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Erica D'Eramo 0:00
Erica, hello and welcome to the Two Piers Podcast. I'm your host, Erica D'Eramo, and today we have guest James Felton Keith joining us. James is the chairperson of the International ISO-30415:DISM, standard for DEI, and he's the CEO of inclusion score companies. He's here to chat with us about why insurance companies care about the DEI pushback.
James, thanks for joining us today.
James Felton Keith 0:41
That was a mouthful. Just when I hear people go, ISO-30415:DISM, I immediately feel bad for them, and then watching just it, yeah, like, my my knee jerk. Like, empathy. Just, I want to jump in and, like, help, like, say it for you, or, like, hold you while you do it. Or
Erica D'Eramo 1:01
I appreciate that
James Felton Keith 1:02
so weird and long, but anyway, yeah, thanks for having
Erica D'Eramo 1:07
Yeah, yeah, rest assured that myself and probably many of our listeners have are no strangers to ISO and various long winded standards, so you're in good company. So yeah. So tell us a little bit about yourself and the work you do. What brought you to this work?
James Felton Keith 1:27
Oh, yeah. I mean, I think it was a series of things coming together. Maybe this is kind of life's work falling in my lap, and I just feel like, well, I don't have anything else to do, but if I go back to the beginning of my career, I was a mechanical engineer who quickly turned process engineer, and in the early and mid 2000s that meant applying process Engineering, IT Service Management, corporate ethnography, corporate change management, etc. And so my career has always been kind of rooted in leveraging standards to deploy processes, right whether we're talking about project management, Lean Six Sigma, your crowd will get what I'm saying. But then life moved on and outside of working in tech. And most of my clients in tech, like I worked at Hewlett Packard and a bunch of places like it, all of our clients were always insurance companies, so we were always dropping a bunch of tech insurance and banking. You know how it goes to help them do what they do better. In the 2010s though, I got very political, my life changed, and I worked for a bunch of politicians. Ran for Congress here in Harlem. I live in Harlem. I ran for Congress in New York, 13th District. It feels like eons ago. And in that time, kind of micro identifying myself, you know, being the black guy, the queer guy, the suit guy, also the insurance guy, I was invited to a lot of these round tables and think tanks about a new standard that we were trying to build for diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. And, you know the standard. It started as an effort at the Society for Human Resources Management, if you're familiar, they got out of the standards right in business, which I thought was odd, because it could be great for them, given the crowd that they have, and a bunch of folks who've been doing this work for a lot longer than me say, about 30 or 40 years. A guy named effin is Henderson was kind of our leader at moving the the caucus of deciding what a chief diversity officer would be, from the Society for Human Resources Management to the International Organization for standards evidence, used to be Chief Diversity Officer at Weyerhaeuser, you know, out on the West Coast, again, about 30 years my senior, and this other woman who created employment law around 1980 out of Title Seven of the Civil Rights Act, named Don Bennett Alexander, who was a employment law professor at the University of Georgia, which, if people are not familiar, is kind of like the insurance school. I didn't know that until I started teaching there a few years ago. And basically these two came together. And evidence was a standards guy, Don was a basically who would sue you, and created this moderate climate where everyone's saying, I am in grieved. You pulled my hair. You called me the dirty word, pay me now, right? So she kind of came to this space, and he came to this space, and that was maybe 12 or so years ago, maybe more than that. Now, I'm bad with math. Post pandemic, I still think we're living in 2020 like January, February, 2020 which was right before. Yeah, I got sick. I don't know when everybody else got hit with it, but, um, yeah, from 2011 to say 2021 there was a crew of us kind of loosely connected, you know, like Dawn was there, for instance, in the beginning, and they had lost track of what we were doing. And then was flabbergasted when we were ready to publish a standard in 2021 she said, I thought this was something that we gave up on in 2015 anyway, I was in and out of it being the politician and being the the global human rights guy. I remember being informed that the standard was moving forward at World Pride in Copenhagen in Denmark. That was, you know, a few, yeah, anyway, years ago, and I was kind of approached back to the beginning of my career to tie it all in as the engineer, to say, Hey, do you think you can look at what they're doing and see if it works like for the people who know this, ISO 27,001 which is a cyber standard, or ISO 14,001 which is the environmental standard, or ISO 20,000 which is the IT Standard, which, if you put all those together and you wanted to audit the hell out of the world, would be how you would rigorously, at least in my opinion, audit for ESG, environmental, social governance, for anyone not familiar. And so I kind of got involved, from that standpoint, to look at the workflow management of it. I'm using a bit of