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Examining Why DEI Efforts Often Fall Short and How to Foster Effective Change
Jan 11, 2025
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - Buckminster Fuller
What if I told you that most organizations’ DEI initiatives were doomed from the start? That their failure could have been predicted and even avoided?
Consider the difference between planting a seed in fertile, nutrient-rich soil and planting it in wet concrete. Which would you predict is most likely to grow? It’s pretty simple, right? And yet, this is what many organizations, institutions, and governments with DEI initiatives have done.
They planted seeds where they could not grow and then blamed the seed for not overcoming the sidewalk it was encased in. By doing so, they conveyed a false narrative that the very diversities that lead to flourishing in every other ecosystem in the world somehow don't work for humans. But often, when DEI efforts fail, it’s not because the seeds are faulty. It’s because the soil is. Until we face the fact that we have set these efforts up for failure and start giving these seeds what they truly need to thrive, we will never benefit from the promise of actualized relational potential across differences.
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Unfortunately, most of us are too distracted by our own fears to see how DEI advocates and critics both perpetuate this cycle of ineffectiveness. Many of us who served in DEI-related roles, eager to accelerate social progress, were incapable of discerning what so-called opportunities were worth our time and sanity and which were not. Advocates fear the loss of progress, while critics fear the erosion of their identity status or the hopes that their investment in the status quo may someday work in their favor. But the reality is that fear cannot drive out fear; it only deepens divisions.
A skilled gardener knows that before planting, the weeds must be removed. Similarly, organizations must confront and clear away the root causes of resistance before expecting DEI initiatives to thrive. To ignore this is to engage in what Fuller calls “fighting the existing reality,” a strategy destined for failure.
The question then becomes: Why do so many organizations persist with approaches that don’t work?
In his work, The Denial of Death, psychologist Ernest Becker argues that much of human behavior is driven by the need to repress our awareness of mortality. In DEI contexts, this denial manifests as resistance to change, seeing diversity as a threat to identity, resources, or power. This is very evident in group dynamics, where people cling to their cultural or social identities like a life preserver, keeping them from drowning in this existential anxiety. And this fear is like a poison injected into the veins of most DEI efforts, rendering them incapacitated before they even started.
In essence, this means that for an organization to have a successful DEI initiative, it must be willing to face what will have to die in its previous expression for something greater to flourish. There is an old adage that says, “In order for the plant to grow, the seed must die.” This is a reality that innovative organizations not only accept but also embrace and strive to work with.
Regardless of whether you are focusing on technological innovation or relational innovation, to build a model that makes the existing one obsolete, organizations must confront these fears head-on. They must create environments where DEI efforts are nurtured by transparency, trust, and a willingness to engage in difficult conversations. In doing so, they not only create space for inclusion but also transform their culture into one capable of sustained, meaningful change.
In part two of this series, we will explore with more depth the resistance to this awareness as well as what possibilities exist for organizations that are willing to do the work to cultivate an environment that can truly realize the potential of DEI and its correlates.
This piece was inspired by a longer entry in the People Are Not Things Newsletter entitled, Deny Everything Infinitely (DEI) Part 1: The Very Predictable and Virtually Inevitable Fate of Most Corporate DEI Programs
Pedro Senhorinha (Sen-your-reen-ya) Silva has had a very storied career that expands from the United States Air Force where he served as a Satellite Communications Technician before cross-training to become a Chinese Linguist all the way to professional ministry serving with the progressive Christian denomination, the United Church of Christ. He has also served in a myriad of other capacities from corporate recruiter to Americorp Vista. And at the heart of every choice he has made, whether vocationally or educationally, is a deep desire to unite people.
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CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg is seen during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with representatives of social media companies at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Wednesday January 31, 2024 in Washington, DC.
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Meta ditches fact-checkers: What it means for the rest of us
Jan 10, 2025
This week, Meta announced that it would be ending relationships with its vast global network of fact-checking partners – organizations like Factcheck.org, Politifact, and the Associated Press that have been flagging falsehoods on the platform since 2017. In making the announcement, CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed these partners were making “mistakes” and engaging in “censorship” and that it was time to “restore free expression” across Meta properties.
Platforms, journalists, civil society organizations and regular folks have long relied on fact-checkers to debunk the falsehoods polluting our information ecosystem. These journalists are trained to research claims and report the facts in accordance with standards set by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) and its European counterpart, the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN). All of Meta’s fact-checking partners were IFCN-approved; none took down content themselves.
