Welcome to the Reconstructing Inclusion Podcast!
There’s a moment in writing a book where you realize you’re not just making an argument. You’re chasing something. It occurs as hidden at the time, but it is there. I had that experience while working on Reconstructing Inclusion.
I was building a careful, layered case for why DEI had been operating on the wrong level, with the wrong structure, too much passion, not enough reason. Khalil Gibran said about passion and reason in The Prophet, “For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.”
What I didn’t know yet was that the thing I was chasing had a name. A name that accounts for many things and yet can be condensed into one idea.
That name is mattering.
Not belonging. Not inclusion. Not psychological safety, as important as all of those are. Mattering. The everyday experience of knowing that your presence creates value for others, and that value is real to the organization and real to you.
In this episode, I trace the path backward through Reconstructing Inclusion, pointing to the places where mattering was already there, already being argued for, waiting to be named. And then I want to talk about why this is not just an intellectual exercise. Because in the moment we’re in now, with AI asymmetrically reshaping the nature of work, geopolitical complexity following people through the doors of organizations, and institutional trust at historic lows, mattering is not a nice-to-have.
It is a relational imperative. If you need to use the word, “strategic” in front of imperative, it would be appropriate. And, I propose that the relational aspect might be more critical than the strategic one. We all know you can’t have one without the other. . .Right?
Reconstructing Inclusion opens with a provocation. I meant it to be one. I wanted to put into words something I’d been feeling for years: that for all the good intention driving the so-called DEI field, the infrastructure to make the aspirations real simply wasn’t there.
“Despite this growing importance, there have been very few frameworks to advance the work beyond historical attachment to representation. Words like belonging and equity have been added to the aspirational outcomes, but the pathways to make this accessible, actionable, and sustainable have not matched the aspirations. With such enthusiasm, it is possible that this is our last and best chance to save DEI from death by a thousand platitudes.” [00:05:00]
Death by a thousand platitudes. I meant that.
My colleague Dr. Jonathan Ashong-Lamptey talks about that line from my text often—he knows how intentional it was and how urgent it felt to me. What I was describing was what I called ceremonial DEI (aka so-called DEI and Orthodox DEI): a practice that signals commitment but builds no fundamental infrastructure.
Organizations could tell you their DEI goals but not what behaviors were expected of their most influential senior leaders and influential actors. They had belonging in their value statements with no way to measure whether people actually felt like they mattered. The whole first section of the book is a deconstruction. Throughout the book, I take apart the concepts the field had come to lean on- belonging, diversity, meritocracy, equity, intersectionality- and ask whether they actually work in the ways we’re using them.
The answer in most cases: not as practiced.
Take meritocracy. The real equation isn’t capability plus effort equals merit. It’s capability plus effort plus network access plus proximity to decision-makers. And those last two variables are not equally distributed. They accumulate through informal relationships, golf outings, drinks after work, the conversations that happen when some people are in the room and others aren’t. That is a mattering argument, even though I didn’t call it that. People whose contributions are never made visible to those who could act on them are experiencing a mattering deficit. Not because of their capability, but because a system routes significance through channels most people can’t access.
Looking back now, I can see mattering threaded through the book long before I had language for it. Three moments stand out.
The first is in a chapter called “Overstanding Exclusion.” I opened it with a passage from William James, written in 1890. Even accounting for the language of his time, what he describes is the most dehumanizing experience he could imagine:
“No more fiendish punishment could be devised were such a thing physically possible than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof... a kind of rage and impotent despair would err long well up in us, from which the cruelest bodily tortures would be a relief, for these would make us feel that however bad might be our plight, we had not sunk to such a depth as to be unworthy of attention at all.” [00:11:00]
What I understand now is that this is a clinical description of what researchers call anti-mattering. Gordon Flett, one of the top researchers in the mattering construct, identifies anti-mattering not simply as the absence of mattering, but as the active experience of invisibility, insignificance, and dismissal.
Kipling Williams confirmed in a lab that social exclusion activates the same brain regions as physical pain. The brain isn’t metaphorically hurt by being rendered invisible. It is physiologically hurt. I was writing about ostracism. What I was really pointing at was anti-mattering.
The second moment is in the chapter on Social Capital. It contains the only place in the entire book where I use the word “mattering” directly. One sentence:
“While mattering to one’s in-group has value, it is also possible that in the accumulation of bonding social capital, people can become rooted in their own identities to such an extent that there is little perspective that makes its way in or out.” [00:14:00]
That one sentence is perhaps the thesis, at least one of the theses, of what I’m building toward next. Mattering to your in-group is not enough. It is not sufficient. For organizational mattering to be real, your significance has to travel beyond the close network, reach the people with institutional power, influence over your next opportunity, the capacity to act on what you bring.
The third moment is in the book’s opening description of Reverend John T. Olds, the pastor I grew up with. He used to say from the pulpit: let people know not only that you are thankful to them, but that you truly appreciate them. He meant say it and show it.
Zach Mercurio, one of the key mattering researchers I cite in my ongoing work, names “see and hear people” and “affirm their significance” as the first two behaviors of his framework. Reverend Olds was embodying that long before any academic framework gave it a name. I stored that story for a book I hadn’t written yet.
Mattering isn’t just the next evolution of inclusion work. It is the specific variable organizations are missing in this exact, urgent moment.