jargon here, but, and at this point, I was, you know, my political aspirations were fully destroyed because I, you know, it was like, the world is over. My mother's maybe dying. I quit everything. I'm not running for office anymore. And I was like, What am I going to do next? And we started building the certifying body around the standard, once we knew that we were close to publishing it, and that's really what got me here we needed to do. I still feel like an engineer in my core. I kind of use that word as an identity, but I think really kind of an organizer. So I was organizing the engineers who cared to say, Can we put together a process to vet people that think they know how to audit in this standard, think they know how to define what dei are in order to go forward? And that's been my work kind of organizing the DEI professionals, those that would like to professionalize it. And the reason that we do that is because we can deploy the audits, which are based on something called capability, maturity, Model Integration. Sorry, to be overly detailed about that, we can deploy that maturity score to an insurance carrier, who are the people or the companies that pay the bill. When you say someone called me, whatever the forbidden terms are, and there's a pattern of them calling me out of my name and looking over me for promotions. Insurance pays the bill when we when we disagree in corporate world. And so the insurance industry really wanted this standard so that it had a uniform way to look at people management risks across the board. So we did is we built a certifying body and a standard to better communicate to Lloyds of London to Chubb to Zurich to AIG, what the hell we even meant about dei so that they could understand if we were improperly or properly selling professional liability insurance to companies full of douche bags. That was a mouthful. So, yeah, that's how we got here.
Erica D'Eramo 8:47
So I mean, it's, I think one of the reasons I was so interested to chat with you, well, a I love talking to another mechanical engineer. I I agree. I joke all the time like, you can take the gal out of engineering. You'll never take the engineer out of me. Because, I mean, even little things about, like, am I going to use convection am I going to use steam heat? Like, I'm always thinking about heat transfer rates and what I mean, it's latent heat, of, yeah, transformation. Like it's my brain is broken forever. But I love the lens through insurance, because ironically, I mean, insurance is really sort of just a bellwether for so many other things, like, if you really want to know the truth, the de politicized truth about climate change or climate impacts, look at the bets that insurance companies are making, because that is their survival, to understand the probabilities and the risks through a clear eyed view. So when we talk about like dei or dei B people have, like, lost sight of the forest for the trees, and get got caught up in like, specific reactions to specific words, when really what we're talking about is, like, base stakes, leadership, access to talent. And that's why, like, it makes total sense to me that engineers are interested in. This like, I think that what drives my interest in deib is the same that drives my interest in engineering and, yeah, efficiency, right? It's like understanding systems. Yeah, okay, that was my thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
James Felton Keith 10:15
Efficiency matters. There's an ache factor there. People don't like us. You know, me or you, and when we go down that rabbit hole, but you know, as someone who has not always had all the access I would like, or all the sense of belonging I would like, I'm just trying to think, as an engineer, can I design a better system? Right? Because maybe this isn't working by design, all right, maybe we can amend it. Maybe we can do a little change management going forward, but I just have to say, as a sidebar, I'm just like you. I think about heat transfer and fluid mechanics all the time, and it's weird. I think we get hazed into this as students. And you know, when I came to school, engineering was my fallback. I thought, you know, I just talk all day, which is essentially what I do now, but you learn these skills, and you see them playing out throughout your life, and so you just can't move away from it. But, um, but no, you're absolutely right in that insurance is the best economic indicator for what's actually happening from a people management standpoint. You know, when I hear people pushing out stats around what chief diversity officers are saying, or what company backed away from Dei, I just look at the claims. And I look at the 7 million, billion, excuse me, dollar market of employment practice liability. I look at its growth rate to see our risk in people growing and yeah, the growth rate is about 15 to 25% a year. Also look at something like there's another type of insurance line called directors and officers. That's what usually gets triggered when you're suing, you know, your superiors, and that it also has about a 10 to 25% growth rate, and so that just tells me that risks are still high. And sometimes those numbers change, you know, a little bit here and there. But when we get into climates like we are right now, where the federal government and its police bodies like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission may not be reporting the entire picture, all you have to do is look at the insurance numbers to say, are lawyers trying to sue companies at the