Month: May 2025

Introduction

I have done a few posts on bias as my understanding of it has grown, so please don’t assume this is just a case of me saying the same thing in different ways. Getting your head around bias is critical if you are committed to be fair and inclusive – so reinforcing familiar knowledge helps a great deal, especially if new insights are included.

I recently listened to a podcast Your Brain at Work -2 May 2025, S12, E16 – The Neuroscience of Cognitive Bias. The podcast is produced by the Neuroleadership Institute (NLI). I am a great fan of their work because it is data driven.

Dr David Rock, NLI’s CEO and co-founder, admitted that it took 4 years of research to understand bias and concluded that you can’t really teach anybody to eliminate bias in their perception. The NLI website says. “Despite decades of effort and major investment dedicated to reducing bias in organizational settings, it persists.”  NLI’s solution is to offer the SEEDS model (Similarity, Expedience, Experience, Distance and Safety) as an effective framework for mitigating bias in decision making.

NLI has the most well-developed approach to addressing bias risks in recruitment and other critical decision areas that I have come across. Just to be clear, I have no relationship with NLI and get no benefit from promoting their work. I am simply a huge fan of science-based and data-driven work.

Below I want to reflect on a few insight gems that David Rock dropped during the podcast.

We equate cognitive effort with threat

This makes sense when we reflect that it is highly likely that during our evolution what most encouraged us to think was how to survive. We are naturally disposed to operate on a kind of autopilot. We like to get good at doing things so that we don’t have to think things through every time we act. We have gotten breathing down pat, so we can do it without needing to be conscious of doing so. 

I remember recovering from GBS in hospital and the hard conscious effort to make my hands work well enough to pick up cutlery, get food onto fork or spoon and get it in my mouth. Even after I was discharged, I struggled to dice an onion. It took me 40 minutes of concentrated effort. I was deeply motivated by the danger of becoming permanently incapable and being in need of external care and support. Now I can dice an onion in 5 minutes – still not quick, but it’s no longer a super conscious task and I have escaped the threat of being consigned to a nursing home.

It is so good to do things that don’t require conscious intentional effort. I put the effort in to get to that state because I was under a very serious threat. As a consequence, I am disposed to look upon bias in a kindly manner – when it is appropriate to the situation.

Bias is even more present when you’re rushing

Of course. When we rush, we take short cuts when they are available to reduce cognitive demand. We don’t have the luxury to linger over a proposition and tease out any complexities or ethical implications. We want solutions to problems and not reasons to pay more attention.

I can’t move quickly post GBS, so I don’t have any stories of fast action and bias. But I do notice that when I want to shift my attention from something I am into to something else in response to a time pressure I am more prone to make keyboard errors. Because of my grip disability I type with one finger and when I hurry it’s more ‘near enough is good enough’ than the usual careful placement of the finger. The ‘near enough is good enough’ bias doesn’t work on a compact keyboard. I err frequently.

But, because those errors matter to me, I correct them. It is easy to imagine situations where ‘near enough is good enough’ is just fine. This is especially true if you have a lot of confidence in your ability to make good choices. Does it really matter if your decision is biased if your choice still works?

Bias is an outcome of our limited capacity to think well

Okay. This can seem confronting. I might reframe it as our limited capacity to ‘think precisely’. This matters in an array of technical fields in ways that are usually very clear. But there are other times when we skip steps – like not confirming that something we assume to be true actually is true because we trust our assumption. We default to bias because it feels okay.

I once prepared a briefing note with a conclusion that relied on information provided to me. The information was wrong, and my manger knew it. Why didn’t I verify such critical data? I had no good excuse. I let a bias that said it was probably true silence a caution that said, “Verify it!”

Our poor ability to understand people – social cognition

This wasn’t a precise quote. The comment was way more complex. The observation was that we don’t really have a great ability to accurately understand other people and the consequences of getting things wrong leads us to prefer our biases. We reflexively default to bias because we assume our bias is more accurate – or at least safer.

I think I developed a cannier ability to assess people in professional settings, probably because having an acquired disability stimulated a need to be strategic in assessing how other people saw me. I lost any sense of an automatic right to be included unconditionally. 

The importance of shared decision making

David Rock affirmed the value of making decisions in a group or team. If there’s no assurance that we can make unbiased decisions alone, we still can’t be assured that sharing decision making with people who are ‘one of us’ will improve the odds.

The benefit of genuine diversity is that we can dilute that risk markedly. I have argued that bar professional recruiters, an organization should have a panel of accredited independents who participate on selection panels. The panel members might be drawn from ERG members and have an assured independent status.