So what went awry with what’s likely the world’s most robust fact-checking operation? Let’s examine Zuckerberg’s claims.
As with any system, mistakes – misguided shadow bans, for example – are inevitable by humans and Meta’s automated systems alike. Neither is perfect, and each has biases; the goal in fact-checking is to mitigate those biases as much as possible in researching content, with the help of training and proven approaches that are the purview of IFCN and EFCSN. If you want to verify something, trained fact-checkers are the best we’ve got.
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Claims that conservative voices are being censored, meanwhile, have been hammering the platforms for years, especially after then-candidate Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram after the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. You’ll recall that Zuckerberg called the risks associated with Trump’s posts too great, writing, "The current context is now fundamentally different, involving use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government." YouTube removed similar content at the time.
Politics were a factor when Meta’s content moderation program was established. Then-Facebook staffed it, hired external fact-checkers and set up its Oversight Board after the 2016 election, when it was revealed the platform was part of a Russian propaganda scheme to influence the race and a key vector in spreading misinformation about both candidates. An excellent read for context is the January 7 issue of Platformer, which also quotes Meta employees’ concerns, particularly about weakening restrictions on hate speech and shifting the reporting burden to users.
Content moderation is complicated, and platforms have learned lessons from the bans, yet the hand-wringing about censorship continues. It comes up in the workshops I lead and in conversations with conservative friends, who cite Zuckerberg’s testimonies or the debunked but still influential “Twitter Files” (see this Factcheck.org piece!)
I respond by saying that claims of censorship are convenient as they’re almost impossible to refute. They’ve been used to attack mainstream media, higher education, government agencies, and officials and even to erode our trust in one another. Rebuttal is weak or absent because no person or entity is 100 percent neutral, and there’s nothing like an accusation of discrimination to trigger a righteous response and deepen our divides. If you’re looking to dig dirt or scapegoat, censorship claims are gifts that keep on giving.
What matters is that Meta’s announcement mirrors Elon Musk’s blatant partisanship during the presidential campaign; it mentioned partnering with the Trump administration even as Zuckerberg claimed fealty to the First Amendment, which protects our speech from government involvement. It’s no coincidence that it came just after the four-year anniversary of the Capitol attack and vote certification or that the news broke on Fox and Friends.
Meta’s shift to a Community Notes-style function for fact-checking matters, too. If you sign up as a Community Notes contributor on X, as I have, you’ll see prompts on posts that are simply people’s opinions, not content that needs to be verified, thus morphing fact-checking into a crowd-sourced debate. To make the loss of resources worse, Zuckerberg didn’t just fire the fact-checkers (only the U.S.-based organizations, by the way). He discredited them – at a time when people were desperate for their help. When I reference the fact-checking outlets in my presentations, people scribble notes or take photos every time.
The clear partisan collusion among three of the most powerful individuals in the world – Zuckerberg, Musk, and Trump – is the epitome of bias. It eclipses any nudging about COVID misinformation by the outgoing administration. We see Musk’s political and ideological commentary all over X, aided by the algorithm he controls. Zuckerberg’s portfolio, used by the majority of the world, is at risk of being clogged with false and harmful narratives. Algorithmic bias toward right-leaning content seems likely – a problem since studies show more low-quality information is shared by the right at present. All three leaders have made a practice of attacking or downranking quality information sources. You can’t advocate for freedom of expression and against standards-based journalism; the First Amendment protects both.
We were brought up on the notion that checks and balances are good. Yet, now we have a U.S.-based trio that basically owns, literally and figuratively, the global communications infrastructure and, with their partners, will dominate the information ecosystem for generations to come – with one less system of checks and without the balance of nonpartisan media leadership. Simply canceling your Meta or X accounts won’t help the people who rely on Facebook groups for support, the organizations that do business there, or the municipalities that use them for rapid-response communication.
I’d like to celebrate a positive change in the announcement – reintroducing “civic content” – but am distracted by feeling like we’re headed toward a propaganda-producing oligarchy, like Russia has. Whether we reject or cheer this trio and their politics, we must ask – is that really the best thing for America and the world?
Deanna Troust is the founder and president of Truth in Common, a nonpartisan nonprofit that works to restore fact-based decision-making and respectful discourse through community-based workshops, professional development, and advisory services for mission-driving organizations. Learn more at truthincommon.org.
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The Untold Costs of AI: The West Is Paying for the Future That Hasn’t Arrived
Jan 10, 2025
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been heralded as a technological revolution that will transform our world. From curing diseases to automating dangerous jobs to discovering new inventions, the possibilities are tantalizing. We’re told that AI could bring unprecedented good—if only we continue to invest in its development and allow labs to seize precious, finite natural resources.