Consider what organizations are navigating all at the same time. Large language models are changing the nature of work faster than most workforce planning anticipated. And the question isn’t simply which tasks AI will handle, as real and necessary as that question is. The deeper one is harder:
“When AI handles an increasing share of execution, what gives people significance? What gives people meaning? What tells someone their presence in the organization creates something that would not exist without them?” [00:19:00]
Rosen Kellerman, and Seligman put it directly in Tomorrowmind: developing a sense of mattering is particularly necessary to weather the frequency of role changes that AI ascendancy will require. A psychologist and cognitive scientist are telling organizations that mattering is a strategic variable for the AI transition.
And then there’s what’s already showing up inside organizations. Zach Mercurio, citing 2025 HBR coverage on mattering at work, reported that 30% of employees feel invisible, 65% feel underappreciated, and 82% feel lonely. The great resignation, quiet quitting, the slow erosion of engagement scores despite constant investment: these are not pay problems or perk problems. They are mattering deficits.
In the book, I wrote about a data scientist, a brilliant friend of mine, who identified a need for AI and machine learning capabilities around 2015 and 2016. He shared his findings across a heterogeneous, curious network of colleagues. Central leadership said, “Oh, that’s cool,” and moved on. By the time the organization caught on, competitors had moved ahead. He had left.
That story isn’t about one person. It’s about what happens when the informal networks through which significance travels are too narrow to carry the contributions an organization actually needs.
The organizations that navigate this moment well won’t just have better AI strategies or better geopolitical risk frameworks. They will have built the conditions where people believe their presence is significant enough to bring their full capacity to problems that are genuinely novel, genuinely emergent. You need trust to do that. And trust is built when people know they matter.
Mattering infrastructure isn’t a program. It’s a set of behaviors and design conditions that, taken together, make people’s significance visible and real.
Zach Mercurio distills the research into three leader behaviors. I want to name them clearly as they’re actionable right now, today, or on Tuesday morning, in whatever configuration your team works.
First: see and hear people. Not just acknowledge presence, but engage with what people actually think, what they’re working on, what they find challenging. This is about paying attention in a way that communicates that someone’s interior experience of the work matters to you. American Express documented a 50% reduction in voluntary attrition after leaders specifically changed this behavior. Good people always have options. When they don’t feel treated as significant, they have one foot out the door.
Second: affirm people’s significance. Name what someone did and why it mattered, specifically, in the moment. Not “great job.” Something that sounds more like this:
“The way you framed that for a client shifted the entire conversation. That is the reason we moved forward.” [00:28:00]
Specificity connected to impact is what makes recognition real rather than performative. The Greek word kleos means what others hear about you, the external recognition of excellence. That is what this kind of affirmation creates. It is not a performance. It is a signal.
Third: scale mattering organizationally. Connect individual work to organizational purpose. Task to project to outcome, consistently, so people can see the thread between what they do in a small piece and the larger whole. Mercurio calls this laddering. I argued for the structural version of this in the Reconstructing Inclusion chapter on “Inclusively Aligned Organizational Design.” The point is: structure creates behavior.
If your organizational design doesn’t create conditions for contribution to be visible, if decisions are made in networks most people can’t access, you are building a system that systematically prevents people from mattering. Don’t consider this a moral argument. It’s an argument for evolved work design. And it has a co-created solution that can emerge.
The Mattering and Performance Audit is a diagnostic I’ve built for organizations ready to find that solution. It surfaces where trust, contribution, and performance are cracking before the breakdown shows up in engagement scores or exit interviews. In three to four weeks, you get a leadership readout with prioritized early actions.
This is a performance diagnostic, not a program or initiative. It turns out the conditions that make people matter are the same conditions that build organizational performance.
Share Reconstructing Inclusion
Mattering is the foundation, not just another framework. Belonging, inclusion, psychological safety: all of these matter. But mattering is the underlying condition that makes them possible. The everyday experience of your presence creating value for others is the foundation that inclusion efforts have been missing.
Ceremonial DEI built aspiration without infrastructure. The critique in Reconstructing Inclusion still stands. Good intentions didn’t build the pathways to make inclusion accessible, actionable, or sustainable. Mattering infrastructure is what those pathways actually look like.
Mattering to your in-group isn’t enough. For organizational mattering to be real, significance has to travel. It has to reach the people with power to act on what you bring. If informal networks are too narrow or too bonded to carry diverse contributions, you have a design problem with a design solution.
The AI transition makes mattering urgent, not optional. When execution increasingly belongs to AI, what gives people significance becomes the strategic question. The research is clear: people need to know their presence creates something that wouldn’t exist without them.
Mattering infrastructure has three behavioral entry points. See and hear people. Affirm their significance specifically and in the moment. Connect individual work to organizational purpose so significance scales beyond the interpersonal. These are not soft skills. They are strategic leader behaviors with documented performance outcomes.
Tomorrowmind by Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin Seligman. Contains direct research linking a sense of mattering to navigating the AI transition. Referenced for the point that mattering is a strategic variable, not just a well-being concept.
Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. Foundational work on bonding and bridging social capital, which shapes the organizational argument for why closed networks produce mattering deficits.
An Introduction, Review, and Conceptual Analysis of Mattering as an Essential Construct and an Essential Way of Life, Gordon Flett 2021
The Power of Mattering at Work, Zach Mercurio 2025
The Mattering and Performance Audit. A diagnostic tool for organizations ready to surface where trust, contribution, and performance are breaking down before it shows in lagging indicators.
If this conversation was useful to you, share it with someone asking the same questions. And if you're ready to diagnose where mattering is breaking down in your organization, let's talk.
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