Introduction
When I was a Disability ERG lead, I developed a 15-person team I called the Guidance and Action Team (GAT). The GAT included members who were blind, deaf, autistic, had MS, had a spinal injury but were ambulatory, a wheelchair user, had a diagnosed mental illness, and more. All up there were 10 distinct disability types.
I had been involved in disability related fields going back decades and even so, the members of the GAT were constant sources of insight. And my fulltime job at the time was almost exclusively disability related.
In December 2018, I arranged for an experiment with my division’s executive leadership.
I had four GAT volunteers sit with four managers and engage in a conversation about disability. The exercise was free form. After an initial period of awkwardness, the conversation developed fully for over an hour.
Afterwards I asked the managers to provide some feedback on their experience. The most senior summed things up by saying that they’d just recently been to a day-long Disability Awareness Course run by the Public Service Commission but the conversation they’d just had gave them far more value and insight.
In February 2019 I presented before the department’s executive leadership board with six GAT members chosen for their stories of awful treatment as a staff member with a disability. The experience was transformational for the board members and the GAT members. The board members became aware of what was happening to staff under their responsibility and the GAT members felt heard and acknowledged for the first time. This experience transformed the way the Disability ERG operated and led to an enduring momentum of positive change.
Disability is a huge and complex field. Disability Awareness Training (DAT) is, in my view, a fiction. But some people make money from providing it and other people say it’s a good thing – so my point of view isn’t popular with everyone.
DAT doesn’t work because it can’t work. It is the wrong solution to a badly analyzed problem.
So, what is the problem?
There is a need for greater awareness of disability, but that need is not simple or uniform. Frontline service providers have a set of needs, as do policy developers, architects, designers, event coordinators – the list can go on.
There is a balance also between service providers and managers being aware of the needs of people with disabilities and, so far as possible people with disabilities being aware of the capacity of service providers and managers to respond to their needs -which can vary for a variety of reasons. It is a 2-way matter.
For me the idea of ‘training’ borders on offensive in the context of Disability Awareness. Allowing that repeated exposure to any set of experiences or ideas will increase the likelihood of something being learned, calling it ‘training’ as opposed to ‘education’ marks attitudes toward how something can be learned.
For me training builds reflexes or habits. Education builds awareness. There is a good argument that the two, combined, can be highly effective. But both require purpose-driven and repeated engagement. One-off experiences, especially any form of training, do not deliver lasting benefits.
What is missing from both is any thought of activating empathy and compassion. This is very important in the context of Disability Awareness because people with disability may be experiencing exclusion and sometimes actual abuse. Empathy and compassion create motivation for engagement and action.
Stimulating empathy and compassion often concerns developing confidence in expressing concern and responding to need. You can’t train for this – but you can coach. This is where group conversations can be invaluable.
Coaching for Disability Awareness requires a genuine desire to develop greater awareness and a willingness to commit the effort to achieving needed changes in beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. Coaching can be about general or specific purposes and can be one-to-one, or group based.
We have wide goodwill to be responsive to the needs of people with disabilities to ensure their inclusion in a range of activities in the community or workplace. But training people to be aware of disabilities in a general sense isn’t a useful response if we expect them to act in a desired way because of that training. Usually, such training is like most training – brief and with no organized follow up.
No new information, insight or capability will stick in our minds without repetition. Quite simply we learn through repetition – unless it is via trauma.
What we must ask is what is the purpose of any training – what outcome do we want? Often the real, but unspoken, purpose is to meet a compliance requirement rather than genuinely trigger attitudinal and behavioural change.
What we need to do is to create a culture of openness to individual needs and a preparedness to adapt and provide an adjustment or an accommodation as needed. This could be helping people to feel comfortable in asking for an accommodation or an adjustment or asking them whether such might be desired.
A person with disabilities cannot represent all or most people with disabilities. No ‘trainer’ can do so either, regardless of their claims.
