind that comes with design.

The Age of Programs

Thirty-five years later, most large companies do something very different.

They launch programs.

They hire Chief Diversity Officers. They form ERGs. They hold town halls and courageously vulnerable conversations. They create slide decks, train the managers, redesign the color palette of the company logo for Pride Month. The acronym—DEI—becomes both a noun and a verb.

And then, quietly, something else happens.

Trust doesn’t move.
Belonging plateaus.
The people those programs were supposed to protect begin to grow skeptical—not of the mission, but of the machinery behind it.

In 2016, sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev studied decades of corporate DEI efforts. Their conclusion was oddly unsurprising: most programs didn’t work. In some cases, they made things worse (Dobbin & Kalev, 2016).

The more companies tried to force inclusion from the outside in, the more resistance they generated on the inside.

And yet the programs kept coming.

The Disappearance

In early 2025, something curious began to happen.

Big companies started pulling back. Quietly at first. DEI budgets shrank. Offices were restructured. Titles changed. In some cases, entire departments were dissolved.

But here’s the strange part: in a handful of those companies, the numbers… didn’t get worse.

In fact, in some places, they got better.

Not because people had suddenly become more empathetic.
But because the work of inclusion had stopped being a campaign.
And started becoming a condition.

The Blueprint Beneath the Language

At a North American logistics firm, something as simple as a resume template was redesigned. Names and universities were masked during initial screenings. Not as a symbolic gesture—but as a design constraint.

No one made a public statement about equity.
But over six months, the company saw a 30% increase in high-performing hires from non-traditional backgrounds. The talent pool widened. So did trust.

And when surveyed, candidates—especially from underrepresented groups—said the same thing:

“It felt like the process was built to protect fairness.”

No one used the word inclusion.
But inclusion had happened.

Not by proclamation.
By infrastructure.

Fragility vs Permanence

Here’s what we missed.

Every critical function in a company is protected by design.
Safety has systems.
Finance has audit trails.
Operations has escalation logic.

But inclusion? That was left to mood. To values. To visibility.

We told people to speak up. But we didn’t protect what would happen if they did.
We encouraged feedback. But we didn’t hardwire the consequences of ignoring it.

We meant well.
But we built a structure that was beautiful and brittle.

And so when the pressure came—political, financial, cultural—it cracked.

Because it was never anchored to the system in the first place.

The Architecture of Belonging

In one European tech firm, inclusion stopped being a campaign and became a line item in operations.

Who gets to speak in meetings?
Who gets staffed on stretch assignments?
Who reviews promotions before they’re approved?

They started asking those questions—not in DEI meetings, but in business reviews.
Inclusion became a design lens, not a political fight.

What’s interesting isn’t that these companies care more.
It’s that they stopped asking their people to care.
They asked their systems to carry the weight instead.

Inclusion that depends on intention is fragile.
Inclusion that lives in the system is permanent.

Nobody Needs DEI Anymore

Maybe the phrase itself—DEI—was the problem.

Because it gave us a place to put the work.
And in doing so, it gave the rest of the system a way to ignore it.

We told ourselves inclusion was about mindset. Empathy. Listening. And it is.

But it’s also about who owns the calendar.
Who controls escalation.
Who can say no.

If those levers don’t change, no acronym can fix what’s broken.

A Quiet Replacement

What we need now isn’t more DEI.

We need systems where trust is built into the workflow.
Where fairness isn’t a training—it’s a rule set.
Where equity doesn’t require advocacy, because it’s already embedded in the design.

You don’t need a Chief Inclusion Officer when the system itself refuses to allow bias to persist.

You don’t need a statement when the logic of your enterprise makes exclusion difficult by default.

That’s not a program.
That’s a blueprint.

The Steel in the Beams

Inclusion, real inclusion, is never loud.

It doesn’t trend on LinkedIn.
It doesn’t show up in a color palette.
It doesn’t hold a microphone.

It’s in the feedback loop.
The decision tree.
The way people get promoted—or don’t.

Old DEI was the paint on the walls.
Inclusion by Design™ is the steel in the beams.

Nobody needs DEI anymore.
Not because we’ve arrived.
But because we finally understand:

Programs invite intention.
But only design guarantees protection.

Want to build Inclusion by Design™ into your organization?
We don’t run workshops. We redesign systems.
Let’s talk → 

References (APA):
Dobbin, F., & Kalev, A. (2016). Why diversity programs fail. Harvard Business Review, July–August.
Dover, T. L., Major, B., & Kaiser, C. R. (2016). Diversity policies rarely make companies fairer. Harvard Business Review, January.
McGregor, J. (2016, July 1). To improve diversity, don’t make people go to diversity training. Washington Post.
Time. (2025). The major U.S. companies scaling back DEI efforts as Trump targets initiatives. Time Magazine.
Stevens, F. G., Plaut, V. C., & Sanchez-Burks, J. (2008). Unlocking the benefits of diversity. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 44(1), 116–133.