Yet, despite these grand promises, most Americans haven’t experienced any meaningful benefits from AI. It’s yet to meaningfully address most health issues, and for many, It’s not significantly improving our everyday lives, excluding drafting emails and making bad memes. In fact, AI usage is still largely confined to a narrow segment of the population: highly educated professionals in tech hubs and urban centers. An August 2024 survey by the Federal Reserve and Harvard Kennedy School found that while 39.4% of U.S. adults aged 18-64 reported using generative AI, adoption rates vary significantly. Workers with a bachelor's degree or higher are twice as likely to use AI at work compared to those without a college degree (40% vs. 20%), and usage is highest in computer/mathematical occupations (49.6%) and management roles (49.0%).
For the majority of Americans, especially those in personal services (12.5% adoption) and blue-collar occupations (22.1% adoption), AI remains an abstraction, something that exists in the future rather than their present.
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While the rewards of AI are still speculative, the costs are becoming increasingly tangible. And the people paying those costs are not the ones benefiting from AI today. In fact, much of the burden of AI’s development is falling squarely on the shoulders of the American West—both its people and its land. According to recent research, data centers in the United States are consuming an increasing share of the country's total electricity. These facilities, which are crucial for AI deployment, used about 3% of all U.S. electricity in 2022. By 2030, their share is estimated to grow to 9% of total U.S. electricity consumption.
This surge in energy demand is particularly significant for the Western United States, with its concentration of tech hubs and data centers. Moreover, the carbon dioxide emissions from data centers may more than double between 2022 and 2030, further intensifying the environmental impact on these regions.
Here’s why: developing and deploying AI requires enormous amounts of energy. Advanced machine learning models demand computing power on a scale that most people can barely comprehend. Recent International Energy Agency projections highlight the magnitude of this demand: global electricity consumption from data centers, cryptocurrencies, and AI is expected to reach between 620-1050 trillion watt hours (TWh) by 2026. To put that in perspective, 1,000 TWh could provide electricity to about 94.3 million American homes for an entire year.
All that energy has to come from somewhere. Increasingly, it’s coming from the West—the part of the country that has long been tapped to fuel the nation’s ambitions, from oil and gas to solar, wind, and hydropower.
This energy extraction is putting immense pressure on the West’s already strained resources. Land is being consumed, water is being diverted, and communities are being disrupted, all to keep the lights on in tech labs far removed from the realities of life on the ground. The irony is that the very regions making AI possible are the least likely to benefit from it.
The rush to ramp up energy production for AI feels eerily familiar. We’ve seen these “get rich quick” schemes before—industries that swoop into rural areas, extract valuable resources, and leave environmental and social destruction in their wake. The West has been exploited before by out-of-state interests with big promises and shallow commitments, and AI risks becoming the latest chapter in that story.
We need to have an honest conversation about the true costs of AI development—particularly when it comes to energy consumption. AI labs may talk about curing diseases and inventing new technologies, but until those breakthroughs become reality, the rest of us—especially those in the West—are left footing the bill. And right now, that bill is being paid in the form of depleted resources and communities that are being squeezed for the sake of a future that remains distant and uncertain.
The truth is, we can’t continue to deplete our resources in the hope that AI’s promises will eventually materialize. We must demand accountability and transparency from those developing AI. Where is the energy coming from? Who is being impacted? And most importantly, who will benefit?
AI’s future may hold incredible potential, but we must make sure that we’re not sacrificing the West’s present for a future that may never arrive. If AI is going to reshape our world, it must do so in a way that lifts up all Americans, not just a select few. Until then, we need to be clear-eyed about the costs—and demand better.
Frazier is an adjunct professor of Delaware Law and an affiliated scholar of emerging technology and constitutional law at St. Thomas University College of Law.
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What a health insurance CEO's murder reveals about America's pain
Jan 10, 2025
The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson represented a horrific and indefensible act of violence. His family deserves our deepest sympathy.
As a physician and healthcare leader, I initially declined to comment on the killing. I felt that speculating about the shooter’s intent would only sensationalize a terrible act.
Regardless of the circumstances, vigilante violence has no place in a free and just society.
But now, more than a month later, I feel compelled to address one aspect of the story that has been widely misunderstood: the public’s reaction to the news of Thompson’s murder. Specifically, why tens of thousands of individuals “liked” and “laughed” at a post on Facebook announcing the CEO’s death.