By genuine diversity I mean avoiding the potential for tokenism without status or power. We can create illusions of diversity because of appearance, but not thought. We can engineer situations where ‘diverse’ people have no standing to give a diverse perspective genuine impact.

Conclusion

Bias in the workplace has been a persistent concern that has not been ameliorated by efforts to address it for as long as we have tried. The problem has been that we have misdiagnosed the problem. Bias is natural and firmly hardwired into our psyches. It isn’t a flaw. Its just not appropriate in certain settings.

It can be addressed in the workplace by creating situations where it is less likely to prevail. The key insight from research is that decisions made on behalf of an organization should not be made by one person but by a team of genuinely diverse people who have the standing to speak with impact.

I will add three other factors.  The first is that decision makers really should have an informed appreciation of what bias is. The second is that there must be a genuine determination not to be guided by bias. The third is that the organization must have a culture which is committed to engaging with bias as an accountable factor in how it operates.

David Rock made a critical observation. We tend to focus on bias in relation to recruitment, but it influences decision making in general. It is, in fact, an inherent risk in all management and leadership decisions.

I’ll add a final insight. Bias influences our decisions in every aspect of our lives. We are thinking about it here in the context of workplaces because when we go from the personal to the professional, we are expected to operate to a different standard – one that has ethical and legal implications.

Bias in our private lives is our business. But it is useful to be aware that among the consequences of exercising our personal liberty to decide as we will is that we can be manipulated to make choices that are not in our interests. Bias can be weaponized against us. Understanding what it is has personal as well as professional implications.

Bias has played a vital function in our evolution because it saved us critical cognitive effort at times when we needed to pay attention to other things. But any strength can be manipulated, and no more so than now – in times when our assent is sought with such sophisticated skill.

I am quite content that I am biased, but I am immensely grateful that I now know I am. Because I can be aware of my capacity for bias I can also reality check my belief that I am being impartial in my decisions. There is always an option to run a decision by colleagues who might challenge what I have preferred. 

It’s always a choice. Do you want to be right in your own eyes? Do you want to be fair in others’ eyes?

Introduction

A fact sheet from the NSW Public Service Commission (PSC) says that, “An ERG is a voluntary, employee-led group that connects members based on a shared lived experience or identity. They foster inclusion in the workplace and offer support, connection and/or advocacy opportunities.”

The word voluntary has several widely accepted meanings:

1. Done or undertaken of one’s own free will. 
2. Acting or done willingly and without constraint or expectation of reward. 
3. Normally controlled by or subject to individual volition.

The word volunteer also has widely accepted meaning:

1. A person who performs or offers to perform a service voluntarily. 
2. A person who works without pay or assumes an obligation to which he or she is not a party or otherwise interested.

A voluntary member of an ERG isn’t signing on to be a volunteer in the 2^nd sense above, but that’s not necessarily what they, or their organisation, might assume.

Here’s a quote from a consultancy’s website:

Time, Energy, and Resources. These groups have tremendous potential, but much of that depends on how you structure them. Affinity groups aren’t a one way street. Individuals put in a lot of energy and effort into these groups, and increasingly, there is discussion about how orgs can better support these groups and the individual. The idea of these groups as free labor benefitting the company is a contentious one, and so discussions of additional compensation are becoming more prevalent. Especially since many groups represent marginalized (and often minority) identities, putting an extra burden on staff with no extra pay can actually be a regressive policy.

Below I want to explore the politics of the voluntary.

Taking the time

I noticed that the NSW PSC fact sheet also says, “Depending on your role in the

network, you may be spending a minimum of 2 hours per week on the network.” There is no mention of what the upper range of time might be, and that’s unfortunate because it gives no opening for thinking about what the time burden might be.

A minimum of 2 hours a week averages out at 24 minutes a day, which isn’t much, except that you can’t chunk your time that way. Notice that this is a minimum in ‘some’ roles. Are you expected to factor that time into your daily routine? It is instructive that some public sector agencies figure that only 2 hours a month can be taken out of paid time. The rest must be on your own time. This is a problematic position to adopt.

ERGs must have a clear understanding of the time demands on members performing certain roles, and whether those time demands will be addressed in paid hours.

What problem is an ERG solving?

ERGs have a range of things they can do. They can have a primary focus on celebrating diversity, or they can focus on addressing discrimination, inequity and abuse in a more direct and strategic way. But regardless of what their focus is, we need to be very clear on whether the activity undertaken is part of a legal or moral responsibility of the organisation. If it is, there can be no expectation that an ERG’s activities should be in unpaid time.

