The Souls of Organizations: Learning, Grief, and Why Higher Education Boards Change Without Changing

How do governing boards make decisions about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in contentious times, and why does organizational learning at the governance level so often stall before producing lasting change? Drawing on a multi-year participatory action research collaboration with a governing board, this talk traces how board members moved through cycles of intuiting, interpreting, and integrating as they developed a decision-making rubric for DEI, yet never institutionalized it. The empirical case reveals a pattern this talk names as “changing without changing”: boards can build tools, develop shared language, and demonstrate genuine learning while avoiding the deeper losses and possibilities that institutional transformation demands. Taking cues from the Du Boisian tradition of rendering visible the interiority that dominant frameworks suppress, the talk explores what it might mean to take seriously the existential dimensions of institutional life that governance routinely flattens into strategic plans and performance metrics. When boards cannot name or grieve what is ending, learning may circulate without landing. The talk opens a conversation about whether grief work belongs not at the margins of governance but at its foundation, and whether attending to what organizations are losing is a precondition for organizational learning that actually transforms.