HRD: How To Respond To DEIB Challenges

The guests in today's episode are expressing their personal viewpoints as protected by the First Amendment and are not acting as spokespersons for their institutions. I hope you enjoy the episode. How can we leverage this time and not think of it as a hopeless time as an opportunity instead? Right?

How do we rebuild in a way that our DEIB work is more embedded in the organization? Welcome to Human Resource Development Masterclass, the podcast series from the Academy of Human Resource Development, the organization that leads HRD through research. I'm your host, Darren Short, and here in our fifth season, we're exploring some of our listeners' top how-to questions with the help of leading authors, researchers, and scholars. In this ninth episode of the season, we're focusing on the question of how HRD can respond to the challenges facing DEIB.

And you'll hear a conversation recorded in July of 2025. To explore this important question, I'm joined today by three experts. My first guest is Dr. Jeremy W.

Bahonos, Assistant Professor in Adult Professional and Community Education at Texas State University. Jeremy earned his PhD in education policy, organization, and leadership with a specialization in HRD from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on teaching methods, race and racism in the workforce, as well as the history of adult education and HRD. Jeremy's recent book, Methods of Facilitating Adult Learning, Strategies for Enhancing Instruction and Instructor Effectiveness, was released in 2024.

My second guest is Dr. Nicole Dillard, an assistant professor of HRD at the University of Minnesota. Her research examines the work and organizational experiences of individuals with marginalized identities, with a focus on mothering and the work-life experiences of women of color. Centering black maternal epistemologies, she explores how mothering functions as sites of knowledge production, resistance, and advocacy within workplace and organizational contexts.

My third guest is Dr. Kieran McFadden, senior lecturer in organizational behaviour and human resource management at the University of Stirling in Scotland. Kieran's research, teaching and practice focuses on equality, equity, diversity, and inclusion, and takes a cross-disciplinary approach. Particularly specialising in LGBTQ workplace inclusion and discrimination, Kieran was a visiting Fulbright scholar at the Williams Institute at UCLA, where he researched labour market discrimination against trans job applicants.

Just visit allbypodcast.com forward slash DEIB to learn more about the bios of our three guests and also to connect with our episode sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you thanks to the sponsorship support of the Academy of Humorous Source Development. Are you ready to transform HRD in 2026?

Join AHRD at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport Marriott in Irving, Texas from February the 11th to 13th, 2026 for the 33rd International Research Conference in the Americas. This conference's theme is Engaged, Healthy and Whole, Driving Learning and Performance for an Empowered Worce. And it invites HID scholars, researchers, practitioners and students to explore how engagement, well-being, and holistic development shape the future of work and learning. Also, new to this conference is a practitioner workshop happening on February 12th, 2026.

The conference keynote session is with Dr. Brad Schuck, a globally recognized expert in employee engagement, organizational culture and workforce well-being. A tenured professor at the University of Louisville and co-founder of Org Vitals, he partners with Fortune 500 companies and global nonprofits to drive meaningful cultural change. Experience thought-provoking keynotes, cutting-edge research sessions, and roundtables that challenge assumptions and advance the field of HRD.

Whether you're a season professional or first-time attendee, the 2026 AHRD Conference is your gateway to professional development, community, networking, collaboration, and actionable solutions. Registration is now open at ahrd.org. Right, let's dive into the episode.

Okay, well, I'm excited to have Kieran, Nicole, and Jeremy here with me today. Thank you so much to all three of you for being willing to spend an hour with me on such an important topic. Thanks, Darren. It's good to be here.

I was thinking about a good place to start, and I'm conscious that a lot of our listeners are spread around the world. A lot of our listeners are potentially new to this as a topic. So I thought it could be worth focusing the start of our conversation a little in on what we mean by the term DEIB, so we can get everybody more or less on the same understanding before we start diving into a bit about what's been happening and what the implications are. So would one of you, maybe Kieran, would you be willing to start off by talking us through what DEIB means to you and maybe what other terms folks may have been using if there's other terms that you've come across?

Yeah, so um I'll start by saying DEIB, um DEI, which we hear a lot about these days, is uh more specific to the kind of North American context. Um in the UK, for example, we would tend to use EDI, uh, and that would be equality, diversity, inclusion. Uh and there are some alternatives. Uh I know in some professions, uh D and I are the more common, commonly used terms as well.

So uh all the same kind of acronyms, but just jumbled around a bit. So when it comes to DEIB, uh diversity, equity, uh, inclusion, and belonging, so diversity refers to having uh a workforce or uh an organization that comprises people from different demographic groups and different uh aspects of diversity. So that could be our protected characteristics or protected classes, but also could relate to any differences that people naturally will have from each other. And so having that diversity in this DEI sense is said to give advantages to the organization.

There's a business case for that, um, as well as a social justice case. Then when we go to equity, uh sometimes people may use equity, some people may use equality, some people may use a mishmash or the both. Uh, but for equity, uh, that's a concept that relates to giving people different treatment because it addresses specific disadvantages or specific um aspects of their lives that have caused them to have disadvantage in in certain uh settings, like the workplace. Uh, and so whereas with equality, we would treat everybody the same, give everyone the same treatment.