Disability Awareness isn’t just a one-way street. The burden of awareness shouldn’t wholly fall on one side. People with disabilities aren’t innately self-aware or sensitive to people they are engaging with. They are not passive ‘victims’ who needs are ‘diagnosed’ and ‘treated’ but members of a community/workplace that has competing demands for limited resources.
Our cognitive limits
One of those limited resources is attention. Contemporary neuroscience makes it clear that we must dedicate a significant amount of cognitive effort to learn new things. In fact, from an evolutionary perspective, the need to increase cognitive effort generally reflects a sense of threat.
We innately like to engage in low cognitive effort activities. This is why bias is a natural reflex – and not the evil it is often made out to be. We can’t eliminate bias, but we can become more self-aware and take responsibility for our behaviour. There are also very good methods for reducing the risk of bias in professional settings.
Education/training is cognitively demanding. We undertake training or education with enthusiasm or reluctantly and this makes a difference to the effort we put in – and the results we get.
It is well known that mandatory training often generates adverse reactions that often lead to outcomes contrary to the intent of the training.
Compliance with training demands can generate what are called ‘tick box’ exercises. Participation isn’t motivated by a desire to learn but an intent to comply with a requirement. Given that training is mostly one-off and triggers no follow up, taking a compliance approach is usually successful in meeting a demand, but not changing beliefs, attitudes or behaviours.
The absence of change is explained usually by the ‘problem’ being more difficult than anticipated or that the other person (with disability) wasn’t helpful or that there hasn’t been time/money to do anything.
What can we usefully do?
We can ‘diagnose the problem’ accurately for starters. The problem with DAT is that it doesn’t/can’t work. The realistic solution is more complex – and hence costly in terms of addressing the need to do something. This is a real problem because offering a low-cost solution to a complex problem will always be attractive. It is hard to move decision makers away from the attraction of a well-marketed ‘solution’ to a problem they are under pressure to address.
The people part
People with disabilities are regular people who have some form of impairment which may necessitate a form of accommodation or adjustment in some settings. They may be experiencing discomfort, pain, or psychological distress – or not.
They may not be very self-aware, defensive or even militant about their inclusion needs. This is a concern because extraverted people with visible disabilities can style themselves as disability advocates and create the illusion that they are representative of people with disability in general. They are not.
There is no magical insight conveyed by having a disability beyond direct personal experience. There is an industry of very marketable people with disabilities representing that they can deliver effective training. They might be entertaining but it is unlikely that they ever conduct an effectiveness audit on their work.
What they rarely, if ever, do is facilitate conversations (or relationships) between people with disabilities and the people who need to understand their needs. This is because these conversations must be ongoing in some form, and this isn’t an attractive option because the skillset is different and the role less attractive.
The environmental part
A disability might be expressed in a particular environment or setting and not in others. An adjustment to a physical environment might require construction or moving furniture. A social environment might require adjustments to sound or lighting or the number and behaviour of people present. A temperature adjustment might be necessary.
You don’t train anyone to be aware of the spectrum of options but educate about the need to ask whether anyone has a concern or create awareness of the right for a concern to be expressed. It is then possible to coach in confidence and style of communication.
The disability part
The range of disabilities is huge, as is the variety of expression. We can build a general understanding by taking broad categories – mobility, vision and hearing are the most common. Age-related disabilities in an area often ignored because ageing is seen as a separate category.
It is impossible to ‘train’ much beyond focusing on a specific disability type to a limited degree in a few sessions. And this is better done in conversations with people with that type of disability over time through mutually respectful conversation – as equals.
It is possible to educate about the scope and complexity of disabilities and help participants to identify their specific areas of knowledge needs. Then there is the opportunity to coach on how to refine the development of knowledge and insight.
The political part
There are some contemporary trends in disability politics worth being aware of. The Disability Pride movement expresses a strong assertive approach to ‘demanding’ inclusion rights are honoured. This may result in what can appear to be a needlessly militant attitude.
There is also a trend toward self-diagnosis of neurodiverse conditions like ADHD and autism. This could lead to problematic interactions.
