Introduction
I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts, the seriously nerdy You Are Not So Smartand discovered a chat with Greg Satell, author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement That Drives Transformational Change. I had listened to an audiobook version of the book a while back a figured a refresh was in order.
It was a handy refresh, and I encourage the reader to click on the hyperlink on the word chatabove.
Below I want to reflect on why changing how people feel and behave is so difficult to do effectively. I started this blog in late 2021 to chart my efforts to get my head around the nagging question – “Why is disability inclusion so hard?”
The mistakes we make
When we are passionate about a cause, like disability inclusion, that seems so self-evidently right, we expect other people to also ‘get it’. And we expect them to change their attitudes, beliefs and behaviours to conform with our clearly morally valid position. But, as experience tells us, many don’t. They don’t ‘get it’ and they don’t change. What’s wrong with them? Nothing.
We have been sold the fantasy that good people will respond rationally to information about people suffering and will adapt their behaviour to be more compassionate. It’s a nice fantasy. We have a simple faith in the inherent goodness of other people, and we believe they will rationally respond to evidence that they need to be kinder and more inclusive. But many won’t and don’t. And this isn’t because they aren’t good people. They are ‘good people’, but we don’t understand them.
We humans are profoundly complex. Philosophers have known this for millennia. Religions have preferred a pared down zero-sum game of simple binary opposites: One of us = good, One of them = bad. This mindset has suffused our culture and has dominated how we imagine and how we choose to act. This isn’t to say that religious people are in any way a problem, only that the wider cultural impact of religious attitudes has been to activate our inherent propensity for bias.
When we feel morally justified in our beliefs it is easy to think that people who don’t agree, or don’t act, as we think is best, are morally deficient.
In relation to disability inclusion this can become a huge problem because we can believe that failure to act on what changes we want is a moral failing. We can then see ourselves as moral heroes fighting the good fight but are defeated by morally deficient, but stronger, opposition. So, we can get a serotonin hit from our brains that makes us feel good as failures.
There’s a popular saying attributed to Einstein. It is: “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.” Now, Einstein didn’t really say this, but I do know that this behaviour is typical of groups who say they are change agents but have an awful record of routine failure. If failure gives you a reward (like a serotonin hit) there’s a risk the reward becomes more important than the mission.
My education on this was as a workplace and regional union delegate in the latter half of the 1980s. Our reflex was confrontation on the grounds that ‘management’ was inherently opposed to worker rights. It wasn’t. We ended up having fights that were pointless and losing arguments we should have won just because of our attitude. We were encouraged to feel like heroes in a struggle when, in fact, we were fools who squandered opportunities.
Disability ERGs can’t take a militant perspective, but they can assume their failure to get the changes that they justly want is down to management not caring about staff because of a moral failing.
Now it is true they often don’t care. But it’s not a moral failing. Its way more complex than that. If you want to drive effective change in favour of staff with disabilities you need to put aside your moral bludgeons and take up a scalpel.
You may not like complexity, but it’s what you have
We humans are complex enough as individuals but put us in groups and things get a whole lot harder. Add organisations into the mix and the level of complexity is enough to blow your mind.
There is a vast industry dedicated to making organisations work. There are academic researchers engaging in highly disciplined research. There are consultancy businesses offering solutions. There are businesses offering training, coaching and mentoring services. All of this effort is dedicated to the goal of helping an organisation to be the best version of itself it can be.
There are two opportunities. One is that an organisation taps into this pipeline of evidence and support at whatever cost it chooses to pay. The other is that it doesn’t. The latter is more common. There is a fundamental distinction between organisations run by highly skilled professionals and one run by well-meaning amateurs. Most public sector agencies fall into the latter category. There are some gifted amateurs, of course.
So, here’s the thing. If you are running an ERG as an inspired, passionate, and maybe even gifted amateur and you are in an organisation run by well-meaning, and well-paid, amateurs, how do you expect to be effective? Other than by serious good fortune your chances are poor.