With equity, we give people different treatment depending on the particular aspects that they have. So, a classic example is having maybe workplace accommodations for somebody who has visual impairments. Um, so if you treated everybody the same, that person would be disadvantaged. But we give that person different treatment, um, the treatment to address those visual impairments uh because they require that.

And it's the sense is to get everyone to an equal footing, to get everyone on the level playing field. Inclusion then is uh a concept that relates to the kind of the full involvement or engagement, participation um uh that people may have within the workplace, um, especially with when it comes to marginalized groups, that they feel uh that they are involved and they can participate and engage in their work and in the workplace and the organization and the social aspects of the organization uh as much as everybody else.

And then belonging relates to that feeling of belonging that they may have. So somebody who is from a marginalized group may feel uh that they've been excluded in in previous instances. They may feel as if they're kind of not the same as everyone else, that they might not uh gel with everybody to the same extent. Belonging is uh in the DEI B sense, uh, is a way of making people feel that they belong to the organization.

Nicole, Jeremy, anything you would want to add to that in terms of a definition? Yeah. One thing that that I would add is this first, thank Kieran for I think it's a really strong definition of DEIB and clarifying the terms for folks. Um, part of the question, Darren, was you know, other terms people might be using.

Um, and these aren't terms that I endorse, but these are terms that are certainly out there in the ether in our political discourse right now. And these include tyranny, woke ideology, corrosive ideology, threat to competence, undermining meritocracy, discrimination against white people, racism, divisiveness, un-Americanness, Marxism, a horror story, and a threat to national security. And I think it's important to point out some of those terms that are being used in reference to DEI and put those in contrast to the definition that Karen so nicely put forward for us.

Um to me, there's a pretty, pretty strong, pretty far leap from acknowledging human differences in the workplace, aka diversity, and taking us to tyranny and threats to national security. But that's where our political discourse is right now as we're as we're as we're recording, um, that we have folks who are seeing the definitions very much as Karen outlined them, and other folks who are seeing them in the terms that that I just that I just summarized there. So we have a wide range of thoughts that people have in our society on this right now.

Yeah, I think that's really interesting and and really a point to make around you know the stories that we tell about what some of these words or these concepts that we just take as you know, kind of neutral in many ways or valuable, right, in many ways. And that depending on the stories that are being told, right, in the in the timing of history, that they're that they can mean very different things to different people based on how we're communicating them and what's happening currently now.

I do want to add to the other side of the spectrum the concept of justice and access. I think those two words are often also used to talk about things that we kind of put in this bucket of DEI, right? And that sometimes we add justice to the equity and diversity and inclusion piece. Sometimes we also talk about access.

You're seeing a lot of conversations about access in relation to some of the points that Sarah made around like um accommodations. But I typically don't use access. I think to me it's implied in equity, but this is also about this conversation of what these warps mean when we're putting them into use. And I think justice is um something that you're seeing a lot more as we think about how the shift of this conversation is happening, particularly in the wake of violence against certain groups, right?

Like what how do we think about DEI in a way that's not just about what the laws are saying, but what we know is our moral imperative to do. Yeah, I think Nicole raised a really good point about social justice often being something we talk about in this context, and something that we were talking a lot about, and some of us still are, but in 2020, 2021, anti-racism was being discussed really directly. And that's something that's um that more and more people are shying away from out of out of fear of backlash.

Um in fact, as part of my preparation for our interview, I was um used AI to ask these different terms for DEI, see if there's anything that was missing. And it didn't give me anything that I didn't know, but it gave me a specific warning that I didn't ask for to avoid using terms like anti-racism and social justice. Um, and so there's there's some of these terms that are are under maybe more attack than others. Um and um and and yeah, so depending on our on our context, um historically, um, anti-racism is one that I think we need to continue to push forward when we can.

Um, but it's also got a lot of lot of pushback um in the last several years. Yeah, there is a sense of of capitulation almost in some of these terms where where you know the word woke has been weaponized, um, and and people have just said, well, okay, I that's a terrible word to be called. Um and I'm just going to agree with that. Um, or anti-racist or uh social justice.

Uh there's always a pushback against these words. There's always going to be, uh, but we don't necessarily have to agree with that pushback or kind of capitulate to that pushback, and we can still use it and kind of own those words um consciously. All three of you in different ways have suggested that there's been events happening over the last few years that have maybe changed the landscape for DEIB. So, again, conscious that we have listeners around the world who may be less aware of what those events are.

I wonder if it's worth just talking a little bit about those and putting them into the context of the longer-term view on this. Um, so Nicole, what what's your thinking about how DEIB has appeared in the news in recent years and what happens when you try and put that into the context of a longer-term history? Yeah, I think that it's important to think about how it's shown up, what what stories we associate with EIB and and how it isn't actualized, right? Because we know that DEI is in in the narrative, right, in the public narrative, is typically associated with folks with marginalized identity, right?

We we normally think about it, uh especially in the US context, which is where I'm located. We think about it in terms of like black folks or immigrants or, you know, trans folks, right? Or women, right? And particularly in organizational contexts, but always in this negative around, you know, what folks are getting that other folks are not getting.

