DEI Deconstructed

How can organizations turn genuine good intentions about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into measurable, lasting impact? In DEI Deconstructed, Lily Zheng argues that the only way to prove commitment is through outcomes. Feel‑good messaging, inspirational talks, and awareness campaigns may comfort leaders and audiences, but they rarely shift power, policy, or lived experience. Zheng’s unmistakable premise—intentions aren't impact—anchors the book's argument from beginning to end.

Zheng lays out a pragmatic framework for rebuilding trust and credibility around DEI. She invites you to view equity, diversity, and inclusion as distinct, measurable results rather than emotional or symbolic states. Then she takes you behind the scenes of why modern DEI often stalls: historical fractures, performative allyship, misguided incentives, and an industry that mistook publicity for progress.

Why intentions fail

Organizations often react to public pressure with rapid, shallow gestures—a new policy, a statement, or a one‑time training. Zheng illustrates this with her own 2020 anecdote: a vice president offering $15,000 for a one‑hour talk instead of investing that budget in ongoing data analysis. That episode epitomizes “check‑the‑box” behavior—an attempt to appear active without improving outcomes for those harmed. These gestures create false comfort and erode trust among marginalized stakeholders.

Reframing DEI as outcomes

To get real traction, Zheng reframes DEI around three outcome categories: equity (enablement and absence of harm), diversity (representative composition built on stakeholder trust), and inclusion (the felt experience of safety and belonging). Each requires measurement: pay equity, promotion rates, retention, microaggressions, and even net promoter scores as trust indicators. Equity ensures fairness in opportunity and treatment; diversity gauges representation with accountability; inclusion captures the culture people experience daily.

The history that built our myths

DEI’s current toolkit comes from turbulent history—from Kurt Lewin’s encounter groups and Price Cobbs’s racial sensitivity training in the 1960s to affirmative action’s retreat after Bakke (1978) and the rise of the "business case for diversity" in the 1980s. These transitions replaced justice with productivity, turning DEI into a marketable corporate advantage. The result was an industry divorced from accountability—where trainings proliferated but few asked whether they worked.

The performative moment

Zheng devotes sharp critique to performative allyship—the 2020 surge of corporate statements and pledges unbacked by meaningful funding or reform. Her data is scathing: of $49.5 billion promised after racial justice protests, only $4.2 billion reached direct grants, and much of that avoided criminal‑justice reform altogether. This imbalance reveals optics winning over impact. When stakeholders sense symbolic gestures, they lose trust—trust that Zheng calls the currency of change.

Power, identity, and responsibility

Zheng moves beyond intention by detailing how power and identity work together. Every organization runs on power—formal, reward, coercive, expert, informational, and referent—and effective DEI demands you know which kind you hold, use it wisely, and sometimes cede it to regain legitimacy. Identity, meanwhile, is not a weapon or a badge but a language: learn it to detect harm, design equitable systems, and take responsibility for repair.

From theory to systems and coalitions

Once DEI is defined through outcomes and power, Zheng pivots to practice: diagnose problems before intervening, build trustworthy people systems (hiring, promotion, well‑being), form coalitions that deploy complementary roles, and prioritize small wins to build momentum. Leaders learn to match DEI tactics to trust levels—top‑down in high‑trust environments, ceding power in low‑trust ones. Sustainability depends on accountability, transparency, incentives, and structure—not charismatic champions.

Fixing the DEI industry

Finally, Zheng calls for professionalization: DEI must prove its impact just like finance or product development. Practitioners must show evidence—pre/post measures, follow‑ups, and clear results. Organizations should hire the right experts—educators to change behavior, integrators to embed equity, and advisors to align strategy—and view DEI as interdependent teamwork, not solitary activism. When DEI is defined by rigorous measurement, shared responsibility, and honest accountability, intentions finally produce impact.

The book’s most repeated lesson is simple but revolutionary: if you want DEI to succeed, treat it like any other organizational goal. That means clarity on what outcomes matter, metrics for success, and accountability for results. Zheng insists that slogans and vision statements without measurable change are just noise. She reframes DEI’s three pillars—equity, diversity, and inclusion—as operational outcomes rather than values.