The idea that ERG members should put in unpaid hours to assist an organisation to meet its legal and moral duties should be thought outrageous. But it isn’t. Meeting these obligations is often not seen as a core business activity, but a good thing to be able to do – if we could afford it – which we can’t. So, ERG members must step up on their own time to get it done.

It can seem entirely rational that because a person becomes an ERG member voluntarily this means they should volunteer their labour to assist their organisation to meet its legal and moral obligations – because the organisation’s failure to do so injures the people the ERG was created to represent and support.

The problem the ERG is solving can be seen as: The organisation is not meeting its legal and moral obligations to ensure members are not subject to discrimination in any form. So to help it get on that track ERG members must contribute unpaid hours of effort. But that’s misunderstanding the nature of the problem. That’s a governance problem and the resolution is to get competent governance.

In environments where time is at a premium, refusing ERG members the opportunity to participate in ERG activities can seem like a fair management choice of handling competing priorities. This may not force the ERG to schedule activities outside core business hours or outside paid hours. But it can limit participation and restrict the impact of the ERG’s work.

If the ERG’s focus is celebrating diversity and promoting inclusion the impact of such activities can be weakened. If the focus is on problem solving – addressing equity, access and discrimination concerns – weakening an ERG’s capacity to function by denying access to activities on ‘operational’ grounds raises an important question.

Is the organisation arguing that business as usual takes precedence over the welfare, safety and rights of staff members subject to forms of exclusion, inequity or abuse?

Often it is, albeit in an unintentional and unconscious way. Organisations exist to further a particular purpose and thinking about the well-being of staff is a comparatively novel development. ERGs are part of the process of integrating the welfare of staff into organisational business as usual – or at least they should. This is a complex thing to attempt. And it requires professional grade skills.

Machines and buildings are maintained in good working order as part of core business. Maintaining staff in good working order is similar, but also very different. That responsibility is divided between the organisation and the individual. When it comes to what ERGs are about, we enter the complex business of changing social values and how organisations reflect them. Organisations may make independent choices about diversity and inclusion, respond to legislation or comply with government policy. All these options may be carried out with varying degrees of enthusiasm by leaders. Individuals are free to make choices, including whether they will comply with expectations to be more inclusive and less biased.

ERGs represent the perspective of staff with certain lived experiences generated by personal attributes or identities. They are a critical partner with an organisation’s key business areas to ensure that policies and practices conform to agreed principles and standards – and that things are working out as intended.

An ERG with a celebratory focus will have a different operational model and skill set to one with a focus on addressing equity, inclusion and justice needs in a more direct and strategic manner.

The real power of ERGs

I am not arguing that all ERG work must be in paid time. Running a highly effective ERG takes professional level skill, so there’s a lot of professional development that is necessary. And with that, there’s a lot of thinking and talking to be done. Anyone passionately involved in a cause will understand this.

Besides, a lot of ERG activities take place in paid hours, and those that don’t are the more abstract or governance functions like planning and organising, administration and skill development.

To be effective, an ERG must have a shared understanding with its organisation about what its focus is and what the scope of activities is. This will then make it possible to agree on what work must be done, and when. It is important to understand an ERG’s activities are work – intentional, purpose driven and accountable.

I made the Disability ERG I led into a de facto business unit. We were professional and accountable because we were committed to getting results. The welfare of our members was our priority. We had what our department didn’t. We had lived experience of disability in the workplace consolidated into a trusted representative voice. Plus, we were ‘politely impatient’. We kept disability inclusion on the agenda and defended it against competing priorities. 

Disability ERGs have the potential to have significant impact if they have clarity on their roles and they have the means to deliver. While having the time to do the work that must be done is crucial, without clarity about what the ERG is doing it will be impossible to negotiate access to that time in an appropriate and fair way. Time is a resource that is often scarce, so it must be managed and allocated. An ERG must honour its responsibility here. Getting enough time is one thing and how it is used is another.

The need for clarity

Being an ERG member is voluntary, and members volunteer their time, taking on additional demands. If the ERG is professional in how it operates, participating in its activities can be genuinely a valuable exercise in career development. This might merit use of personal time in the same way enrolling in a course can be personally rewarding. For that to be a realistic prospect there must be widely acknowledged recognition that work done in the ERG counts as ‘real work’ and it has an honoured place on one’s CV.

