The Comfort — and Limits — of Individual Change

By Dr. Kathleen Yang-Clayton, Founder and Executive Director, C3E in Local Government

Implicit bias trainings are an important start. They help people recognize how unconscious beliefs can shape behavior. But when governments stop there, they risk treating equity as a personal performance issue rather than an organizational design issue. As one staff member in Peoria put it during our recent sessions: “I can unlearn my bias — but I still have to work inside a process that hasn’t changed.”

That’s the heart of the problem. People return to the same hiring systems, communication patterns, and decision-making processes that have decades long biases built into their standard operating procedures (SOPs) that allow silos to continue, cross-departmental collaboration to fail, and hiring processes to unintentionally exclude those who are already furthest from opportunity.

Without rethinking those systems, even the most self-aware employee is swimming upstream.

From Awareness to Action: How Institutions Reinforce or Undo Bias

At the Center for Equity, Effectiveness, and Efficiency (C3E), we work with public institutions that want more than awareness — they want transformation. Our REDI model — Reimagining Equity through Dynamic Inquiry — helps agencies move from episodic training to systemic redesign.

REDI starts with a simple premise: public institutions can only achieve equity, effectiveness, and efficiency when they integrate equity principles into all policies, processes, and practices. In other words, sustainable change begins when organizations embed equity into the way they operate, not just the way individuals think.

In Peoria, for instance, city staff began by surfacing the organizational habits that made equity feel abstract: unclear meeting purposes, inconsistent recognition, and communication structures that left frontline employees out of key decisions. These weren’t moral failings; they were design flaws. Once the team saw that equity and efficiency weren’t competing values — but two sides of the same coin — they started redesigning everyday processes using project management tools like POP (Purpose–Outcomes–Process) and the equity-centered Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) iterative learning model.

By the end of the first phase, of our model, we have seen teams co-design pilot projects to modernize workflows, strengthen onboarding, and improve recognition systems. These aren’t symbolic changes — these are structural shifts that build trust, reduce burnout, and improve clarity across departments.