From DEI to PBJ
DEI to PBJ Framework Shifts
Power, Belonging & Justice: A New Framework
Many of us who lead and work in businesses, organizations, and governments are trying to create environments that work better for more people. In fact, one of the most enduring contemporary dynamics that businesses, organizations, and governments grapple with is how to create and maintain environments that are more just and heterogenous despite the historical (and current) barriers to upending a status quo that privileges and prioritizes dominant groups (i.e., Whites, men) (Berrey, 2015).
In pursuit of this, organizations across various industries rely on the framework of DEI. This means that DEI has become the primary lens through which people understand, talk about, and organize around the need for racial progress, in particular, and social justice in general (Bell & Hartmann, 2007; Georgeac & Rattan, 2023). The framework anchors the site of our organizational inquires and intervention in three major areas: Diversity or representation (i.e., who’s in the room?), Inclusion or participation (i.e., how does everyone in the room feel), and Equity or fairness (i.e., does everyone in the room have what they need?). While that has been useful in some ways, we argue that this emphasis fundamentally colors (and limits) the type of questions we ask and the sort of solutions we see as available to solve the problems before us.
Furthermore, the purported promises of DEI as a remedy for past and on-going injustice often fail to realize, in part because they were not completely designed to (Berrey, 2015; Mayorga-Gallo, 2019); and in part because the framework—being decoupled from power—lends itself to cooption and outright attack. In emphasizing differences in perspectives and characteristics but ignoring differences in power and opportunity, the DEI frame reduce the chances that people might recognize and be motivated to shift the underlying dynamics. Ultimately it is a shaky foundation upon which to rest social justice because it doesn’t allow us to be as precise in what we are trying to solve, for who, when, and how. DEI often emphasizes the differences between people rather than the unequal circumstances affecting people (Purdie-Vaughn & Walton, 2011; Trawalter et. al., 2015).
If we are actually going to achieve the goal of more power-conscious organizations and a more just world, we need a not only a new tool set, but a new paradigm. That’s what PBJ represents. More than just a catchy acronym, it is also a framework for how to ask and answer questions that all organizations currently rely solely on DEI to solve – with limited success (Mckinsey Report, 2020; Wiley Report, 2021).
Fundamentally, PBJ evolves the foci of our attention from the three main areas of DEI to: Power or position (i.e., who does—or has the capacity to—influence things and when, and how that is shaped by external circumstances and internalized beliefs); Belonging or stewardship (i.e., who and what is accepted/valued/nourished, where, and how that is consciously and unconsciously determined, stewarded, and communicated); and Justice or reparation (i.e., responsiveness to inherited systems of oppression, and the creation of pathways that foster fairness, reparation, and re-structuring of modes of engaging, operating, and relating (see Figure 1). These shifts represent shifts not just in words but also in what sorts of interventions and practices are more visible and, as a result, more possible to create spaces where all people can bring the full scope of their talents and values to bear in collaboration, create environments of collective stewardship, and directly address histories of structural violence in order to chart a collective future.