Volunteers are often seen as amateurs with no skills. This might justly offend rural firefighters and emergency service workers. Part of the problem is that ERGs are seen as employee-led associations – like a social club. The NSW PSC fact sheets take this approach. It’s out of date. It was the go-to model when ERGs were mooted as a good idea ages ago. They were employee-led, ergo they are like social clubs.

But social clubs do not have the critical brief of working to address issues related to staff wellbeing and welfare where their organisation has a legal and moral responsibility to act. In fact, seeing ERGs as equivalent to a social club has been an unintentional misdirect that has squandered a lot of effort and opportunity.

A Disability ERG is a critical partner with its organisation in addressing concerns which the organisation is required to deal with. Responding to needs to address access, equity, inclusion, discrimination and abuse issues impacting staff with disability isn’t a job for amateurs, and most certainly not unpaid ones.

The lived experience perspective is vital. But without skilled, informed and professional advocates the benefits of that perspective will be lost. It is far better to see an ERG as a genuine stand-alone innovation rather than a reincarnation of what seems to be a scarce entity these days – the social club.

It would be far better to create an ERG as a genuine business unit. The fact that it is employee-led is hardly an issue since all business units are employee-led. The fact that it concerns staff welfare and wellbeing isn’t remarkable since there are other business units with the same focus. What’s awkward about an ERG being a voluntary staff-led business unit is that it must have a voice to ‘talk truth to power’. That disrupts the normal order of things and exposes an organisation to accountability that it might not be all that comfortable with. 

But we can’t camouflage a moral issue as a resource issue – despite the persistent intent to do so. The reality is that in some organisations Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is an exercise in compliance rather than a commitment to a social goal. That makes DEI a cost rather than investment.

So, the fact that an organisation has sanctioned the establishment of ERGs doesn’t mean it is prepared to accommodate them operating at their peak potential. It may not have a well-developed understanding of what an ERG is, or what the optimal relationship with an ERG might look like.

ERGs must not assume that any such understanding exists. Being able to negotiate what voluntary means is essential if there is any prospect of addressing the more complex problems. This must be clarified first because it’s the foundation of all ERG activities.

Conclusion

In May 2018 I attended the Australian Network on Disability’s Annual National Conference in Sydney. The keynote speaker was Kate Nash, founder and CEO of PurpleSpace, a UK based organisation dedicated to supporting staff with disability.  It describes itself as: The world’s only professional development hub for disability network leaders.

Kate’s speech set my imagination on fire. The following day I attended her workshop on Networkology. So, there was a science, a methodology, to running an ERG. How I operated as a Disability ERG lead was transformed, and I turned the ERG into a very effective body. How effective can be measured by the fact that my successor was offered a full-time role as ERG lead. This was a remarkable experiment. The ERG had made a compelling case to be treated seriously – as a professional partner in driving the change we all knew was needed and required.

There are sound grounds for asserting to an organisation that the work an ERG is doing is what the organisation is responsible for and that expecting unpaid labour to help it meet that responsibility is hardly fair or reasonable. That’s a good basis for a robust negotiation.

But you must have something to negotiate with. What is your value proposition? What insight do you offer? What is your accountability argument that makes you an invaluable partner? If you see yourself as an amateur volunteer body with no compelling professional perspective, you’ve got nothing.

Introduction

I had a reason to google the social model of disability and found the Wikipedia entry. It was an interesting read after close on a decade of not revisiting the concept.

Here’s a bit I found interesting: “The social model of disability is based on a distinction between the terms impairment and disability. In this model, the word impairment is used to refer to the actual attributes (or lack of

attributes) that affect a person, such as the inability to walk or breathe independently.”

I don’t like it because it attempts to break a personal reality into two elements – the lived experience and the environment in which that experienced is lived – and that environment is only ‘social’. It tries to divide the lived experience into neat rational domains. But when was the last time you heard a person with disability use the term ‘impairment’? Also, in the UK, where this concept originated the preferred terminology is ‘disabled person’ – as if the defining attribute of a person is how they are able to function in a social setting.

I want to react to this idea and ask whether it is now fit for purpose. I don’t deny that it may have served some good purpose in the past.

Why language matters

My ‘impairments’ are with me whether I am at home or out in the social world or in the natural world. I am quite aware that ‘social’ can embrace all three settings since, from a distinctly technical perspective, all can be covered by the term. I have Masters and Masters Honours degrees in Social Ecology – just so you know.

