SPINE: Building Organizational Backbone in an Era of Retreat

By Effenus Henderson
Author of SPINE: The DEI Backbone for Agility and Adaptability in a VUCA World (2025), Amazon Publishing.

In an age where DEI efforts face unprecedented political, legal, and cultural headwinds, organizations and leaders must ask themselves: What endures when buzzwords fade and backlash intensifies? What anchors our institutions when performative pledges unravel under pressure?

The answer is spine. Not just moral spine — but SPINE: Strategy, Practice, Ideation, Need, and Execution. This framework, which I first introduced in my book, offers more than a roadmap. It is reinforced by recent data from the 2025 Axios Harris Poll 100, which found that companies maintaining DEI commitments saw improved reputation scores — Microsoft (+3.2), Patagonia (+2.9), and JPMorgan Chase (+2.4) among them — while many who retreated faced reputational decline. It is a resilient, values-centered system for navigating complexity, grounding action in purpose, and sustaining equity even when the winds of change turn cold.

Each element of SPINE is a bulwark against the growing tactician mindset — what Ken Beller once warned us about: short-term, efficiency-obsessed leaders who prioritize metrics over meaning, speed over substance, and optics over outcomes. In 2025, that…