I notice misplaced apostrophes on billboards. I have opinions about the Oxford comma. So when I use em dashes — and I use a lot of them — it's on purpose. I was doing it before the robots got here, and I'll be doing it after.
I want to start with something that might surprise you coming from a Chief Diversity Officer: I think the most powerful inclusion model in America isn't in a corporate headquarters or a university. It's in the military.
Not because the military is perfect. It isn't. And I'll get to that. But because it has figured out something that most institutions are still fumbling with: when people are united by a mission bigger than themselves — when the stakes are real and shared and survival depends on everyone contributing — a lot of the things we fight about tend to fall away.
Service does that. Shared purpose does that. And I think it's one of the most underused ideas in the entire DEI conversation.
My husband served in the military. When he received orders to deploy to Afghanistan, we had just arrived in North Carolina. I didn't know a soul. With young kids and no community around me, I packed up and went back to Cleveland.
When we eventually returned to base, I found a military spouse support group. And I want to tell you — that group was more genuinely diverse than most DEI initiatives I've seen. Women from completely different backgrounds, different politics, different religions, different parts of the country. We had almost nothing in common on paper.
But we had the mission. Our spouses were deployed. Our kids needed us. We were in it together. And that shared stakes created something I've spent years trying to replicate in professional settings: real trust, across real difference, built fast.
Nobody ran a workshop. Nobody filled out a demographic survey. We just showed up for each other, because the mission required it.
That experience shaped everything I think about inclusion. Not as a program. As a practice. Built through shared purpose and showing up.
When Hell Week begins, there might be 250 SEAL candidates on the beach. By the end — after 130 hours of cold, wet, relentless physical and mental stress — about 35 remain.
Here's what's remarkable about who makes it: it's not always who you'd expect. Not the biggest. Not always the fastest. The ones who make it tend to be the ones who can keep contributing when everything in their body says quit — and who can do that while carrying a log with six other exhausted people at 3am in freezing water.
At that point, nobody cares what anyone looks like. Nobody is thinking about anyone's background or checking demographic boxes. The only question is: can you contribute? Can you carry your share? Can we count on you?
That's not a diversity program. That's something more fundamental — a structure where character is the only currency that matters.
When I posted about this on X, some people pushed back. And they weren't wrong to. The SEALs — and the military broadly — have real inclusion problems. Women were excluded from special operations for most of the institution's history. There have been documented issues with racial discrimination. Reports of hazing. Complaints that the culture, for all its talk of team, can be deeply hostile to anyone who doesn't fit a very narrow mold.
I'm not dismissing any of that. I lived military life. I know it's complicated.
But here's what I'd say to the critique: the existence of failures doesn't negate the lesson. Every institution has failed at inclusion — including the ones that talk about it the most. The question isn't whether the SEALs are a perfect model. They're not. The question is what the underlying structure gets right that most organizations get wrong.
And what it gets right is this: shared mission creates the conditions for belonging that no training program can manufacture.
When the military has fallen short on inclusion — and it has — it's often because it excluded people from the mission entirely, or built in barriers that had nothing to do with ability to contribute. That's not an argument against mission-based inclusion. It's an argument for actually applying it consistently, to everyone.
For the past several decades, most institutional DEI has operated like this: identify underrepresented groups, set targets, run training, create reporting mechanisms, measure inputs, celebrate numbers. And then wonder why the culture hasn't actually changed.
I've been in this field for twenty years. I've seen the trainings that leave people more divided than when they walked in. I've seen the bias reporting systems that teach people to perform the right language instead of actually connecting. I've watched organizations spend significant money on inclusion initiatives that made their most well-meaning employees quietly disengage.
The problem isn't the goal. The goal — creating organizations where every person can contribute fully, where difference makes the work better, where no one is excluded because of who they are — is right. The problem is the method.
You cannot mandate belonging. You cannot train your way to trust. Connection doesn't work that way. It never has.
This is why I keep coming back to service — not just military service, but the broader idea of being oriented toward something beyond yourself.
The communities I've seen do inclusion right — and they exist, in every sector — tend to share this quality. People aren't there primarily for themselves. They're there for the work, for the mission, for the people they're serving. And when that's genuinely true, the question of who belongs becomes a lot simpler: anyone who shows up and contributes belongs.
Think about what this would look like in organizations that actually applied it. Not "we need to hit our diversity numbers" but "we have a problem that requires every kind of mind in this room, and we're going to fail if we don't use all of them." Not "let's make sure everyone feels comfortable" but "let's make sure everyone's contribution is visible and valued."
When your survival depends on the person next to you, you stop caring about their demographics and start caring about their character. That's the shift we need.
I've spent twenty years in this field because I believe the underlying goal is worth fighting for. I believe in workplaces and communities where every person — regardless of background — can show up fully, contribute meaningfully, and be treated with dignity.
But I've also watched us pursue that goal in ways that don't work. Ways that create more division than connection. Ways that reduce people to categories instead of recognizing them as whole human beings with something to contribute.
The military spouse group in North Carolina didn't need a DEI program. It needed a shared mission and a willingness to show up. The SEALs — for all their real flaws and real failures — built something that corporate America keeps trying and failing to build in conference rooms and training sessions.
The lesson isn't complicated. It's just hard.
Unite people around something real. Make the mission bigger than the demographics. Let character speak louder than category. That's inclusion that actually works.
Attorney. Chief Diversity Officer. Military spouse. Author of Humanity at Work (#1 Amazon Bestseller). Member of Heterodox Academy and Advisory Board of Class Action. Speaker on civic discourse, viewpoint diversity, and the future of inclusion. Follow on X →
Views expressed are her own and do not represent any employer or institution.