Any argument in support of such a wide embrace of ‘social’ doesn’t work because it is not in common usage – and hence it is meaningless in the context of defining disability in a general or public sense.

The idea that a lot of the extent of disability is down to features of the human-made or human-mediated environment is fair enough. Ableism has long dominated how we think because it reflects the majority situation and cultural aversions to disability in public have dominated consensus thinking for centuries. I have previously observed that despite wars where the veterans have been feted as heroes preserving freedom, we nevertheless continued to build public buildings and spaces which excluded ‘impaired’, veterans who became ‘disabled’ because of those design and construction choices.

The Wikipedia entry also says, “While physical, sensory, intellectual, or psychological variations may result in individual functional differences, these do not necessarily have to lead to disability unless society fails to take account of and include people intentionally with respect to their individual needs.” The intent is well-meaning but unbalanced.

This definition imposes upon “society” a ridiculous burden with no means of doing anything. Failing “to take account of and include people intentionally with respect to their individual needs” sounds good, but it functionally meaningless. It imposes a moral burden on us all without our assent. Intentional inclusion of all people with a disability is a huge ask if we are all expected to deliver on it. It’s a nice ideal but a hopeless expectation as it is.

This is my primary objection to the social model of disability – it isn’t workable. Also, there is no point in splitting terminology, at the level of a definition, into categories nobody will use.

I don’t use the term ‘disabled person’ because for me it’s not the person but their body that is disabled. I get that the social model assumes that the body and the social self are one and the same. I don’t agree. Having a model that rides roughshod over other people’s sense of meaning can’t be representative.

In short, the social model has been imposed, not assented to. I don’t know who came up with the social model, but I would not be surprised if it didn’t involve people living with a disability. Or, if it did, these people were angry (for good reason) and feeling militant.

But we won the moral argument way back. We can’t keep relitigating a case already won. We must move on to the next stage – how do we convert that success into meaningful action. The social model doesn’t help us answer that question.

What’s the alternative?

For starters, let’s be real. How can we have a definition of disability that is universal beyond the essential attributes of impairment of normal human functions? Some impairments reduce our capacity to participate in social activity. Others can exclude any participation at all without extraordinary levels of support – and sometimes not even then. 

I worked in psychiatric hospitals in the early 1970s and subsequently with private facilities that accommodated former psychiatric hospital inmates in the early 1990s and then again from early 2002 to mid 2006.

These people had profoundly impaired capabilities to function in unmanaged social settings. That’s why they were where they were. Yes, social rules defined who was or was not able to access normal social life – often unjustly so – but those rules reflected what a community believed it could accommodate – often unfairly. 

The point is that you can’t define a model of disability that imposes, without consent, expectations by the model designers, upon the community.

Let’s look at the sensible divisions of disability in a social context:

• Mobility disability – modify the physical environment to accommodate mobility needs. Can be done by setting design standards and modifying existing structures.
• Sensory disability – modify the physical environment with assistive technologies, modify communication technologies and practices. Can be done by establishing standards and practices.
• Psycho-social disabilities – modify policies and encourage more empathic, informed and sympathetic behaviours by co-workers and others. Unenforceable as a requirement.
• Undisclosed disabilities – people do not disclose disabilities for fear of adverse consequences from employer or co-workers. No formal action is possible.

What can we ask for?

Mobility disabilities have been at the forefront of the disability inclusion movement because such disabilities are unsubtle and not complex. The social model of disability was designed when this was the dominant consideration.

Modifications to physical settings in an organisational or community context are well underway. This isn’t uniform because there are considerable costs involved. I am a member of my local government’s disability reference group, and I can testify to the level of commitment – in some LGAs at least.

Designing and adapting physical environments is down to commitment and budgets. Expectations are directed by legislation and met by policy and pragmatism. Generally speaking, in my NSW context, we are doing a decent job.

Changing attitudes is an entirely different matter. Some behavioural change is technically mandated by legislation, but enforcement is very problematic. We can’t demand a person be more considerate or compassionate, only encourage them to be so. 

And here’s a problem. Encouragement can be done badly and even excite adverse responses. 

Real conceptions of disability 

I don’t think the social model works as a dominant idea. There are two major weaknesses.

1. The social context is far more complex than a purely physical model and,
2. There is no uniform means of seeking compliance across a community.

This suggests that the social model was primarily designed to influence policy makers – hence excluding the majority of people who might be expected to go along with it.