But we if we look holistically, we know that DEI is something that is beneficial to all of us and that in many regards, many of us are accessing the resources for that, even if we don't have these kind of you know prescribed uh marginalized identities. So sure, you know, we can talk about like the wake of uh 2020, right? And the various racial justice protests, and we saw a lot of kind of the violence against black bodies, I think was a critical turning point for a lot of these conversations.

And, you know, what folks have you know described as this racial reckoning. Um and I think out of that there was a lot of kind of like a massive uptick in DEI statements in organizations and you know, corporate investments and you know, new hiring of you know, chief diversity officers or roles in that regard in this context of we're looking at HRD and organizational pieces, right? Um, so I think if we, you know, for organizations, we've we saw this, we know we knew more work needed to be done, and so we position this work as not just like moral imperatives, but also a business priority.

And at the time, I think for many of us, it felt like a real turning point. Um, and then currently what we're seeing more recently is that there's been, you know, this sharp backlash uh against what we're terming as DEI related topics, particularly around race and gender and sexual identities and ethnicity and the such. Um so now we're seeing this move of you know anti-DEI legislation introduced or being passed across several states, you know, efforts to censor discussions around race, gender, and not just in private institutions, but in public institutions, right?

We're seeing things like removing curriculum from education institutions, book bannings, you know, things that feel like we were so far removed from historically, right? And then there's these corporate pullbacks and political pressure behind them, reminding us really how fragile this work is if it's not rooted in like significant structural change. And you know, I think you know, that is our unfortunate reality, but I do think that if we're talking about historical context, that if we kind of zoomed out historically, we would see that this is not new, right?

And that we've always had these kind of cyclical patterns in across history where we see very significant visible progressive change followed by times of what I would say is resistance and just like you know uh retrenchment, right? We saw this after the Civil Rights Act, we we saw this after affirmative action, right? And so we're seeing it again. And so I think it's important for us, as people are in these spaces of losing hope, to realize that what we're what's happening isn't unprecedented.

Yes, it's surely disheartening, but it's something that we've seen before, we can learn from, and we could continue to create some change. You know, I was recently watching this interview with President Obama, and um the community was having this conversation around this is the this is the most disheartening um period of of my life where I've never seen anything like this in history. And this this type of uh anti-DEI backlash is just, you know, it's it's it's unprecedented and we've never seen before.

And it was interesting because, you know, uh President Obama's response was you know, if we talk to your parents or maybe your grandparents, right? We we're sure that we know that there were periods in humanity, perhaps, you know, World War I or enslavement or lynching, Jim Crow, right, World War II, right? Like that are probably more severe in terms of the human cost than what we're experiencing now, right? So, you know, whether you agree with that perspective or not, is it's good to have this perspective to think long term and historically about what we're experiencing, right?

Because I think sometimes we can get in these spaces of what can we do? There's nothing we can do and feel hopeless. And this reality is that you know, these things have happened before, and that we were we we we banded together and we found a way to move forward and to think broadly about the cost of humanity. And we, you know, redirected our course.

And I think now is the time for us to think about how do we do that in this current moment, as opposed to feeling the pressure of what hopelessness can can do for us, right? We we have to be and we are designed for resilience, right? And and to and the ability to create change and not just react and be compliant. And I think now is the time to remind ourselves of that.

Um I totally agree. And some things that I would add is that in the previous historical eras that Nicole alluded to, where there's been just intense, intense human cost, thinking about it in the US context, enslavement and Jim Crow and the lynching movement, through all these times, we had committed activists, we had committed folks who were doing the work that we have now called DEB, whether that was called abolitionism, whether it was called civil rights, whether it was called human rights, people have been committed to this work, often at considerable risks to themselves professionally and personally.

And the the times of relative progress that we've had after as a result, is it didn't, it's none of this came out of nowhere, it came out of sometimes generations of commitment to struggle. And to make it a slightly more recent example, um, Nicole alluded to 2020, 2021, the George Floyd murder, the Black Lives Matter movement really reaching a crest and a lot of attention from organizations coming at that point. But let's remember the Black Lives Matter movement started in 2013 with the murder of Traymont Martin.

So we had a seven-year period of intense grassroots activism that most of mainstream US and almost all the corporations were not paying attention to. Um and it wasn't just because of the murder of George Floyd and that heinous video breaking that we saw some levies break and some change happen. It was because of seven years at least of committed activism and work in communities. And so, as we are in a place where we're we're experiencing backlash, depending on how old we are, maybe for the first time or the most intense we've experienced in our lives, maybe not.

Um we we should be taking inspiration from the folks from way back and from the folks from 2013 who are putting in groundwork. Um and it might be years before we see some of the results in a tangible way, but we have to continue to push and take some inspiration from the fact that we're part of the tradition. We can't choose to be part of a tradition that continue to resist even um even when DEI, what wouldn't we call DEI back then, um, was under assault. So Yeah, just to echo what both of you be been saying, um I I was recently writing something on the kind of the origins of the modern day diversity management and and the business case.