Equity: enablement and absence of harm

Equity is about measurable well‑being across groups. It requires tracking success and eliminating harm: pay gaps, promotion barriers, discrimination, or biased evaluations. Equity manifests only when these metrics converge toward parity. Zheng emphasizes that creating accommodations—like color‑accessible test formats—demonstrates real equity, not tokens of awareness.

Diversity: trust and representation

Diversity means having stakeholder‑trusted representation. A board may have demographic variety but fail if those represented see tokenism. Representation must empower access to communities that were previously excluded. Zheng notes, quoting Zora Neale Hurston, “skinfolk ain’t kinfolk”—shared identity doesn’t guarantee shared accountability. Evaluate diversity through stakeholder trust, not optics.

Inclusion: the lived experience of safety

Inclusion shows up in how people feel at work: whether they can contribute without fear, whether they trust leaders to act, and whether communication flows across power lines. Measure inclusion using engagement data, microaggression prevalence, and psychological safety indices. The goal: all stakeholders feel seen and safe to participate.

When DEI aligns to outcomes and measurement, interventions stop being symbolic and start being strategic. You shift resources from theater to transformation—and every investment produces evidence capable of building long‑term trust.

Zheng uses history to explain why contemporary DEI efforts often recycle the same mistakes. She retraces DEI’s evolution from encounter groups in the 1960s to corporate diversity management in the 1980s and 1990s. At each stage, the field traded accountability for comfort.

Encounter groups and backlash

Kurt Lewin’s “T‑groups” and later race‑relations institutes tried to teach empathy through intense experiential training. Early programs, like the Defense Race Relations Institute (DRRI), ran hundreds of hours and yielded knowledgeable trainers—but backlash arose once control shifted to commanders. Leaders diluted techniques to prevent discomfort, weakening impact. This cycle of promise, backlash, and dilution continues today.

Retreat from affirmative outcomes

The 1978 Bakke case and Reagan‑era deregulation gutted accountability frameworks. Organizations stopped tracking outcomes and turned to rhetoric—color blindness, meritocracy, “managing diversity.” When outcome mandates disappear, progress erodes. Studies from those decades show gains plateaued or reversed once enforcement weakened.

The business case illusion

Corporate DEI reinvented itself around profitability. R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr. popularized “diversity as a competitive advantage,” and reports like Workforce 2000 framed difference as productivity fuel. This logic inspired thousands of one‑off trainings and interventions, but few proved durable. As Zheng observes, justice was swapped for efficiency, and DEI became performance rather than reform.

The takeaway: accountability and measurement built progress, but comfort and politics erased it. Learning from these cycles—promise, backlash, dilution—is the essence of what Zheng calls achieving “negative expertise.”

Trust is the real currency of change, and power is the means by which you spend it. Zheng teaches you to map both. Every organization operates through six power types—formal, reward, coercive, expert, informational, and referent—and your influence depends on knowing which kind you have and how it interacts with trust.

Understanding power

Formal power derives from role authority; reward power from resources; coercive from enforcement; expert from credibility; informational from access to data; referent from relationships. If you lack formal control, you can still wield informational and referent power through transparency and trust­building. In Zheng’s case study of the tech company “Zorm,” distrust escalated because centralization and unwritten power rules suppressed authentic communication. Restoring trust required redistributing informational power to employees and ceding decisions to representative groups.

Trust levels drive tactics

In high‑trust environments, leaders can drive change directly and scale fast. In medium‑trust contexts, they must prove sincerity with small wins and shared governance. In low‑trust organizations, power must be ceded, apologies made, and employee‑led structures built. Zheng’s example comparing ineffective and restorative corporate apologies shows how sincerity plus concrete action rebuilds credibility.

When power sharing meets outcome accountability, trust grows. Leaders stop demanding faith and start earning it through transparent performance, making DEI possible even in skeptical or wounded cultures.

Zheng argues that identity should be taken seriously but treated as one lens among many, not as a moral scoreboard. Identity shapes access, credibility, and harm, so ignoring it—via color‑blindness or neutrality—hides systemic problems. Yet overemphasizing identity as status creates performative competition. The balance lies in responsibility.

