It’s the question of the age. If DEI is a known “bad,” how do we eliminate it?

DEI, of course, stands for “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” It’s the flagship acronym in a trio of awful things our world suffers from.

ESG and CRT are the other two.

Happily - and necessarily for him - Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, famously reversed his position on Environmental, Social, and Governance investing. Critical Race Theory has largely been dismissed as nonsense, and rightly so.

As I pondered getting rid of DEI, I was reminded of a speed reading course I took as a broker. I hated reading our dull research, and I thought I could “absorb” it faster by speed reading.

A few years later, Tim Ferriss published an article on speed reading. Many of his readers were skeptical. Though I rarely write comments, I thought I’d chime in.

I want to share it with you today.

Talking With Tim

Here’s what I wrote, with minor adjustments:

Let me add something I learned when I took my first speed reading course. I did it as an institutional broker for a large investment bank in London. I hated reading the (useless) research our economists were sending out, so I wanted to cut my time getting the “house view.”

My instructor shared this with us:

He was teaching a class in Oxford. His first student came into the room and sat very near him. Seinfeld would have called him a close talker. The kid was staring at the teacher’s lips, and the teacher, quite unsettled by this, moved away as subtly as he could. The student noticed this and wrote on paper, “I’m sorry, but I’m deaf. I need to read your lips to understand you.” The teacher now realized why his student was on top of him and was calm.

As the tuition began, the first speed reading assessment came in. On average, most people read about 250 words per minute, or about as fast as we talk, as we sound the words in our head as we read. This kid came in at 1,500 words per minute. The instructor was astounded. Now, after trying and improving a few times, most people can get over 1,000 words – I hit over 1,100 per minute – but it takes a couple of tries. This kid was doing 1,500 per minute every time, without the tuition.

The instructor told the rest of the “normal” people in the room to try to stop reading the words, just look at them, and trust their brains to do the rest.

The deaf student, reading his lips, starts furiously writing on paper, “Do you mean to tell me that people who can hear sound out the words in their heads when they’re reading?”

The instructor nodded affirmatively.

The deaf student then wrote this:

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

If one is deaf (I now see), one can’t assign a sound to a word.

They just look at shapes. In fact, one of our exercises to get us accustomed to this was to turn the book upside down and to “read” the gobbledegook.

Much like Su Doku, which is NOT a numbers game but a game played with numbers, you need to get nine shapes in a square, row, or line without repeating. We’re using numbers to do this, but really, it’s about the shapes.

Stop saying the words in your head, and your speed will improve 3-4x…

See, the “disabled” have much to teach us.

The Solution

The solution is to hire the right people and discover their “superpowers.”

In this case, we found out that deaf people - or at least, people who are born deaf - can’t subvocalize when they read, making them high-speed readers.

When we see the “golden arches,” we immediately think, “McDonald’s.” If we put a bunch of corporate logos in a line, we’d know each one on sight. People who can’t subvocalize read text like we “read” logos. It happens instantaneously.

One way to discover employees' superpowers is to simply ask them. Formally, companies can ask them through open dialogue or skill assessments. It may be as simple as granting more autonomy to employees on their projects.

But most people instinctively know this stuff is best done informally. Companies can conduct more team-building activities or encourage skill-sharing through workshops.

Of course, this is much harder than separating resumés by race, color, or creed, and that’s why companies avoid it.

Wrap Up

DEI is easy. Figuring out your employees’ superpowers is much more challenging.

Companies would tick boxes instead of improving over time.

That’s why Boeing’s wings keep falling off, Deadspin media fired its staff and shut down, and Silvergate tarnished.

Finding the best in a company’s employees doesn’t require taking the hard road but taking one less traveled.