I live with mobility and manual dexterity disabilities that, since acquiring them in 2008, have radically reduced what I can do. I can’t garden as I used to do. Under the social model my disability would be neutralised by having somebody turn up to do my gardening. I can’t bushwalk as I used to. Accessible tracks would help somewhat but if I had a means of accessing rough tracks that would be even better.

While I deeply appreciate the efforts to make my social environment more accessible, I don’t want to be defined by what others do or are expected to do on my behalf.

Several years ago, I participated in an evaluation of a draft disability inclusion online training course. You couldn’t progress from one stage to the next until you completed a set of questions and got right answers. One section asserted that a person with a disability was limited in what they wanted to do because of their disability. The options were yes/no. I chose ‘No’. That was wrong.

I had a very long list of things I could not do because of my disability. There was no way I was going to hit ’yes’, and it offended me that participants were directed to choose nonsense to pass the course. I communicated my discontent and heard nothing back. I was chair of my department’s Disability Employee Network at the time. The resistance to my objections was a surprise, as was the fact the course had been progressed that far without consultation. Somebody assumed it was a good idea – maybe as a token response to pressure to ‘do something’. We could have had a conversation at the time the idea was raised, not near the end of the design project.

Disability is a 24-hour reality, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The only time I am not aware of my disabilities is when I am in bed. Yes, I am impaired in multiple respects, but the consequences of my impairments is an inability/disability to do many things that have nothing to do with my social setting because that includes private and intimate dimensions.

Impairment might be a technically accurate description, but it doesn’t work as a social statement. But then its more than a social description. People don’t describe themselves as ‘impaired persons’ or ‘persons with impairment’ because the language doesn’t do justice to lived experience. the word ‘impaired’ begs the question – to what to degree? Besides it sounds transient. Disability isn’t as negotiable. And it is permanent.

The notion of permanence isn’t readily acknowledged, but it’s a standard issue. Impairment might be a transient state that would not excite major work to cater to temporary needs – but it should. The nuances of meaning may be relevant in academic and bureaucratic settings, but they are meaningless in the real world.

Problems with the model

There’s a difference between being unable and being disabled. Both must be catered to in an empathic and compassionate community and there is an innate harmony between the two in many respects. So, what’s the difference?

Being unable to do something because of some external impediment is very different from being unable to do something because of a personal impairment. In the latter case one has a disability. In the former one is simply impeded by design and attitudes.

Disability is living with impairment, often to a radical degree, that will not end and which may deteriorate. It doesn’t matter whether the setting is social, private or intimate. It can dominate and even define one’s sense of identity. That sense of identity is determined by personal lived experience far more than a social experience.

I live with my disabilities 24/7. The only time I don’t feel their impact is when I am doing nothing (like lying in bed) or doing something passive (like watching a screen). My ability to function is impaired but those impairments are disabling in so many ways.

I am not impeded in my desire to tap dance. I just can’t do it at all. My tapdancing capability is disabled. My ankles don’t work well enough to make it a thing I can reasonably aspire to do.  I have seen a video of a guy in a wheelchair mountain climbing, but he had a group of volunteers who agreed to help him realise an outrageous ambition. There is no way I could get a group of people to help me tap-dance. Without his support group he has a disability, and I am merely impaired? Give me a break!

So, let’s talk about disability as:

• Personal existential experience (its crap living with a disability)
• Personal environment (making where you live as liveable as possible)
• Direct social environment (can I enjoy getting around my community?)
• Overall social environment (can I enjoy travelling farther afield?)
• Cultural environment (do I feel a sense of stigma or unwanted attention?)

Disability isn’t the simple binary of medical model vs social model. The impact of physical and sensory disabilities can be ameliorated by modifications of the physical environment in private and public domains. These modifications can be contracted or mandated.

Other disabilities may adversely impact a person’s ability to enjoy our shared social spaces because other people who use the same social space must collaborate with them for things to work. But that collaboration cannot be mandated, only contracted – unless given freely.

We cannot have a functional model of disability which relies upon engagement with people who have no obligation or duty to collaborate. To attempt to do so further disempowers people with disability who may already rightly feel disempowered. It also excuses failure by blaming people who have not agreed to be part of a model, and who may have no awareness of it.

I am not here arguing that other people in our social space ought not be kinder and more inclusive of people with disability, only that we can’t build a model on the expectation that they will. Addressing physical access needs by making or buying solutions isn’t even half the problem solved. It is a substantial chunk of the problem though, and those who benefit from these solutions are grateful. 