Identity denial and multiculturalism

Color blindness often protects dominant identities and perpetuates invisibility of inequity. On the other extreme, uncritical multiculturalism turns cultural celebration into stereotype reinforcement. Zheng calls both incomplete. Real DEI means recognizing identity as partial insight—useful for diagnosis but insufficient without structural reform.

Drop the moral labels

Instead of categorizing people as “racist” or “antiracist,” Zheng asks one question: are you fulfilling your responsibilities to create measurable equity and prevent harm? When accountability replaces identity shaming, progress accelerates. Learn community‑specific linguistic and historical contexts—like why identity‑first language matters to autistic advocates or how BIPOC arose to center anti‑Blackness—and treat learning as humility, not certification.

When identity literacy meets outcome accountability, interventions become human, respectful, and measurable—an antidote to both denial and performance.

You can’t fix inequity by guessing. Zheng demonstrates how evidence‑based diagnosis transforms DEI from rhetoric into science. Every intervention must begin with tracing causality: what produces a disparity, who holds decision rights, what incentives sustain harm, and where to pilot solutions.

Trace the chain of events

If men or White applicants advance more often, don’t invent slogans—map the hiring process. In one example, women failed initial interviews because an extroverted culture biased evaluations. Real equity required redesigning rubrics, not retraining individuals. Tools like Applicant Tracking System (ATS) data, pay analyses, and qualitative interviews reveal root causes.

Experiment and iterate

After diagnosis, pilot solutions with measurement built‑in: structured interviews, standardized scoring, work‑sample tests, and post‑intervention trust surveys. Feedback loops close the gap between intention and outcome. A trusted environment emerges only when change is tracked transparently and mistakes become data, not scandal.

Start with outcomes, not tools. That simple inversion is Zheng’s operational law—and it turns DEI from guesswork into accountability.

Complex change requires many hands. Zheng categorizes seven essential roles in any DEI movement: advocate, educator, organizer, strategist, backer, builder, and reformer. Each fulfills a distinct mission, and coalitions succeed only when all roles activate in concert.

Complementary roles

Advocates surface harm, educators translate it into understanding, organizers mobilize action, strategists plan, backers legitimize, builders implement, and reformers sustain. In Zheng’s anti‑harassment training case, the movement succeeded only when these roles aligned—from vocal employees to leadership backers to builders designing better programs.

Coalitions and small wins

Coalitions are messy but necessary. People join for different motives—justice, branding, pragmatism—and that diversity strengthens outcomes. Use small wins, not grand pledges, to build legitimacy. Each successful step (a new reporting system, an inclusive training module) increases trust and unlocks bigger reforms.

Map who plays which role around you; fill gaps before acting. With coordinated coalitions and incremental victories, DEI grows from advocacy into durable systems.

Lasting DEI depends on institutional foundations—vision, accountability, transparency, and structure. Zheng’s closing chapters give you a blueprint for embedding equity so it survives leadership turnover and political cycles.

Vision and incentives

Anchor your DEI vision in concrete organizational goals. If you measure productivity, define DEI in terms of expanding opportunity for who contributes productively. Tie executive compensation, performance reviews, and promotions to DEI metrics to align incentives with credibility.

Transparency and structure

Trust thrives on transparency—publish representation, compensation, and culture metrics internally and externally, and share lessons from failure. Create structures that persist: DEI councils, board responsibilities, and independent oversight groups ensure accountability beyond individual champions.

People systems

Redesign recruitment, promotion, and feedback systems to eliminate bias. Standardize job descriptions and scoring rubrics, make advancement criteria transparent, and provide inclusive benefits and flexibility. Don’t rely solely on training; fix structural inequities first. Policy beats personality.

Fixing the DEI industry

Zheng concludes by urging professional rigor: practitioners must show impact evidence, specialize as educators, integrators, or advisors, and collaborate through shared standards like the Global DEI Benchmarks. Clients must demand proof. DEI matures only when success becomes verifiable and systemic.

With foundations solid—vision, trust, power sharing, measurement, and structure—organizations finally move from aspirational equity to operational justice.