Um, and this may be completely Elementary to you both, but but just for me from a UK perspective, uh, I hadn't known about this. About um, you know, you have this president uh in a second term and he's railing against uh inclusion in organizations, and he's saying that it's racism and it's discrimination against white men. Um, and it was Reagan in in the 70s who's doing this. Um, and he's you know trying to get his political power, increase his political power through these kind of types of actions, through targeting um uh what would what we'd call now DEIB um and trying to get rid of the executive orders for affirmative action.

Um obviously he failed to, but um Trump succeeded. Uh but corporate America at the time kind of resisted it uh strangely. They just said, well, no, there's there's a there is a business case here. Uh and what we've been doing, although um it's been portrayed as being somewhat foisted upon us, actually it has helped our businesses or organizations to grow.

And so there we can have the the growth of the business case into the into the rhetoric of of DEIB and diversity management. Um, and and like like Jeremy was saying, it's um really interesting to think of those people who were doing the grassroots work in organizations. Um, I'm thinking back to I think it was Microsoft maybe, Gleam and Microsoft, one of the first uh LGBT employee networks, uh, and that was just people gathering together and they didn't have workload allocated to that.

They didn't have you know certain goals, it wasn't aligned with the organizational framework, things like that. So there is some, although obviously it's good to have sponsorship and things like that from the organization, it actually is nice to have that detachment from the organization in a way as well. So looking at the kind of rollback from corporate uh corporations at the moment, that might actually be an opportunity for people who want to do work in the organization on DEIB, but aren't necessarily aligning it to the organization directly, um, and therefore have more control and more personal power over that as well.

Kieran, you brought up there this the implications for organizations, with which makes me feel like that's probably a good segue to take us into talking a bit more specifically about what all of this means for HRD within organizations. So I'd be interested for from all to hear from all three of you really, based on what you're seeing and from the different perspectives that you're looking at this from and in terms of the challenges that HRD professionals are facing on DEIB as a, I guess, specifically as a result of the recent events that you've just been talking through.

Um, so what what what are you seeing as those main challenges for HRD professionals at the moment? Yeah, I think one of the big ones right now is is injunctions and legal compliance issues coming down because of executive orders, because of different legislative actions, um, where folks are um it's becoming illegal in some cases or non-compliant in some cases to do the work that we've been doing. Um and that is is one of those where um where there's intense pressures to comply that can include threats of termination, um threats of loss of funding.

And so this is um a very challenging landscape, particularly in the public sector and for those who are you know receiving public funds and are therefore forced to comply with um with some of this work. And an extension of that that I think is sometimes even more scary is is I you know, on one hand, we understand compliance. We have to we have to stay legal in our in our jobs. Um we're expected to stay legal in our jobs, um, but there's also this phenomenon of overcompliance, where folks are so afraid of being out of compliance that they end up doing so much more harm to the DEI B project than what is legally mandated.

Um, an example of this, I was talking to some folks recently who were who were legally required to take certain DEI B related language off their websites. And the the legal mandates they were a public institution, the legal mandate they were working within did allow DEI language in certain contexts, but it wasn't allowed in others. And within this organization, some units and some individuals decided to remove every reference to DEI, period, because they wanted to be safe. Others tried to just keep the ones that um that they were that were in compliance and take the other ones off.

And then there were some other folks who um who decided, you know what, now that I know what's legal here, what I can have, I'm gonna make sure there's even more of that language on these websites. And found you know, finding tactical strategic ways to to actually highlight the DEI work that they do while remaining in compliance. And so one of the things that my my big message in this um this era is if you have to comply, comply, but don't overcomply. And when you see other folks over-complying, don't be afraid to speak up and and really read up on what these mandates are.

Um really understand the implications of them so that you can push where you can push while remaining as safe as possible as you push. Um private sector is more mixed. You know, some organizations are remaining steadfast and committed and coming out and saying that. Um others have you know turned tail and you know discontinued everything that they started in 2020, 2021.

Um and there's I'm sure a lot more. I'll turn it over to the the other folks. Yeah, I think that you know this kind of returns to the previous conversation about learning from history, right? Like that there isn't really for many, for many organizations, right, there isn't really a need to overly comply, right?

We we if we follow the arcs of history, we can make uh you know a pretty verified hypothesis that things will shake out, level out, right, uh, in some years, right? And so this need to overcomply in a matter of like a month, right? Without waiting to see, you know, what other organizations are doing? How can we learn?

How can we tap into the expertise of, you know, perhaps HRD professionals who are doing this work, who've been committed to this work, who've been engaged in DEI work for decades, right? What is some some of the learning that we can just pause, right, as opposed to being reactive and responding out of fear that can help us remind us that it's not just about compliance or legal defensibility, right? It's about for organizations, it's about how we make value-aligned decisions, right, that support, you know, not only, you know, the bottom line, but our organizational health and the well-being of the people within our organizations, right?

And a lot of the work that's being doing, that's that's being done in response to overcompliance, they're they're not matching that, right? So these organizations are saying that have said that this is what matters to us to continue um to add value to us. This is how we care for our employees, this is this is the bedrock of what our mission is. And then, you know, in a matter of you know, six months, it's a complete reversal out of fear in for some regards, and some it's performativity, which you know is valuable for us to know as well.