same rate or a higher rate than they were previously? And I can tell you the National Employment Lawyers Association at any la are starting to target employment law like how we used to see personal injury law in the 90s, they're on billboards. I swear someone stole a zinger from me that I did in Vegas one time I gave this talk, and I said, Never leave your employer without a lawyer. And I saw that on a billboard here in New York, and I wanted to call someone like, Hey, me. Like my line. You know, I'm thinking maybe we need to start making mixtapes about some of this stuff. But, yeah, insurance is concerned because it is the backdrop for the whole economy. We just don't usually talk about it that way. So, you know, we're usually in the shadows, rightfully so. People hate insurance. I mean, I think there are some reasons. But, you know, I think, I think about the first time I got no fault insurance, when I was 16, I had a, you know, a 1986 Ford Tempo. And I didn't like that. I had to buy I had to ask my parents, why do I have this insurance? So I immediately hated the industry. I don't know who these people are. I don't know why they take my money. They're the devil. I think we all feel like that, until we have a crisis, right? And so, yeah, insurance doesn't do a good enough job of communicating its virtues, even though it definitely has its pitfalls, and people are icked out about the industry. But yeah, it is directly tied to people risk management, and right now, people are more available to sue, whether it is well advised or ill advised, than they were previously. And that is going to increase the price of doing business. Forget the insurance piece. It is increasing the price of doing business in general.
Erica D'Eramo 14:19
It's a bigger problem, yeah, yeah. I mean, fundamentally, it's risk pooling, right? Like, we always want this going, like to MBA 101, stuff, you want to diversify risk, right? Like you want a diversified portfolio, you want to balance out your risk. And so the broader you can set that pool, the more risk resilient you will be, right? And so like, when we when three people go in on buying a property together, or whatever, like, we're all doing this in other ways in our lives, but insurance is essentially risk. Bullying. I think, personally, like, my my challenge, especially when it comes to, like, health insurance, is, like, the for profit element, if we're just risk pulling like, it does get tricky when there's a a shareholder, shareholder need in play. But tell me, like, right now, with all of the changes, um, what? Like, what's the state of play right now. What are you seeing that is interesting to you?
James Felton Keith 15:25
We've so what we see in the media is posturing, even the companies, the 1415, or so companies, and again, 1450 companies that are making a hoopla. And to put in perspective, just for the Americans, there are 5.2 million companies that pay a decent amount of taxes. There are a bunch of other companies. You know, someone started a startup, whatever. Someone's a consultant at Starbucks on their Mac. But 5.2 million companies, 15 are like we're backing away from di maybe if we look at the numbers a slightly different way, we can say six maximum percent of the market has stepped back. That's like a nothing. But when we really look at the tactics, they're just doing stuff like changing messaging. Because if you're a company and you operate in the modern world, you know that there aren't enough men to do the work, and so, so that's what we're seeing. The market is no substantial changes. And even when we look at, I think again, the insurance industry is also a good industry to look at as a reflection of every other industry, because every other industry has to have insurance. I haven't seen a single chief diversity officer or person in that staff ilk change roles or mission. I just I got paid to do two talks this month from black employee resource groups at huge firms. Now I'll do another one on Friday, and we'll, you know, we'll do one next month is women's month, and so all the women are going to come do their thing. My point is, we haven't seen a big change in that regard, but what we have seen is an uptick in grievances file by straight, white cisgender men saying that they have been either discriminated or retaliated against. And I do want to make this clear per Title Seven of the Civil Rights Act, you can't discriminate. You can discriminate against white guys. Kanye West did it pretty elaborately and ridiculously uh, recently, and we saw what happened to him with with Adidas. I think it's necessary to note that. And so what the other thing that we see in the market, in the risk management market, is insurance carriers and brokers starting to tell their clients again, which are every type of company we can think of, that they need to have a process to validate why they're doing what they're doing. And one of the best recent examples of this is a guy sued Starbucks for reverse discrimination. I hate the word reverse discrimination because it reminds me of the word irregardless, which is not a word. It's redundant. You could just say regardless, and again, like I just established, you can discriminate against white guys. Now, Starbucks lost, and they paid this guy out $25 million and that was an insurance claim, but he was sued. He sued them because he thought that they were discriminated against him and hiring Asian women, and I believe it was Colorado. Now, if Starbucks were able to show via the ISO 30415, standard, a workflow that