When I led a disability ERG, I was extraordinarily lucky. I had gifted senior leaders supporting me, a developmental experience that transformed how I operated, and I had some key foundational attributes that I brought to the role. One of those attributes was a passion for doing research.
I don’t expect other ERG leads to have the same attributes. What we do with our personal time is our own affair. I just happen to be a nerd. Because I have disabilities that impede my ability to do anything other than very slowly, I have a lot of time to listen to audiobooks and podcasts. This suits me just fine.
I make this point because I want to say something that I do not want to be taken as a criticism. If we want to be successful in changing how people behave and become more inclusive of people with disabilities there’s stuff that we need to know and do – and a lot of that is hard work. There isn’t an option. If we put in the effort to become more skilled at what we do, we will get better results.
Why we resist change that is good for us and others
The fact that we are innately change-resistant isn’t news. But it is glossed over by the frequent celebration of the changes we do embrace. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 heralded the touchphone revolution which hasn’t slowed down. New fashions in clothing, new cars, new this and new that suggest we are change hungry.
It makes sense that an innovation that improves our survival odds will be accepted. We have adapted to labour-saving devices with a passion. In fact, the whole Industrial Revolution was about labour-saving – but from a cost, rather than a convenience perspective. AI is continuing this tradition by threatening to get rid of more jobs in the name of efficiency and cost saving. Some change is thrust upon us, and some we lap up happily. But we also resist a lot.
There are varying dates accepted on the date of emergence of early modern humans – 300,000 years ago is widely accepted. Civilization is said to have started around 3,000 BCE. The Industrial Revolution started in 1760 and ended in 1839 (according to a source Siri found me on the intranet).
All this is by way of noting that most of human history has been about a very low-key level of change. That’s built into our biology and our brains. We prefer things not to change.
Further evidence of this can be found in what we humans have done to influence our collective resistance to change. We invented religions, education systems, politics, advertising and influencers – to mention but a few. Pretty much everything that civilisation is about comes down trying to make us change how we feel, think and behave – and our collective acquiescence or resistance to those influences.
We are always being subjected to efforts to change us ‘for our own good’ or for somebody else’s benefit – and this we resist with reflexive ease most of the time.
All that said, we are mostly good, kind, caring and inclusive people – just not to everybody. And we can be downright picky about who we are willing to embrace into our ‘circle of care’. This is entirely natural and good. This is baked into who we are.
So, what’s the problem?
Our social and cultural environments have changed at a far faster rate than our attitudes, beliefs and behaviours have. The imposed pace of some change has created cognitive pressures that make it a threat from which we sensibly want to retreat.
Those who champion certain changes in our culture mostly do so from an intellectual and moral sense of certainty that they are right. And maybe they are. But their passion for changes in our collective attitudes, beliefs and behaviours have not been informed by psychological insight. This matters a great deal because without such insight we assume other people to be as we imagine them to be, not as they are.
If you can’t encounter people as they are, you can’t have inclusion. If you want people to change their attitudes, beliefs and behaviours to conform with the new values and insights you are championing you must engage in skilled efforts to encourage them to change. Resistance to your efforts is not for want of intellectual or moral competence. It is simply inherent in their psychological make up.
For some people, response to new insights and values might be positive and quick. They are disposed, by so many personal life factors to respond that way. Others might have a combination of personal experience, history and culture that leads them to simply disagreeing on intellectual and moral grounds or rejecting what is proposed on what we might call dogmatic grounds. Others might resist change they agree with because the current demands on their cognitive and emotional capability makes anything else feel like a threat.
Advocating for changes in how we collectively feel, believe and behave can seem to us like a no-brainer on intellectual and moral grounds that we have accepted and believe in. But rejecting those changes may seem equally valid to others.