But I think that this hyper focus on illegality has never been the goal for organizations or for us in humanity, right? We see this, right? When we think about things that were legal in the past, right? Talking about things like lynching, talking about you know, internment camps, talking about these things that were you know legally defensible in the past that we know were not aligned with our values, right?

As a society, as organizations, as individuals, as communities, right? And so how do we just stay in that moment of reminding ourselves that you know compliance should not be the only thing, and maybe not even the dominant thing that drives the decisions that we make in organizations, right? And how do we surround ourselves instead of kind of uh retreating or you know, the firing and the pruning of people, surrounding ourselves with people who can help us stay accountable? Um I appreciate that so much.

And implicit in that is something really powerful in that um, you know, there's this political optics and the legalities that are that are pushing a lot of folks to to sometimes like just you know abandon programs to cut bait on some of their DEIB um work. But something that I don't think enough folks are maybe talking about, thinking about strategically is that the harm this does to employees and you know, you know, people that I'm talking to are talking about feelings of intense betrayal because their organizations didn't make some sort of a stand.

And this has spillovers, and you know, I'm I'm all about DEI for the social justice case, but this has spillover for the for the business case as well. If you're demoralizing folks, if folks are feeling disengaged because your organization isn't willing to take a stand, um, that has all kinds of long-term negative outcomes for your organization in terms of retention, in terms of recruitment, in terms of reputation, in terms of productivity. And so I really hope that folks who are making in the place to make strategic decisions within organizations, they might be looking at like, okay, what's what's the cost of potentially losing a federal contract versus the cost of alienating large portions of our of our of our customer base, of our of our workforce?

Um, because that those are those are costs there too that are a little more hidden given our political context, but those those costs are not hidden to the employees who who are the ones experiencing those types of betrayals. I think there's a a middle ground to some organizations I see are taking as well where they're uh and it speaks to the kind of the challenge for the HRD professional I was thinking about, and that's and uh is rebranding. Um so they are continuing to to to majority of the extent of what they are doing, but they're rebranding it and they're calling it something uh not DEIB related, but to the kind of as DEIB.

Um and we can recognize that, um, but but to the lay person maybe it doesn't uh appear off the cuff to be uh to be DEIB. Uh and so one of the challenges for the HRD professional, I think, is yes, is that tactical rebranding of of what's being done uh to make sure that it's uh kind of uh kind of keeping compliant to to some extent, but it's it's it's certainly doesn't uh look like DI DEIB. Uh but there's also that rebranding uh kind of more psychologically or culturally rebranding uh to try and undo the effects of what uh political opponents to DEIB have done.

And there was a very conscious effort, and I'm I'm I I can see it in the UK now kind of taking hold as well, where we can see certain actors trying to portray EDI in the UK as being anti-merocratic, uh meritocratic, uh being anti uh or being discriminatory against uh white people or working class people. Uh and so there's there's a conscious effort in newspaper articles and opinion pieces on websites to try and do that. So there's also some rebranding that needs to be done to try and undo the effects of that.

Uh, and I think the HRD professional is well placed to do that, that they can highlight that this isn't against meritocracy, it's actually pro-meritocracy, it's trying to achieve uh a meritocratic institution uh because it isn't at the moment. Um, and so I think there could be some cultural changes and some learning that can be done there just to highlight what DEIB is and isn't uh to both undo the effects of what has been happening in the last couple of years, um, but also maybe to be legally compliant as well.

Yeah, we know that, you know, to to to your point, Sarah and also to the point around costs, right? We know that that financial realities, especially for small businesses, especially for public institutions, are real, right? And when you have, you know, the possibility of losing a billion dollars in funding that supports your students, and particularly the students who really are supported through DEIB work, right? That these are tough decisions, right?

We understand that. But we also know that an organization has to be, you know, for full sustainability and um uh progression, organizations have to be driven by their mission, right? And their vision, right? And if organizations are saying that this work, right, whatever you call this work, right, that this work matters and that it's meaningful and that it is at the core to who the organization is, that we have to stay fed steadfast in that and figure out ways to do that.

No, I'm not gonna concede, I'm not gonna overcomply, right? I'm going to stand very strong and keep things as is. For some of us, that's going to be okay, how can we be fugitive about it? Right?

How can we be core to this, what we believe is a strong value for organizations, but do what is possible to protect ourselves, right? So that may be like, you know, changing the way we call DEIB. That may be removing it from the very visible public pages of our organizations, but continue to do the work behind the scenes. And then for for other of us, it may be some different things, right?

There's a it's important for us to to acknowledge that there is a spectrum of responses that that organizations and individuals can take based on the realities of their lives and the reality of their resources and the privileges that they have, right? But I do think that in all of those choices that you have, if this work, whether it's called DEIB, right, at the essence of valuing everyone's humanity, making sure folks have access and sense of belonging and organizations is important, then we have to find a way to fight and we have to find a way to do the work.