validates via feedback mechanisms, which is a terminology using the standard that they have a reason to go after certain types of women, those feedback mechanisms may manifest in something like an employee resource group or business resource group or an affinity group saying, hey, Asian women exist in Denver, and you go, you know what? We want to integrate some of them in our stores, in our culture. So we make sure we're engaging them because they exist and we see them, then their lawyers would have been able to get out of that suit for maybe about 25k in legal fees, because, you know, lawyers are expensive, but not 25 million, which is what they parted ways with. And so we see that send ripple effects throughout the market, where now insurance carriers are asking, and this will, I think, be particularly interesting the insured companies and the brokers, did you know that there was a risk mitigation path, because there's something else, another type of insurance called errors and omissions. We call it DNO and errors and omissions if a broker, for instance, is a broker that wrote the DNO, the Direct. Was an officer's policy for Starbucks, and they paid out because they were apparently discriminated against this guy. If the broker knew that there was a process he or she or they could use, then they might also be liable for not sharing the information adequately. So just by doing this podcast, and if some broker hears it in Colorado or Ohio or wherever I'm sitting in New York, they're implicated. The reason I go around broker to broker is to let them know if you know about this, because I just told it to you, and it was advertised on the internet, and we got a bunch of blue checks that validate it. You act like you didn't know about this, you're potentially at risk, because Starbucks could have gone, you know, our broker didn't give us a good solution here, and so they put it right back on the on the market. So being aware that a person or population exists, failing to acknowledge it adequately and ingested into the market of both consumers and employees, is it is a dangerous thing, not only for modern capitalism and how we get along, but it is a designed and fail safe per the Insurance industry, basically to ignore that people exist is a big financial fine, aside from whether it's actually illegal or not, because it's an ethics issue with how we give licenses to the broker community.
Erica D'Eramo 21:35
So for folks, so for folks who don't deal with insurance regularly, can you give us like a little rundown of what some of these terms mean. I mean, I think a lot of people think that they understand the role of a broker or the role of an underwriter, but maybe just like a little well synopsis, well,
James Felton Keith 21:52
I think your broker is your first line of this of defense, right? They're supposed to be your knowledgeable guide around what product you're buying, what sort of financial product you're buying, and that's why there's that errors and omissions risk if they don't properly advise you on you're buying this kind of policy, it will protect you for XYZ, versus maybe you want an extra policy on top of that policy that helps you with whatever's past XY and Z. So brokers own the relationship. They're regulated in. They're the only ones who get to sell anything, and they're really the friend or peer of probably your company's CFO or chief compliance officer, or just that team, your risk manager. The problem is those people rarely communicate with your HR, your D&I, your supplier, diversity people, those people who work in HR, supper diversity, or anyone under those rungs, they normally don't know what the company is paying out, because you just told some woman, if she did such a good job, that if she was a man, you would have gave her 50% raise, which is illegal, right? So those are the brokers. They are required to know better. The problem is, there's so many brokers that usually you know they don't know better. They're everywhere. Everybody's a broker. So that's them, the underwriter, separate role inside of an insurance carrier, which is a type of company. So like Zurich, is an insurance carrier, but AON is a broker. Chubb is a big insurance carrier, but Willis Towers Watson, which owns what I still call the Sears Tower, because I'm older in Chicago, they're a broker. Willis is a broker. Chubb is a carrier. So they underwrite things. The underwriter at the company is the person who will write the contract. They make the financial transaction real, and they will also vet if you Company X, let's say you're a mid sized manufacturer in Indiana, if you're viable to sell what we call the paper too. Again, the paper is what the underwriter literally writes on to say, you manufacture x if you trigger a claim, are entitled to this sort of payout. If you pay us monthly, quarterly, annually, X amount of premium, right? So the carriers are usually the bigger, older companies, and the brokers are the ones selling the paper that they would normally sell. I think that's the easiest way to differentiate them.
Erica D'Eramo 24:35
So the brokers are the ones that are like managing transact, like making the transactions happening, making those connections happening. And the underwriters are the ones that I mean underwriting in general. We've is we've taken as kind of a general term, but they're the ones that are essentially holding the financial risk and back, putting the putting the assets behind. Yeah, they're the bank. Yeah. Hey, yes, the bank, right? Yeah, the asset holder, yeah.
