I think it’s hard to act without objective measures of value. I’m a big fan of culture change but shy away from initiatives with the express purpose of changin

I think it’s hard to act without objective measures of value. I’m a big fan of culture change but shy away from initiatives with the express purpose of changing culture because it’s so hard to measure and attribute cause. Many years ago I held a hackathon, a first in my org, and people said they had fun and connections were made. I had many people ask me to be on committees and groups to improve culture and I didn’t have time but paid attention to what happened. They held parties and stuff, and weren’t harmful but didn’t seem to do much. The point of my event was to hire new programmers and the fun and cultural aspects were positive byproducts. I think you need to do specific things and then mix in culture change. Making culture the primary purpose makes it too hard to succeed. An example of a DEI activity that I really like is focusing scholarships on HBCUs as the purpose is to get really smart people into jobs, not just to increase percentages of workers from specific races.