And the doing of the work is the messiness, is the you know, the variety of it. But whether we should be doing the work to me is feels like a non-negotiable. Yeah, I agree. And I I love the way Nicole was talking about being driven by the mission and having a having our vision rooted in that mission.

And we want to tie that back to uh your camera rebranding, he used the term a couple times, tactical rebranding. And I like that language of tactical because if we were driven by our mission, that we have our strategic goal of the truth, of we're working for that DEIB. But the but the tactical pieces that we have to do to stay in the fight might sometimes look like there's such a thing as a tactical retreat, right? There's such a thing as a tactical withdrawal.

And you know, if we're gonna be wise and we're gonna be able to survive and thrive in these challenging environments, we have to know when to and in what context to stand up um top of the hill, right? And and and make your stand. There's also going to be when when do we find another another domain? When do we fight another day?

And so for me, I'm not not puritanical and saying everybody has to march on the front line. Um, that's not always the best tactic. Um, but I think the important thing is to not lose sight when we're when we're doing the tactical things we have to to stay in the fight, to not lose sight of the fact that they are tactics, to not let our tactics become our strategies, um, not let our tactics become our vision or our mission. Um let's keep that mission, like Nicole was saying, and then then we're gonna have to be tactically fluid in changing times and in challenging times.

I think it was Nicole earlier who mentioned having people around us who hold us accountable. Uh, people who will hold us accountable to our mission and our vision are gonna be really important so we don't lose ourselves. Um, we don't lose our sense of mission to the sense of the tactics. Um we're operating on different levels.

Um there's no easy right or wrong answers, but I I think you know keeping that core vision, like Nicole said, is is really, really important. As I'm thinking through that, I'm starting to think a bit about like the the coalition of people who do this within organizations. So how we continue to make progress on DEIB and the role that HRD can play. Um, and I think about the organizations that I've had visibility into.

Like I think like six, twelve months ago, DEIB was so embedded into the uh structure of the organizations. Uh it's employee resource groups, HRD had a role, HRM had a role, leadership was talking about it. Um it was embedded into processes and systems and training and all of that sort of thing. And a lot of the organizations I've had visibility into, it sort of disappeared from a lot of that, and almost nobody talks about it.

Um, but it makes me wonder, therefore, what role HRD has got now to sort of come back into the void that's been left to start engaging within the organization to talk about. So, what can we now do? How what progress can we make in those spaces where organizations possibly have gone too far? Um what what's your thinking about the role HRD can make to kind of almost continue to make progress in organizations in the absence of anybody else attempting to do that?

But you mentioned Aaron, I I'm thinking how deeply is the work embedded in the systems, right? Because I wonder, you know, when I think about profit or learning, right? Like if someone was to come and say to you, we're anti-profit now, we're anti-learning now, remove all things your related to profit and learning from your organization. Like, how difficult would that be for most of us, right?

If not all of us, right? And and I so sometimes I wonder, like, so embed DEI and this type of work in your organization, in the way that you embed your measures, your processes and your systems around profitability, right? Embed this work in the way that you embed it around learning and training, right? Or development, right?

And if we embedded this work in that with that lens of that, it is it is it is not just critical, it is necessary to the work that we're doing. Would we even be in this space now where we could easily kind of clean clean the slates and organizations of DEI work, right? And when you are able to clean it in such a quick manner of way, then that makes me wonder was it was it truly structurally embedded into the organization? And those are questions for our leaders, right?

Or or was the work you doing, you know, rather performative. So I think of instead of you know how we talk about DEI, which these things are important, but I think the more structural ways that we embed the work is is even more critical in this time where we're seeing it being stripped so easily, right? Like how do we think about instead of you know DEI during certain times of the years or a correspondence with certain months or holidays or DEIs and one-off trainings, but there's no follow-ups, right?

How do we think a long-term view of what our employees need to be successful in their lives and in these organizations? And at every aspect of that, what role does DEI play in that? And how do we embed that in every right, in each of those dynamics, right? So that we're thinking about us almost like secession planning or like organizational change initiatives that think about, you know, what this looks like over the length of the life of our employees in the in the life of the organization.

Yeah, I think that's uh that's a really an important point about um like the ethos of the organization, uh, similar to what you're saying about uh the mission of the organization. Um, because recently, I think in maybe the last five years, perhaps, you know, you have the business case and the social justice case for for DEIB, um, as it's commonly termed. Um, and the business case has kind of not just taken precedence, but almost kind of replaced the social justice case. There used to be somewhat of a balance there or a complementarity.

Um, but but I think more recently it's become kind of return on investment for doing these DEIB initiatives. And so that so you have the business case, but then kind of retroactively, then it kind of almost works to make everything about the market and about the business case and and the and the costs and benefits of doing certain things, whereas a lot of people would have been just doing it because of the ethos of the organization. So I think there's almost like an opportunity right now where you know DEIB, the complex, the DEI inc has been somewhat dismantled in a way from all these executive orders and this pushback.

There's an opportunity for HRD professionals, for everyone in the organization to kind of start thinking about the social justice case a lot more. And like Nicole said, embedding that into what they do and just in their everyday actions, the way that they manage work, the way that they give uh upskilling sessions in the organization, things like that, looking at that from an inclusive lens. Um, and that therefore then doesn't have to be subject to a cost to benefit analysis or um looking at the business case for that.