James Felton Keith 25:02
The underwriters are the bank. The brokers are the salespeople. So the brokers are the ones calling you. They're going to come by the office, they're going to explain what the bank has made, created for you, right? And one thing I'll add to that is, I know a lot of people think about insurance as a portion of the financial industry. But it's actually the other way around, without risk capital, without those initial agreements that we set, let's say way, way back when, when everyone was wearing sandals, uh, maybe turbans, and it was Sandy everywhere because we hadn't built any infrastructure, no roads, um, insurance started to exist when, when leaders made decisions not to kill each other. That was insurance. And so on top of risk capital, we built the financial markets, the debt markets, so bonds, the currency markets, you name it, the capital markets. Those are all built on top of the sea of insurance. It's just insurance is more well regulated than other industries, and so you don't see companies as big as some of the banks that we normally talk about in the news, like JP, Morgan, B of A, you name it. We did see AIG during the financial crisis, for anyone who remembers, was one of the big, too big to fails, right? But by and large, their insurance companies, everywhere they cover regions, they specialize in things. And it's just a pretty old, conservative industry. I like to call it the oldest industry. I know what everyone thinks the oldest industry is but this industry is older than that one. Because in order for the thing that we say they do in the oldest industry to even happen, two old men, again, probably in sandals, had to allow it to happen. And that agreement, that piece, was insurance. I'm not saying insurance are pimps. I'm just saying it's an older industry. We don't need to jumble down that rabbit hole. But anyway,
Erica D'Eramo 27:10
So the the element, I mean, this is where I think to bring it back to the piece around the bellwether, you know, being able to understand what true risk, you know, what the true understanding of risks are outside of cultural and political influences. You know, the fires in California. You know, hearing from some folks in the insurance industry about like, and I don't fully understand this, but how, essentially, it's taking such a toll on insurers that the insurers are now having to tap into their insurance that's covering the insurers, and it's like this whole underlying structure that really kind of like placing bets, in a way, and the people who are playing, not, I don't mean like in a gaming way, but ultimately, you're trying to understand your probabilities and your risks and understand as much as you can about the outcomes, and then invest accordingly, like put your resources accordingly,
James Felton Keith 28:17
One way, I'll explain it. So for anyone not familiar, insurers, their insurers are an older, bigger industry called reinsurance. Yeah, so, right. So you have reinsurers. Most of them are headquartered in Bermuda. So if anyone just hangs out in the Bermuda, whoever you meet at a bar, probably works in reinsurance. But reinsurance is just like insuring the insurance, and sometimes insurers, the littler guy, the regular carriers, the regular underwriters, can take on too much risk in a given area, like with the wildfires in LA or even though the flooding in Florida, you know, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to get homeowners insurance in Florida. I think healthcare is another interesting space. Before we dig into that, I would differentiate life from property and casualty insurance first, health and health also, even though health is kind of a form of, you know, property and casualty, but it is tied to life a bit. And then in property and casualty, you have personal stuff, like houses, and then you have commercial stuff. When we talk about Dei, I'm specifically talking about commercial insurance. I'm talking about commercial PNC, or property and casualty, because of how people play onto the property, etc, of institutions. But yes, if we get into again how people feel about how insurance works, and the ick factor of the fact that we saw on the news, a lot of insurers pulled out of California and Florida, and they will continue to because of ESG things. Things. You know it's it is really a proxy of not having enough participants in those risk pools that you mentioned earlier. Now, this is not new. It's happened over and over again. I actually got to the work that we do now, before I ran for office, I ran a cyber insurance company, and I remember when the cyber standard was amended and came back out in like 2013 the way I knew we could build an insurance company on top of this dei standard is because we had done it once in the early 2010s with cyber what was happening is the world was normal in the 2000s and then everyone started getting hacked in the 2010s and what they wouldn't do is get an audit, which the underwriters and the insurance carriers wanted. Right and more laws were published, like Europe's General Data Protection Regulation, New York came out with its cyber reg. So New York Department of Financial Services basically said, if you are tied to a New York bank, I don't care whether you're a manufacturer in Idaho, if you deal with New York mailing bank, you have to get an audit, or you're in violation of New York Department of Financial Services. And so given that, I can't explain how important New York is, because it controls the banking sector to the entire world, because we can audit anyone. And basically all the banking rules are set here via our Superintendent of Financial Services and the insurance commissioner, which works under her. So all that said, we saw companies or insurance carriers pull out of insurance companies that wanted to pay ransomware in 2013, 1415, until they built infrastructure to prevent against that. And I tie this right into Dei. More than 90% of cyber risk or errors that we see in the market are human error, whether they're deliberate or just people making mistakes, right? And so there's a lot of training that goes into how we educate humans to take care of our digital infrastructure. And to be clear, in the modern day, all governance, if you're thinking about E, S and G, is cyber or it has a digital component. We only govern things through engineering processes that we now digitize. So that said, the worst type of employee that you want taking care of your cyber assets is somebody who didn't come here to work today, that lady who's pissed off, who already hates you. She's gonna let the virus come in. She's gonna do it. She's not here to play, or she's only here to play. Well, she's only here for her check. We know these people, folks, you know they whether they work at, you know, the advertising or the manufacturer of the banking company around you, whether they work at the city, at the municipal or the state government, we know these people who are having a bad day because their boss told them, you know, you're so good, if you were a guy, we would have gave you a 50% raise or did something else crash.