But that leaves a huge amount of unmet need that the social model cannot address. That unmet need is dependent upon other people’s beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. Their participation must be freely given. It can be a requirement in limited settings – like employment. But even so, compliance with a demand to be inclusive can’t realistically be enforced. If we tried, we’d get resentful performances of compliance that masked negative sentiments that are harmful to the people who we intend to help.

The other huge problem with the social model is that it imposes upon a broad community ethos a singular focus. We would all like a community to be kinder and more inclusive in general. Desiring such only for people with disability seems unfair and unreasonable. Inclusivity can’t be framed in terms of excluding others who also have a need inclusion.

In a recent Your Brain at Work podcast episode David Rock of the Neuroleadership Institute discussed the difference making an action compulsory and making it compelling. See From Mandatory to Compelling: The Science of Filling a Room (10 May 2025). How do we make voluntary inclusive behaviour compelling? Can we? I think we can – if we dare. 

Conclusion

The social model of disability is a lop-sided relic of times gone by. It doesn’t serve the needs of people with disability in general and may well be a disservice to them.

By including an expectation that others modify their behaviour without their assent it has created a passive hope of compliance that will not come. There is no doubt at all that a kinder, more inclusive, community would make life so much better for people with disability who may need consideration, gentleness and compassion to function well in social settings. But that’s not something to be attained by demanding it, or expecting it will happen because it’s in a model.

Here’s a test. Excise that expectation from the social model and what would be the impact? My expectation is that we’d find it has zero adverse consequences and maybe some strong positives. 

It might, for example, free us to better imagine how to create a kinder, more inclusive, community without the distraction of a single theme. In the same way physical accessibility isn’t only about ramps, social accessibility isn’t only about disability.

The Disability Employee Network I was a member of had a motto – Solve for one, extend to many. It was borrowed from inclusive design principles and was intended to say that what we were doing was universally applicable. When we advocated for inclusion, we meant everyone. Disability was just our focus area of expertise, not the limits of our concern.

Disability becomes part of our identity out of necessity, but it doesn’t define it or dominate it – unless we let it. That can happen with disability advocates – if that’s their mission in life. But they need to be mindful that not every person living with disability shares that need.

I don’t want my needs, as a person with disability, defined by a model crafted for a purpose that may no longer be relevant. I am not comfortable with people who do not live with disability believing that the social model of disability is the definitive way to think about disability. I am not cool with the notion that people living with disability think this is the model they should accept because that’s what they have been told by people who they trust. 

We need to review our beliefs and assumptions periodically to make sure they continue to align with current knowledge. The social model of disability was the way to think in 1983. That’s 42 years ago. A lot has changed since then. Do we still need a model of disability? I don’t think so, but I am happy to be shown to be wrong. We do need a more current understanding though.

I hope this has stimulated some fresh thinking.

Introduction

We must understand that bias is a natural element of our psyche and there is nothing inherently wrong with it. But it can get us into trouble in certain circumstances.

The idea that we should ‘fight bias’ is misleading. It is our natural tendency to surrender to biases that we may now need to struggle against. So, we are ‘fighting’ our impulse to not be aware of the need for intentional choice, not  bias itself. I will tell you a story.

In around 2003 I participated in a recruitment exercise for my department. My line manager (a man) convened our panel, and a woman was the independent. As the interviews progressed it was obvious that there were 2 stand-out candidates. One was a very attractive woman who used her attractiveness very effectively at the interview. On the face of things either candidate would have been suitable. It should have been an easy choice. Go for the very attractive one. 

It was clear that the candidate expected to be offered the role. Her style and manner oozed confidence. She intended to manipulate the panel by activating our bias toward attractive people. My manager and I engaged in a poorly coded debate. We were both clearly taken by the very attractive candidate. We were trying not to make our reaction obvious to the independent, who sat there watching us with a bemused expression.

We males were conscious of the influence we were under and were determined to resist it. We debated about why we shouldn’t offer her the role on the logic that if we couldn’t find a reason not to make the offer, we’d have to make it. We found a reason not to, once our instinctual fog had dissipated. 

This was an ethical struggle for us. We weren’t looking for a lover or a mate. We were recruiting on behalf of our department for a role for which sexual appeal was not a selection criterion. It wasn’t an easy choice because our male brains were drenched in hormones, and on a different mission to the one our public servant selves were on.

There’s nothing wrong with a bias toward very attractive people because there are many times when such attractiveness is beneficial. But we also know that such a bias can precipitate all kinds of strife.

Knowing when your biases are kicking in takes a fair degree of self-awareness because bias begins at an unconscious level and comes to the surface as feelings and beliefs that we are ready to justify and defend.