It's just part of what you do in your day to day work, um, just like Nicole was saying. Yeah, and I would I would add that now might actually be a really good time to do this work of the deep embedding. We think about you know 2020, we had all these pledges, all this all this money being allocated, all these diversity statements being written. A lot of them were sort of knee-jerk.

Um, and when they were knee-jerk, they didn't end up being embedded. And I I think at least a lot of times it ended up being embedded. I think sometimes to use an analogy, we may have got the leaves of the tree before we got the roots. Um, and now might be the time, and the roots are the part you don't see to get um, right?

Um now might be the time to really put down the roots so that we when we so we can grow this in a way that whether the you know whether when the seasons change and the leaves fall off, we still have our roots, we still have our trunk, we still have our branches. Um now might that be the time to do that deep, pun intended um rooting work to get this into the heart of our organizations, and that that'll give us a more durable structure over time. Yeah, and I I think that's a key point and to the to and a good response to the question of like, you know, how can HRD professionals respond?

And I and I will say that, you know, as I I you know, I'm an academic, right? But I also am in consulting and overwhelmingly the leaders in the organizations don't want to not do the work, right? They're just emotionally responding, fear, right? The idea of like you know, the the punitive nature of the financial cost that they're seeing, the story that's being told, that this financial cost is more uh meaningful than the long-term cost or the financial cost of the impact of retention and recruitment, right?

So they're hearing this story and then it's you know emotionally making emotionally driven responses, right, uh, to what's coming down from the administration. But overwhelmingly, this is not what the work that they want to be doing. They want to support the work and figure out how to do the work. And so I think that to the point that you're making, Jeremy, of like, how can we leverage this time and not think of it as, you know, a hopeless time as an opportunity instead of like, okay, now these organizations are stripping bare, right?

So how what do we do now that we're stripped bare and that we can rebuild? How do we re instead of leaning into rebuilding a space that is, you know, bare of DEI B work, right? How do we rebuild in a way that our DEI built DEI B work is more embedded in the organization, is is created in a way that's more meaningful and not just reactionary, right? And then the folks who are thinking about, you know, I don't want to completely strip, but I need to take some of this language down or some of these programs down to be in compliance, right?

How do how can an HRD professional help me think through around, okay, this is the program we had, and perhaps how we were implementing this program is not at the core of what we should be doing to promote DEIB, right? How can we rebuild the program or the initiative or the strategy or whatever, fill in the blank in a way that is more aligned to the to our values, more aligned to our vision, our vision, but is stronger in this space of rebranding? So I I do think that that is a a really helpful way to think about how do we, you know, rise to the the current challenges, particularly those of us doing the HRD, doing HRD work.

Does that imply, do you think, that like there's common ground in what we're trying to achieve and where there's disagreement, it's in how we were trying to achieve it. In other words, did do you think if we actually broke this, cut this down to just some of the values that are were underpinning DEIB, that there would be common agreement amongst most people that those are shared values. And so if if we can get agreement on the shared values without the language of DEIB, we might be able to find a way of moving forward to see what can be done based on those values.

Yeah, I think that your question points to another um thing that we could be doing, right, in terms of like how do we leverage learning and education, right, to do this work, right? So in some ways, the way we learn about these concepts, the stories that we tell about these concepts, right, they matter as much as the work itself, right? And when you are building, you know, your your frames on concepts that you do that you don't understand, but they're trendy business, you know, uh tactics, right?

Or that concepts that you don't understand how it specifically relates to your particular environment, your particular employees, but that it's you know kind of what you know, what's on trend, then that's how you get where we're at right now. And on the converse, right, like how you allow administrations or whoever to come in and create a story about the work that you're doing that you know is not a match, right? To where we get to some of these terms like Jeremy was talking was talking about earlier, like tyranny or anti-whiteness and things like that.

Right. So that's a lot of that is about how we as HRD adult educators, right, can help people understand the nuance of words, the importance of concepts, why they matter, how we tell stories, right? And how we get our employees to tell stories, right? I think even in my own practice, the more meaningful work that helps people change is when they can understand how these concepts, how these terms are directly in relation to their story about their identity, right?

I think about my students and me coming into the classroom telling them DEI matters, create a vision for an organization or create a strategy that you would use as an intern or create a narrative that you would tell in an interview or um about why DEI matters to you, that, you know, they conceptually that's just really foggy for them, right? But if I say to them, you know, tell me about a time that you were in an organization, whether that's work or here at the university, where you felt like your voice didn't matter.

Tell me about a time where you felt like practices or policies at this institution really did not take into account your lived experience. How would you feel if this, right? Like I think about though the way that we think about stories and the way that these stories become narratives, become master narratives that create and shift economies, right? And shift the way that we do things.

I think that more needs to be invested in that, right? More time needs to be invested in how do we relate to the stories that are creating meaning and really um are the architects of you know how we're organizing our lives. And I think HRD and in it, particularly in its role in adult education, can play a very critical role of how do we think about stories in the in the context of organization, not just like as fantasy, but that these stories are real and they're embedded in how we make decisions.