The political dimension isn’t a major concern, but it helps to be aware of it because an adverse interaction with a person with a disability could trigger an anticipation that other people with disabilities will behave the same way. They won’t – but some may.
It is important to remember that people with disabilities aren’t inherently articulate, militant or insightful. They are regular people with some kind of impairment that might be an issue under some circumstances. Their disability isn’t ‘always on’ as an issue.
What are useful ways of thinking about Disability Awareness?
- Develop a general understanding of disability.
- Understand the cognitive and motivational limits of developing awareness of disability and frame your need to know accordingly.
- Support a culture of sensitive communication – it’s about mutual understanding.
- Create an intentional culture of inclusiveness in which people with disabilities feel safe in saying what they need.
- Develop a sensitive, honest and confident response to those needs.
- Create opportunities for shared and ongoing conversations of mutual positive regard.
I am a huge fan of PurpleSpace – an organization dedicated to supporting employees with disabilities. They work with organisations, helping them to engage with staff with disabilities, but do not offer DAT in any form. Instead, they say “We believe that the only real way for employees and employers to build disability confidence is from the inside out…. It means helping employers to learn about building inclusive cultures directly from their own disabled colleagues.”
Here’s an excerpt from their brochure, Building Disability Confidence:
“We are all about ‘Networkology’ – the art and science of building great conversations through networks & resource groups to support inner confidence and drive cultural change.
Our clients told us that for too long they had over-invested in employee assist programmes, external training, occupational health providers, external consultants, membership trade organisations, segregated recruitment
campaigns, sponsorship of award and recognition schemes, benchmarking tools only to see no impact on the visibility of their own purple talent and disabled colleague engagement scores. (My bold)
So they come to us in order to re-align their spend, better invest in their internal ‘cultural change agents’ and make a step-change in the quality of internal conversations about building inclusive workplaces.”
It was the PurpleSpace CEO, Kate Nash who inspired me to transform how I led my department’s Disability ERG and turn it into a highly effective ‘cultural change agent’. What applies to organizations also applies to communities.
Conclusion
There is a general commitment to Disability Inclusion with goodwill on both sides. It is important that awareness is a two-way flow and that the demand to be aware isn’t placed solely upon those providing services.
People with disabilities aren’t necessarily passive recipients of services in their favour but members of a community or workforce which has limits and flaws as well as aspirations and ideals. Many people with disabilities can (and prefer to) articulate their needs and their hopes and expectations as a conversation rather than a recitation of demands.
There is a sense that people with disabilities have a prickly sense of entitlement about their rights. Maybe some do, but most are cool about having open conversations about what is genuinely doable. Ignorance and neglect aren’t the same as issues about intent, capability and capacity to meet a need. There may be a lingering sense of hurt for some – and trust or respect issues to address – but they can be worked through when there is evident goodwill.
We have a shared need to become more aware of the reality of living with a disability in our workplace or community so we can do our best to meet needs for accommodation or adjustment.
When that need is expressed by an organization which expects to pay for meeting the need there is a willingness to accept ‘solutions’ that come at a cost that is affordable.
There is a fundamental difference between solving a human problem and solving an organizational problem. This, understandably, isn’t going to be a high priority concern for decision makers whose priority is to comply with demands from on high.
I am not saying there is any intentional or callous disregard for the human dimension – just that there is no personal sense of commitment. This is a fundamental problem with training in many settings. It is often about compliance with requirements, abstracting real people as elements of a problem – often to the extent that the person with disabilities is seen as ‘the problem’. What is lost in all this is the empathy and authenticity we need to keep our perspective on what the actual problem is.
When that happens, we craft a need for ‘training’ because people with disabilities have become a problem in general rather than people with specific needs which could be inquired about with sensitivity and respect – directly.
Developing Disability Awareness should be about fostering Disability Inclusion through person-centred engagement with the people who best know their needs. It’s about building relationships between decision makers and service providers and people with disability. There is mutual interest and there should be mutual trust and respect. There is no need for a representative ‘expert’ to train anybody.