Some people talk of ‘unconscious bias’, but, for me, there isn’t any ‘conscious bias’ against which we can make a distinction. There can be, however, a conscious choice to abdicate personal responsibility and surrender to the urgings of our bias.

Thinking about what bias is

In essence bias is an energy efficient way of making choices. A bias is a set of givens created at a near instinctual level. We prefer those who are like us in as many ways as possible. This works well when we want mates or tribal members. But then we lay over those instincts a range of reflexes developed by cultural, religious or tribal identity.

Biases mean we don’t have to put time and energy into making choices about who is in our in-group and who is not. In large, complex and pluralistic communities being able to quickly rule people in or out of warranting our conscious consideration is necessary for our emotional health. Otherwise consciously processing so many choices would drain us. We have a psychological capacity for only so many people in our in-group. This is a bit like constant speed dating in nanoseconds. 

But here’s where it can get ugly. Our reflexes developed by culture, religion, history, family and personal experience can be expressions of fear and loathing of groups of people who are not inherently dangerous.

I was born in Northern Ireland. My father was a devoted Protestant who loathed Catholics. As I grew up in Australia, he tried to convince me to inherit his loathing of Catholics. That didn’t work. I ended up not liking Protestants. When you live in a small country town as a kid people who try to divide you are more of a threat than people who are different (and possibly interesting). I had Catholic friends I couldn’t invite home.

Sadly, for many people, their sense of identity is built on reflexes that exclude others as threats to their cultural, spiritual or physical wellbeing. Here the problem isn’t the unconscious bias mechanism but the conscious defences of the bias-based reflexes that build our sense of identity.

Domains in which bias is active

The personal (self-interest)

Bais inherently serves our self-interest at the level of personal physical and psychological survival. We choose people who will enhance our chances and avoid those who will not. However, this is true only to the extent that we are psychologically healthy – and this raises a range of considerations too complex to deal with here. Suffice to say that we can develop biases that are harmful to us.

Social

Who we live with is less and less a choice we get to make. There was a time when a village was a community of people like us. Some small country towns may be largely still this way. But our larger urban centres less and less so. And when we get to cities, they are like microcosms reflecting the whole planet.

Our biases help us reduce the number of people we want/need to deal with consciously. But this is where the identity reflexes kick in and we can exclude others out of fear and loathing because of inherited or acquired beliefs, attitudes and values.

On the social level we are free to associate with whom we wish – to include or exclude. But whether we do so for reasons that are fair or reasonable, or by actions that are kind or respectful is presently a matter of our personal determination. There are some laws that limit how we treat other members of our communities, and there are influences within these communities which seek to set a positive tone of mutual respect, acceptance and inclusion. There are, sadly, other influences set on division and separation.

Organizational

Here things get complicated. Organisations are bound by laws and sometimes policies that seek to foster inclusion and ensure their workforces reflect the community in which the organisation operates. Compliance with these laws and policies is generally a condition of employment. Hence not letting one’s biases and reflexes influence one’s choices and behaviours at work is an ethical responsibility.

This is also where things get messy. The function of DEI strategies should be to assist an organisation’s workforce to become more self-aware of how biases and reflexes can violate their legal and moral obligations to its workforce and the community it serves. However, the ethical responsibility of an employee to comply with an organisation’s obligation is scarcely articulated at all, let alone in an unambiguous manner.

The result is confusion about rights and responsibilities.

Conclusion

We misunderstand bias because we see its adverse consequences in settings where it causes harm in 2 ways. It violates the obligations upon the individual being biased and it injures the opportunities of the person subject to bias. Mostly we think in organisational terms where nobody has clearly articulated what obligations and rights are placed upon members of a workforce.

The upshot is a muddle of moral sentiments fuelled by well-intended passions but misguided by flawed understanding of what bias is. To make matters worse the question of accountability is left hanging in a fog of sentiments about moral imperatives rather than obligations.

In sum, bias is natural and normal and good. But in some circumstances, it can morph into toxic and harmful beliefs, attitudes and behaviours when the normal bias process creates identity reflexes. 

In an organisational context staff have two obligations. The first is to be sufficiently self-aware to ensure self-interest biases do not influence decisions made as a representative of the organisation. The second is to ensure that bias-based identity reflexes do not influence one’s conduct as a co-worker or as a representative of the organization.

Neither is an easy ask on a personal level. But both are ethical obligations as a member of a workforce. They are not ‘asks’ on a personal level.