I'm conscious that we're coming up towards the end of our hour. Um, and I'm also conscious that we've barely scratched the surface. I've got uh like I I came into the call with like a set of questions. I now have more questions than I had when I started, but I've also like feel like I've advanced my thinking as a result of listening to the three of you.

Um I actually feel more optimistic as a result of listening to our conversation. Um my hope is that the the listeners are thinking the same thing. Um I'd like to wrap up, I think, with one question, which hopefully will help those listeners, because my guess is many of them are there going, great, I I I now want to do something. I just don't know what my first step should be.

So I I'd love to hear your thoughts at this point as to what advice you would give around what should be their next step as a result of this conversation. What would you what would you recommend they potentially look at as a place to start as a result of this? I'd love to pick up on that sort of where Nicole left off and recognizing that we're talking about people in very diverse workplace contexts. So there's going to be no one size fits all.

But I think the importance of narrative is a really good place to start. And I would encourage folks, if they are challenged right now with what to do next, to spend a little time writing their DEIB story as it's been so far, how they got into it, why they started doing it, why they care about it, what's been happening lately, and then write. I do this sometimes, write one or two or three fictional what's coming next. Because you put that in the context of your own values, your own lived experience, your own organizational context, and writing it out in that narrative form can allow you to try out, to experiment in with thought experiments around what tactics might work in your organization.

Then after you write out a few of those, when you see one, I think, you know what, I think this is gonna allow me to move forward in a way that's in keeping with my history, that takes into account my circumstances, then go ahead and start trying to put that put that into action, whatever that that story looks like. Um size fits all won't won't do it, but I think grounding yourself in your own DEI narrative might be a really, really powerful place to start. I think related to that and related to what we were talking about, about the historical context and some of the themes that have come out today, we've been here before, uh, to some extent.

Uh there's been there's been backlash before, there's been a kind of uh uh uh tactical withdrawal or retreat as well. Um, and but marginalized people, marginalized groups haven't gone away. Um we're all still here in some form or another, uh, whether that's uh an employee resource group or whether that's just a lot of people in an organization. Um and so to add to the idea of the kind of the narrative and the story, it's also who you tell the story to, and that's storytelling, um, storytelling action.

Um, because we can kind of gather around and just, you know, like say the folks at Microsoft in the 90s when they're starting uh what would become an employee resource group, but at the time was just maybe a group of friends, of people with kind of commonalities, a common story um and a common experience as an organization, you can gather around and you can you can do some work on inclusion. It doesn't have to come under the DEIB business case cost-benefit analysis uh aspect.

Um, you can just make the organization a better place in kind of in your own terms and not even necessarily as part of your job description. I know we're all busy, but we can there's obviously advantages uh to working in a place where you feel like you belong, that there's inclusion, even if that doesn't come necessarily from an official DEIB uh action or initiative that can be something that you and a group of people have done together. Yeah, I think also, you know, critical to this work is being in community, right?

And and that serves many purposes, right? Being in community can help be in community with folks who think differently than you, right? So if you're having challenges about what this work means, is it valuable and could be done differently, join some associations, some coalitions that maybe think differently differently than you to give you some perspective that you can take back to your organizations, right? So community means that, right?

Challenging ourselves to think differently and to be comfortable hearing things that are different from our own perspectives, but also being in community means strengthening our ability to really be able to do the work in a sustainable way so that when we do have, you know, these massive forces coming against the work, that it makes it easier for us to continue to do work and to resist, right? So think about how do you leverage the expertise of other organizations, other institutions or associations that are similar to your own to help you do the work, right?

They may have skill sets that you don't have, they may have been doing this longer or have you know a toolkit, a toolkit that may be valuable. Sometimes we feel like when we get into the trenches, we have to do this work all by ourselves and think, and we automatically go to self-protection, right? But being in community can help fortify what we're doing for the self, right? For the unit in a way that also strengthens the whole.

And I also think that sometimes we have these blinders on, right? We can think about how things impact us like locally and not think about the global implications. And so being in community also gives us more data, right? More narratives, more stories to see kind of the fullness of the implications of this work and the fullness of what happens if we if we don't do the work, right?

So my my my default recommendation is always to build support systems, to be in community, to join coalitions, right? And use what you're learning from those spaces to further fortify yourself, but also to be able to do the work in a way that is more meaningful. Feels like a wonderful call to action to wrap up the episode. But I I wanted to say a massive thank you to all to all three of you for um the conversation today, for uh the ideas that you fed in.

And I I really hope this isn't the end of our conversation because I feel like we could continue for a lot longer. Um so I hope we're able to get back together again at some point and continue this chat and potentially explore how this is changing over the next few years. But uh in the meantime, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Thanks, Eric. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode.

It was wonderful spending time with Kieran McFadden, Nicole Dillard, and Jeremy Bahonas. If you enjoyed this episode, check out our other 52, which contain conversations with over 100 leading scholars from around the world. To learn more about the series, check out HRDmasterclass.com.

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