Last week, Meta and Amazon announced that they’re scaling back their diversity initiatives. This follows similar decisions around diversity, equity and inclusion efforts from Walmart, Toyota, and McDonald’s a few months ago.

The DEI rethink we’re witnessing is one display of a bigger shift impacting our workplaces and our world. The 2025 Skills Horizon research initiative, which I and my co-authors prepared, explores the five shifts that are contributing to what we call a “decade of disorientation”.