Erica D'Eramo 33:09
I mean, this is where it's like, we could talk about, like DEI. Ultimately, what we want is people who are engaged, who are motivated, who feel bought into the mission. Who feel like this is why like belonging. It's like motivation 101, right? Self determination theory we've known about forever. It's this is, you know, autonomy, something that you're good at and that you can you have a little challenge, and then belonging, connectedness, and so we can call it a bunch of different things, but ultimately, having people who are, who are there and have opportunities, regardless of their demographics, regardless of the color of their skin, their gender, who are, who get to be autonomous, have some autonomy and have a sense of connectedness and belonging they are that's good business is ethically good. It's like, gives us all we can sleep at night knowing that we're creating a good workplace all the things it's like good business. Right?
James Felton Keith 34:12
Back to your word you're worthy. People. It goes back to being efficient and effective, if qualitative measure like effectiveness. And people go, Yeah, I just thought this is effective, but per the efficiency rating, it reduces those premiums, which is a number, it reduces the spin that we have to make on ad hoc programs that remedy the problem that we created for ourselves, which is a radical inefficiency. If, if I tally the cost of and I love your language here, the lack of belonging. It is this how anyone should calculate the cost of a lack of dei and be at their firm. It's the cost of your risk premiums, plus the cost of those ad hoc programs that aren't working for you, plus the cost of at least one risk manager, let's call her HR, chasing down that crazy thing that happened. Yeah, and it reminds me of I heard one of my friends these leads, dei at at Krispy Kreme. Same happens to be Christopher, and he was like, what we're really doing here, solving for belonging. And so even if you do what you would, what other people might consider a little job, you sell donuts, you you work at the cash register. You know, having leadership that has a soft skill set to tell you what we're really there to do, which is, we're delivering happiness in a donut to these people. We'd love for you also to be able to come to work happy today. What do you need to do that we can't solve all your problems, but we want you to know we really care. We don't want you to leave us open any cyber risk or anything else. We don't want you to be deliberately rude to people, because sometimes I meet folks and go, Well, I'm not in a sexy role like, you know, Erica, or whatever it's like, Whatever you do, if the leadership tells you it serves this broader purpose, we solve a very human problem here. Even if you know, you work for exomo like we, we turn the lights on for you. Everyone can tell a story, you know, and so and so we should, because what we're really trying to do is solve for belonging. And when I meet people and we, we oversee a and we still have it a big government grant from the National Science Foundation to push the standard into STEM society. So like, think the American Society for civil engineers, mechanical engineers. Shout out to the civil engineers. I'm I stole one of their cups from DC. I'm drinking from it right now. Greater as we work with these folks, right? They're trying to create excellence in whatever their field is by motivating people to be there, and so they have an incentive to try to solve for belonging. But as some colleagues in this one effort come to me in confidence and say, I'm not sure we can actually pull off what we're saying we want to, because people just sometimes they just generally don't like each other. And I was like, Look, I'm not asking everybody to like everybody when they come away, but I am asking, and I know that this is possible, because I do it every day. I wake up, I'm really comfortable in my own room, in my own home. I put on a shirt, I brush my teeth, I try to be overtly repulsive around folks, and I code switch it at work. It's like all we're really asking some people to do who are more offensive at work is to come to work and coach which just a little bit more, be a little bit more on that piece and cues. Maybe don't slap somebody on their behind and go that was actually a compliment, because it's offensive some guys, and it's usually guys, I just have to be honest, are a little too comfortable at work, and it creates these cultural rifts. I go to work every day, and I try to deliberately monitor how I engage everybody, and that's really all we're all we're asking for. It's not It's not rocket science, and it is designable in a mechanical process, for sure.
