Inc to provide this clarity.
To get out from under the overwhelm, we have to start by understanding the status quo. What have businesses been doing to address DEI, and why isn't it working?
Stop the Trainings
American businesses spend $8 billion a year on diversity trainings.9
The quintessential diversity training came out of a 1960s workplace focused on compliance. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had made it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, sex, or national origin, and a barrage of discrimination suits quickly followed. One of the most common remedies was a court-ordered mandate for the organization to train all employees in anti-discriminatory behavior. Many companies wanted to avoid costly and embarrassing lawsuits and preemptively implemented trainings, collecting signatures from employees afterward, acknowledging that employees understood the consequences of noncompliance.
Over decades, trainings expanded to accommodate LGBTQ employees, as well as other groups, and many workplaces now prefer to call them “unconscious bias” trainings. Even as they've evolved, one aspect of trainings hasn't changed: their ineffectiveness.
Morgan Stanley had trainings, before they shelled out $100 million to settle high-profile sex discrimination lawsuits. Bank of America's trainings didn't keep them from paying $160 million in racial discrimination settlements. Uber had trainings before paying millions to settle a class action suit brought by 420 female and minority engineers alleging gender and racial discrimination. These totals don't take into account the enduring costs of tarnished brands.
Multiple studies published in the Harvard Business Review conclude that diversity trainings don't work and often backfire. These studies found that white men who were asked to attend diversity trainings were actually less likely to hire and promote women and minorities.10 In general, participants who attend trainings in which they're told that we all hold biases leave those trainings believing that they are the exception, and their actions become more rooted in bias, not less.11
One of the reasons that biases are so insidious is that learning about them doesn't actually rid us of them. While becoming more aware of them can increase our ability to identify bias in others, it does not increase our ability to recognize it in ourselves. In fact, the stronger our biases are, the worse we are at seeing them, and the more neutral we believe we are. When this phenomenon is scaled, the more meritocratic we believe we are as an organization, the more biased our systems may be.
Chapter 3 describes in greater depth why trainings and other common approaches to DEI, such as affinity groups and the Lean In prescription, fall short. It also introduces new perspectives that can give businesses a competitive DEI advantage. For now, a quick preview: The difference between businesses that break the DEI inertia and those who stay stuck is defined by one key perspective shift: Equity isn't personal. It's systemic.
A Perspective Shift: From Changing Mindsets to Changing Mechanics
In a 1972 interview with Playboy magazine, the visionary architect, inventor, and philosopher Buckminster Fuller introduced the timeless wisdom of the trim tab—a small mechanism that helps stabilize an enormous ship or aircraft—which would become a central metaphor in his philosophy:
Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Elizabeth—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks that's it going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, “Call me trim tab.”
The truth is that you get the low pressure to do things, rather than getting on the other side and trying to push the bow of the ship around. And you build that low pressure by getting rid of a little nonsense, getting rid of things that don't work and aren't true until you start to get that trim-tab motion.
To reorient our businesses toward a more inclusive future, we need to stop asking employees to push harder against the bow of the ship, and instead, decrease the resistance employees face. We need trim tabs. The environmentalist movement gives us a good example of what this looks like.
Let's say you're an environmentalist who's traveled out of town to present your findings at a conference. While you're prepping for your presentation and running back and forth to networking events, your values don't change, but your focus and your actions might. You may be distracted and less vigilant about turning the lights or AC off in your hotel room every time you leave. Despite your environmentalist moral core, you're accidentally wasting energy.
European hotels figured out a behavioral design hack that reduces their energy bills and makes it easier for their environmentally conscious guests to act in alignment with their values.12 Hotel guests must place a room key into a slot on the wall to activate the lights and temperature control system in their rooms. When they leave the room and take their key with them, they don't have to think about turning off the lights or the air conditioning. They just turn off when the key card is absent. By adding a trim tab, the design of the room has taken thinking (and willpower) out of the equation.
The human brain carries at least 200 unconscious biases that cognitive science has recognized.13 Scientists estimate that unconscious biases drive between 75 and 90 percent of our decision-making, without our even realizing it.14 Current approaches to DEI rely on employees to stay vigilant against incursions of unconscious biases that they're probably not even aware of, while performing well at challenging jobs. We're asking employees to push against the front of a very, very large ship, and we've seen how it's played out. We've plateaued. We've made all the progress we can make under the “try your best” model.
We still have a chance to change course. We can either ask employees to keep pushing against the front of the ship, or we can adjust our equity trim tabs and focus on correcting mechanics rather than mindsets.
GEN Certification: Discovering the Equity Trim Tabs
When Ford needed to improve quality in the 1980s, they plotted defect rates on charts that were visible to everyone in their factories. In today's automotive marketplace, Tesla has refocused the measurement spotlight on a new metric that matters: Delivery Performance—the percentage of fulfilled deliveries that meet the customer-promised delivery date. Any employee can log on to Tesla's KPI dashboard, at any time, to see the company's progress toward its 90 percent Delivery Performance goal. Digital dashboards that track business-critical function data provide a clear, quantifiable standard for employees to aspire to.
Employers, however, have never had such a measurable standard for equity in the US workplace. This has left them to take “best guesses” in an area that already feels fraught with complexity. Maybe moving networking events to work hours will get more women to participate, but without measurement, who knows? Maybe stating that leadership supports Black