Here we have the options of conflict, coercion, compromise or conversation. When we are possessed of moral certainty the first two are the easy options. Compromise becomes the unhappy art of the possible, always with a preference to activate the first two options. Conversation means more than debate. It means actually discovering the reality and validity of the other person’s situation.
We are psychologically change-resistant because change requires cognitive effort and that’s usually about a threat. If we are loaded up on the demands to survive and support our families, maintain our relationships and endure workplace demands we may not be excited to be more inclusive – even if the cause genuinely activates our sympathy.
Just because something is a morally just cause doesn’t mean we have the cognitive capacity to engage with it – because we may have higher priorities within our personal sphere of responsibility.
The problem is that change agent activists are driven by moral and emotional energy and do not take the effort to remember that inclusion means including those who don’t agree. And they can assume that those not agreeing signifies a want of moral character or intellectual capacity – and are hence moved into the conflict or coercion group.
Inclusion must include those who disagree as well as those who agree but just don’t have the cognitive bandwidth to be actively engaged. That means working harder and smarter to evolve whatever culture you are trying to influence. Kindness is always better than moral passion.
Failure is routine
Efforts at change in organisations fail regularly. Such efforts are rarely predicated on science – psychology or neuroscience. ERGs are regular failures – to the extent that I have been unable to find any studies on them, but they are seen to be ineffectual. There’s a lot of glossy advice on-line about how to set up and run an ERG. Some of it is useful and a lot of it depends on whether the host organisation is super supportive.
There is not, however, much guidance for ERGs who struggle or fail. This has been a passion for me because I became the leader of a failing disability ERG and transformed it. There’s not a lot of use in discovering how to succeed if you don’t also know how and why failure happens.
We fail routinely at change because we have mostly strategies for success based on what we imagine or assume to be so. Now there is no excuse for taking this approach.
Conclusion
Learning why we fail at change is critical, but we must take reflection to a sufficient depth. A useful way of getting to that depth is asking the ‘7 Whys’. This is also called Root Cause Analysis. You can search either term to find an abundance of content. The Wikipedia description might be a useful starting point.
If we don’t think of change as the complex and difficult art it is, we will become accustomed to failure and blame those who ‘failed’ to change rather than taking a square look at our lack of skill and knowledge. There is an abundance of research converted into accessible books, podcasts and articles to guide our efforts at gaining deeper skills, insights and knowledge.
Fifty years ago, social change was driven by morally infused guess work. Back then we got somethings right and a lot of things wrong. But it was enough to make encouraging progress. It was all very hit or miss.
Changing organisation’s culture became imperative to ensure organisations adapted to the world they operate in. This is especially compelling for for-profit entities who live or die by their bottom line. As a result, there has been a lot of research undertaken, and a lot of books and podcasts published. The Harvard Business School not only produces the Harvard Business Review but an array of podcasts.
One of my favourite sources is The Neuroleadership Institute because it is research and data driven. Its motto is: Change in weeks, not years. A recent show from their Your Brain at Work podcast explores how this might be possible – https://your-brain-at-work.simplecast.com/episodes/the-stuff-of-thought-critical-thinking-in-the-age-of-ai
Here’s a quote from the podcast: “There’s a really really big gap between what people think they do and what they actually do. We call it intent versus impact.”
Running an effective ERG is a professional skill set and this is no better epitomised than in PurpleSpace. It is telling that it describes itself as The world’s only professional development hub for disability network leaders.
This is the contemporary reality. Effective change is needed to help us adapt our deeply ingrained habits of behaviour to the novel social and organisational realities that only seem to accumulate. DEI was intended to be one of the ways of doing that, but it seems to have lost its way. ERGs should be playing a far more effective role than they are doing.
We have gone beyond the simple energy of moral certainty to a far more complex challenge for more self-aware and strategic action. We can’t drive change on our terms, only on its terms. We have transited from activism to implementation – from wanting to making. But we haven’t caught up and brought our mindsets into tune with our environment. We have become resistant to the very changes we want.