Erica D'Eramo 37:59
Yeah. I mean that belonging becomes very, very easy if you have an entirely homogenous group and yet, like a we know homogen homogeneity is not resilient for gazillion reasons. You wouldn't want it in your stock portfolio. You wouldn't want it in your agricultural layout. But, yeah, having that resilience of different minds, different skill sets, different backgrounds, Representative workforces that look like the community you're serving, that look like the community you're drawing from, like that does require a little bit more effort to create that belonging around mission or around human like being humans together. So yeah, I like the fact that, like, a lot of us have had to learn how to adapt and code switch, and all we're asking is for some of us to, like, maybe have to do a little bit less of it, and others to learn a little bit more of what that feels like.
James Felton Keith 38:54
Yeah, it's kind of simple stuff, but leadership is necessary to say this is how we're going to do it, and we're going to create feedback mechanisms per the standard so that people can tell us whether it's anonymous or outright when they think they've encountered some of these situations, so we can look at potential remedies, and that's risk mitigation. That's what Lloyds of London wants to engage now. Do you have a process to when the aggrieved come to you to go, we're going to try to dissipate this, or are we just going to court? Because if we're going to court, fine, I'm just going to double the premiums pay us double.
Erica D'Eramo 39:30
It speaks to like leading I get on the case around leading and lagging indicators so much. And I think where we really lost the plot was like solely looking at lagging indicators and lacking curiosity to go upstream and look at the leading indicators. So I love to hear that there's some process around it. So tell us where folks can find your stuff and and where to follow you what you're doing.
James Felton Keith 39:53
I'm on all the Yeah, the normal stuff. I just James and Felton and Keith. I've way too many first. Things. And people can call me any of those, but the companies is just at inclusion score.org or inclusion score, dot.ai, we have an automated tool that we that's what we give to the insurance companies to deploy on their insurance if they want to look up the standard and really read and understand the standard, I would just Google ISO, 30415, or if you go to the it's gonna be a long winded
Erica D'Eramo 40:24
We're gonna put it in the we're gonna put it in the show notes.
James Felton Keith 40:28
Just inclusion score. If you look up inclusion score, you'll see all the stuff. We'll send you to a million different places. But I would say, get familiar with the standard. If people ask you, what does dei mean? Don't be poetic. If you're not a poet, some people are poets, but we still don't want you to be poetic. Just say the standard, because it means all the things and really d, e, i and b are they're more philosophical reaches. Again, we'd love to solve for belonging. What we fail to do when we talk about these big philosophical concepts is established that what we're really trying to do is implement a business process for active engagement and workforce resilience. That's all we want. We want to know you try to see if we can make the workforce resilient. It's not all the I know people go diversity is this, and equity is when you can jump over the moon, but you're holding somebody in your backpack. It's all the it's whatever, not those things. So learn the standard, or at least reference the standard. Plenty of people use standards in other industries every day, and they don't know what the hell is in the actual standard. It's fine. You don't need to know it. That's our job. But I would look it up just so that folks know it exists, and this is how the insurance carriers of the world are vetting you.
Erica D'Eramo 41:47
Yeah, cool. Well, thanks for shining a light onto this area that I don't think I've ever had somebody come on the podcast and talk about insurance, and definitely not insurance as it relates to larger concepts around like workforce engagement and whatnot. So thank you for joining us and sharing some of your experiences and insights, and it's been great having you on.
James Felton Keith 42:10
Thank you. Thanks so much. Yeah, great.
Erica D'Eramo 42:13
And for folks who want to explore a bit more, you can find the links to these resources in the show notes, and we'll also link to a really interesting article about illegal versus legal DEI, so we'll share that as well, and you can find a summary of this podcast episode and the transcript on our website, twopierceconsulting.com and we'll see you next episode. Thanks for joining you.
