164. Why You Can't Just Operationalize DEI
DEI Is How You Do All Things
As we move away from some of the urgency that surfaced in 2020 around diversity, equity, and inclusion, it remains vital to continue doing the work.
DEI isn’t a box you can check and say you’re done. You can’t schedule learning and unlearning.
It’s not that simple. Systems of white supremacy and inequity weren’t established overnight, and they can’t be dismantled so easily.
Erica discusses why DEI is an ongoing project that requires emotional investment and openness and why it can’t just be operationalized.
Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:
Why DEI has to be the lens through which you do all things
Why DEI can’t be an intellectual exercise
How committing to learning and unlearning requires an emotional investment
How noticing when you’re defaulting to ingrained assumptions creates opportunity for growth
DEI Is A Lifelong Process
On the Pause on the Play® podcast, Erica Courdae says that one of the ways people respond to urgency around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is by trying to operationalize it.
It “gives them a way to kind of wrap their head around it. They can make it easily digestible. They can put it on a schedule…And that’s just not how that works.”
She says that you can operationalize actions that support your DEI efforts, as Jennifer Voss and Martha Beck Incorporated have done with facilitating their awards program, but “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion cannot be simplified down to just tangible things because learning and unlearning, that’s not something that you can schedule like a task.”
The reason, Erica says, that people try to operationalize DEI is that it is “a way to make it something that you can disconnect [from] the emotional aspect of it.”
Confronting the lasting emotional damage and trauma of white supremacy is uncomfortable, but Erica urges everyone to resist the urge to make DEI a checklist item and push through the process.
“We cannot operationalize the process of understanding, dismantling, learning, unlearning, relearning, going back to the start line, all of those things…This is a lifelong process.”
Commit to Learning and Unlearning
Committing to learning and unlearning includes all of the things that you experience. Movies, music, the word choices that you make.
With word choices particularly, Erica reminds us that “the goal is not, hey look, I changed my language and now I’m a good person. The goal is to understand the harm that the language causes.”
It’s impossible to operationalize DEI, or to check it off a list, because it is social and cultural programming that is being dismantled, it’s the assumptions that we make, the automatic defaults we hold.
“I want you to think about how it shows up. I want you to think about where you have these areas in your thinking that maybe are the defaults.”
Paying attention to those details takes time and effort, but it presents “a great opportunity…to pay attention to how you feel and where you can question things just a little bit.”
DEI Is The Lens
DEI has to be a part of your everyday life.
“DEI is not something that you do, it’s how you do all things. You cannot operationalize everything that you do.”
Erica says she is often asked to create trainings and modules for DEI as if it is a discrete line item, when it needs to be incorporated into how you do everything.
“I need to really make sure that the lens that I’m processing all things through, is coming through [DEI] and noticing where I can be better.”
She continues, “being able to acknowledge where there is a possibility and an opportunity to be better, that’s the goal. And that’s what using the lens of DEI for all things really means.”
There Is No Checklist
Erica says that when you’re approaching DEI as the lens through which you do all things, “biases and preconceived notions aren’t read away like the passages of a book.”
You can’t read, listen, protest, or donate your way out of the discomfort that comes with noticing the biases and preconceived notions that you’ve been programmed with.
Wanting to switch it off or numb it out, “that’s telling you that there’s something there.”
She says, “Your ‘normal’ shows up everywhere. So catching it in action is more valuable than intellectualizing its imagined presence.”
Noticing when your notion of normal comes up is an opportunity for growth and evolution.
Noticing and paying attention to “when that shows up, what’s going on in that situation, what prompted me to feel that way, what prompted me to have that thought, why did I make that assumption…That type of learning, that type of awareness, that type of ‘oh, shit’ moment is a whole lot more valuable than ‘let me read this book.’”
She adds that those moments when you ascribe a normal to someone else that is inaccurate, “that is what I want you to pay attention to. That is where the opportunities really come up. That is a huge part of your process that I do not want you to miss. And there’s no book on it. There is no checklist.”
You Have To Go Through It
The emotional toll of the assumptions that others have made about us, and the assumptions we’ve made about others, can’t be operationalized.
“Those are all things you have to go through…You can’t operationalize working through the emotional pieces that come along with dismantling white supremacy and how it decided to park itself in the way that you respond, or behave, in life.”
You can, however, work to operationalize the ways that you are seeking to do things, whether that’s hiring practices or other aspects of your business that will support your DEI efforts.
“You can operationalize your process, but you can’t operationalize the emotional piece of that process.”
Ready to Dive Deeper?
Being clear on your values and the impact you want to create helps you use Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as a lens.
You need to be explicit about who you support, what you support, why you support it, and how your actions are aligned with that.
If you want support in getting that clarity, so that you can get closer to embodying your values in your life and business, join the Implicit to Explicit Masterclass.
Learn more at pauseontheplay.com/explicit.