What causes someone to ‘like’ murder?
News analysts have attributed the social media response to America’s “simmering anger” and “frustration” with abroken healthcare system, pointing to rising medical costs, insurance red tape, and time-consuming prior authorization requirements as justifications.
These are all, indeed, problems and may explain some of the public's reactions. Yet these descriptions grossly understate the lived reality for most of those affected. When I speak with individuals who have lost a child, parent, or spouse because of what they perceive as an unresponsive and uncaring system, their pain is raw and intense. What they feel isn’t frustration—it’s agony.
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By framing healthcare’s failures in terms of statistical measures and policy snafus, we reduce a deeply personal crisis to an intellectual exercise. And it’s this very detached, cognitive approach that has allowed our nation to disregard the emotional devastation endured by millions of patients and their families.
When journalists, healthcare leaders, and policymakers cite eye-popping statistics on healthcare expenditures, highlight exorbitant insurer profits, or deride the bloated salaries of executives, they leave out a vital part of the story. They omit the unbearable human suffering behind the numbers. And I fear that until we approach healthcare as a moral crisis—not merely an economic or political puzzle to solve—our nation will never act with the urgency required to relieve people’s profound pain.
A pain beyond reason
In Dante’s Inferno, hell is a place where suffering is eternal and the cries of the damned go unheard. For countless Americans who feel trapped in our healthcare system, that metaphor rings true. Their anguish and pleas for mercy are met with silence.
It is this sense of abandonment and powerlessness, not mere frustration, that fuels both a desperate rage and anger at a system and its leaders who appear not to care. The response isn’t one of glee—it’s a visceral reaction born of pain and unrelenting remorse.
As a clinician, I’ve seen life-destroying pain in my patients—and even within my own family. When my cousin Alan died in his twenties from a then-incuurable cancer, my aunt and uncle were powerless to save him. Their grief was profound, unrelenting, and eternal.They never recovered from the loss. But Alan’s death, heartbreaking as it was, stemmed from the limits of science at the time.
What millions of Americans endure today is different. Their loved ones die not because cures don’t exist but because the healthcare system treats them like a number. Bureaucratic inefficiencies, profit-driven delays, and systemic indifference produce avoidable tragedies.
To appreciate this depth of pain, imagine standing behind a chain-link fence, watching someone you love being tortured. You scream and plead for help, but no one listens. That is what healthcare feels like for too many Americans. And until all of us acknowledge and feel their pain, little will improve.
Curing America’s indifference
When we focus solely on cold numbers—the millions who’ve lost Medicaid coverage, the hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths each year, or the life-expectancy gap between the U.S. and other nations—we strip healthcare of its humanity.
But once we stop framing these failures as bureaucratic inefficiencies or frustrations and, instead, focus on the devastation of having to watch a loved one suffer and die needlessly, we are forced to confront a moral imperative. Either we must act with urgency and resolve the problem or admit we simply don’t care.
In the halls of Congress, lawmakers continue to weigh modest reforms to prior authorization requirements and Medicaid spending—baby steps that won’t fix a system in crisis. The truth is that without bold, transformative action, healthcare will remain unaffordable and inaccessible for millions of families whose anguish will grow. Here are three examples of the scale of transformation required:
- Reverse the obesity epidemic with a two-part strategy. Congress must tax ultra-processed, sugary foods that drive hundreds of billions of dollars in healthcare costs yearly. In parallel, lawmakers should cap the manufacturer-set price of weight-loss medications like Ozempic and Wegovy to be no higher than in peer nations.
- Change clinician payments from volume to value. Current fee-for-service payment systems incentivize unnecessary tests, treatments, and procedures rather than better health outcomes. Transitioning to pay-for-value would reward healthcare providers, specifically primary care physicians, who successfully prevent chronic diseases, better manage existing conditions, and reduce complications such as heart attacks, strokes, and kidney failure.
- Empower patients and save lives with generative AI. Tools like ChatGPT can help reduce the staggering 400,000 annual deaths from misdiagnoses and 250,000 more from preventable medical errors. Integrating AI into healthcare enables at-home care, continuous disease monitoring, and personalized treatment, making medical care safer, more accessible, and more efficient.
If elected officials, payers, and regulators fail to act, they will have chosen to perpetuate the unbearable pain and suffering patients and families endure daily. They need to hear people's cries. The time for transformative action is now.
Robert Pearl, the author of “ChatGPT, MD,” teaches at both the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group.
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