Beyond the Backlash
INSIGHTS AT THE INTERSECTION OF INCLUSION, ESSENTIAL PERSONNEL RECRUITMENT AND GEN Z
VOLUME 19: Reimagining DEI
By Greg Almieda, CEO and Founder, Global View Communications (GVC)
Two years into the DEI backlash, most of the conversation is still about defense… what to rename, what to quiet down, what to cut before someone asks about it. That’s not a strategy. It’s a retreat with good PR. If we’re going to reimagine DEI instead of just surviving it, it’s worth looking at how other functions have handled their own reckonings because DEI isn’t the first corporate function to get told it was too scattered, too soft, and too disconnected from the business to defend itself.
Consumer insights went through exactly that. For years, it was a function full of talented people doing genuinely good work, market by market, region by region, each team solving its own local problems well. What it didn’t have was any shared muscle. No common tools, no common language, no way for a lesson learned in
one market to make another market smarter. The leader who took on the rebuild called it “global might for local fight”. The recognition that local excellence without global connection is just a thousand smart people reinventing the same wheel, one country at a time.
That’s DEI right now in most companies. Strong people. Real commitment. Zero shared infrastructure. An ERG in one region and a supplier diversity program in another, each doing solid work, none of it connected, none of it compounding. When the backlash hit, there was no collective strength to draw on, just isolated efforts, easy to pick off one at a time.
The second lesson is about posture. The insights team had spent years in an order-taker role, waiting to be asked, running the test, producing the report, staying quiet until invited into the room. The fix wasn’t a new title. It was retraining people to show up earlier, form a point of view before being asked for one, and spend less time perfecting the analysis and more time acting on it. DEI has the same order-taker habit, waiting for a mandate, a budget line, an invitation to the strategy conversation instead of forcing its way in with a business case nobody can wave off.
The third lesson is about learning versus testing. A function that only measures after the fact, one annual report, one static dashboard (that can’t adapt in real time). A function built around continuous learning gets sharper with every market, every campaign, every misstep. DEI has mostly operated in the first mode: an annual report nobody reads until a crisis, instead of a live feedback loop leadership actually uses to make decisions.
Reimagining DEI doesn’t start with better language. It starts with connecting the scattered work that already exists, changing the posture from order-taker to business partner, and building a real learning loop instead of a once-a-year report. Do that, and the next wave of pressure has something real to hit not just a slogan.
— Greg
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Interested in submitting a guest column for publication? Contact greg@globalviewcomm.com for more information.