DEI Has Failed Us All

It’s time to admit an uncomfortable truth: DEI has failed us.

Like a lot of people, I was all-in. On paper, I agreed with everything DEI promised — better decisions, better outcomes, stronger culture, more access for people who’d been shut out, fairer processes, better products, better profits. All of it. DEI was a meaningful part of my MBA coursework, and I bought in completely. I figured the people complaining about it were just ill-informed, or selfish, or quietly furious that a level playing field would cost them an advantage they hadn’t earned. How petty do you have to be, I thought, to oppose this?

I don’t think that anymore.

I’ve watched the evidence stack up, and I’ve had to admit something that genuinely disappoints me: DEI, as we are actually doing it, is failing the people it was supposed to help. It’s bad for the average worker. It’s bad for companies. And in its current, unchecked form, it has become something I can only describe as anti-competitive, undemocratic, and corrosive to the things that actually make organizations work.

That’s hard for a former believer to say. But somebody has to.

The Benefits Aren’t There

Start with the simplest test any business investment has to pass: does it add value?

Everything a company does is supposed to create value for its stakeholders. Anything less is just mismanagement dressed up in a mission statement. And by that plain standard, the DEI experiment is failing in plain sight. Company after company is quietly admitting that the returns aren’t there — that they are spending more on these programs than they will ever get back from them.

But instead of taking an honest look, they double down. They force more of it onto employees and customers, at real financial and human cost, as though the cure for a program that isn’t working is simply more of the program.

It is not. More DEI is not the solution to poorly performing DEI.

Ask the Customer

You don’t need a McKinsey deck to see it. You just have to be a customer.

When I hit a forced DEI touchpoint that makes the experience measurably worse, it enrages me — and I know I’m not alone. Can I just press 0 and get the normal, proven, human-quality service I’m used to? I try, every single time. I mash that button like my sanity depends on it.

That instinct, the reflexive lunge for the off-ramp, should tell us everything. People are not resisting DEI because they’re bigots or dinosaurs. They’re resisting it because, in their actual lived experience, it is making things worse. And being told to enjoy it anyway is its own special insult.

The Love-Hate Trap

Here’s the strange part. People don’t simply hate DEI. They love it and hate it at the same time.

DEI is more unpopular today than it has ever been. Whatever your politics, your religion, your education, your background, you are statistically more likely to view DEI unfavorably now than you were a year ago, even while you still love what it could theoretically do.

That contradiction isn’t an accident. We love the vision and resent the reality. Some of that is branding and clumsy rollout, sure. But most of it comes from the unchecked nature of these programs. DEI for DEI’s sake, deployed everywhere, with no apparent regard for the human toll.

Look at hiring. DEI has made getting a job feel nearly impossible. Candidates tiptoe around it, wondering how it weighs against them. Recruiters and hiring managers quietly wonder whether they’re even seeing the best people, or whether the best people got filtered out for reasons that have nothing to do with the work. Stressed candidates, stressed recruiters, owners missing out on talent… and we’re told this is the system working as intended.

Who, exactly, is winning here?

A Fork for Soup

None of this means the underlying idea is worthless. It means we’ve confused the ingredient for the dish.

DEI should be one small component of a well-designed process. It is a tool you reach for when it genuinely improves the outcome. Instead, we’ve made it the whole point. We’ve cleared every other utensil off the table and handed everyone a single fork, then acted surprised when they can’t eat the soup.

Thoughtful leaders use DEI where it makes sense, where it adds value, where it actually improves the process or the bottom line. They pilot before they scale. They measure honestly. They keep a human in the loop and stay willing to pull back when it isn’t delivering as promised. That is the opposite of what most organizations are doing, which is closer to faith than to management.

We took something with real promise and turned it into a compliance exercise. And compliance exercises always produce the appearance of the thing instead of the thing itself.

In Conclusion

The spending with no return. The forced touchpoints that degrade the experience. The hiring process nobody trusts. The doubling-down. The companies quietly walking it back. The love-hate contradiction tearing at people who genuinely wanted it to work. I meant all of it.

I was talking, though, about Digitally-Enhanced Intelligence. DEI. Which, if you sit with it for even a minute, is plainly the more honest name for what we’ve been calling artificial intelligence. There is nothing artificial about it. It is intelligence: pattern recognition, synthesis, generation, random em dashes. It’s just intelligence that has been digitally enhanced. DEI.

Go back and read all of this again if you must. Every paragraph. It holds.

The billions spent chasing returns that haven’t materialized. The forced AI touchpoints that make customer service worse while we stab at the zero key. The hiring pipelines mangled by resume-screening models nobody fully trusts, while jobs are lost and harder to get. The companies cramming it into every workflow and calling the failures a reason to deploy even more. The way we both marvel at what it can do and quietly dread what it’s doing to us right now. That is the state of AI in the workplace. Word for word.

I find it odd and somewhat amusing, though, that the loudest voices against DEI — the real one, the human kind — tend to demand evidence, accountability, and the freedom to opt out of sweeping programs imposed on them without consent, while at the same time nakedly embrace AI without any of that.

They are, very often, the same voices cheering the uncritical, company-wide rollout of AI with breathless enthusiasm and almost no oversight at all.

They want merit-based decisions — until the model makes the call. They want transparency — until the system is a black box nobody can audit. They want workers protected from ideology imposed from above — until the thing being imposed is trained on data none of us fully understand.

So let me be clear about the part the bait was hiding: diversity — actual, human diversity — is a good thing. It was never the problem. The problem is what happens when anything — any idea, any technology, any initiative — gets adopted wholesale without honest scrutiny, without fully understanding it, without real accountability, or without the basic humility to ask whether it’s working for us.

That principle doesn’t care which side of the culture war you’re on. It only cares whether you’re paying attention to what matters.