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DEIB as Risk Management: Why Insurance Is the Canary in the Coal Mine
With James Felton Keith on the Two Piers Podcast
When we talk about Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB), we often focus on values, culture, or leadership. But what if DEIB is also a critical form of risk management—especially in insurance?
In this episode of the Two Piers Podcast, host Erica D’Eramo is joined by James Felton Keith, Chairperson of the International ISO-30415:DISM standard for DEI and CEO of Inclusion Score Companies. Together, they dig into the intersection of DEIB and insurance, explore the development of international standards, and unpack what organizations need to know to mitigate people management risks.
Meet James Felton Keith: Engineer, Technologist, Politician, Standard-Bearer
James Felton Keith is not your typical guest. With a background that spans mechanical engineering, tech, and politics—including a run for Congress in Harlem—Keith brings a multifaceted view to DEIB. As the lead architect behind the ISO-30415:DISM standard, he approaches inclusion with the precision of an engineer and the pragmatism of a policymaker.
And yes, he’s fully aware that ISO-30415:DISM is a bit of a mouthful.
From Congress to Compliance: The Origins of a Global DEIB Standard
Keith’s path to DEIB leadership started during his political career, when he joined roundtables focused on the future of inclusive workplaces. Those conversations grew into a working group tasked with formalizing a DEIB standard—one that would eventually gain international traction through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Collaborating with pioneers like Effin Is Henderson and Don Bennett Alexander, the team designed a framework that would do for DEIB what ISO 27001 did for cybersecurity and ISO 14001 did for environmental management: create a consistent, auditable standard.
The Missing Piece in Risk Management: People
According to Keith, too many organizations still treat DEIB as an HR issue—detached from business strategy and risk. But he argues that DEIB is central to how companies manage their most unpredictable asset: people.
The rise in Employment Practices Liability Insurance (EPLI) and Directors & Officers (D&O) claims is a warning sign. These insurance trends signal that unresolved DEIB issues are driving real financial risk.
Insurance companies are paying attention. Are you?
The Insurance Industry: A Bellwether for DEIB Gaps
As Erica and James explore, insurance doesn’t just react to risk—it predicts it. The growth of coverage areas like EPLI points to increasing exposure around workplace grievances, discrimination, and leadership accountability.
In other words: if your DEIB efforts aren’t backed by process, feedback loops, and measurable outcomes, your organization is vulnerable—not just reputationally, but legally and financially.
Brokers, Underwriters, and the Business Case for Belonging
To understand why DEIB matters in insurance, you have to understand how insurance works. James breaks down the roles:
Brokers act as the relationship builders, facilitating transactions and managing client needs.
Underwriters assess risk and determine whether a company is insurable—and at what cost.
If your people management practices aren’t robust, underwriters take notice. That means higher premiums or denied coverage. The DEIB standard gives insurers a consistent framework to assess your organizational health—and for companies, it offers a way to proactively manage risk.
What Companies Get Wrong (and How to Fix It)
One recurring theme in this episode: organizations often overlook the feedback systems needed to sustain inclusion. Whether it’s failing to track grievances, or responding inconsistently to employee concerns, many companies are reactive rather than strategic.
Keith points to cases like the Starbucks “reverse discrimination” lawsuit to illustrate how even well-meaning programs can backfire without structure and documentation. The ISO-30415:DISM standard helps companies implement a proactive, verifiable system to minimize these risks.
Why Leadership (Still) Makes or Breaks DEIB
No standard can replace the role of leadership in building inclusive cultures. James emphasizes that executives must lead the charge—not just in messaging, but in action:
Establish clear feedback loops.
Create policies that evolve with workforce needs.
Foster a sense of belonging that improves retention and engagement.
Belonging isn’t a warm-and-fuzzy extra—it’s a business imperative.
Learn More and Take Action
To close out the episode, Erica thanks James for pulling back the curtain on the often-overlooked connections between DEIB and insurance. If you're a leader, broker, underwriter, or policymaker looking to strengthen your DEIB efforts, this conversation offers a practical roadmap.
You can learn more about the DEIB standard and Keith’s work through Inclusion Score and the links provided in the show notes.
Because DEIB isn’t just about checking a box—it’s about managing risk, empowering your workforce, and building resilient organizations for the long haul.