Introduction
I was checking my email this morning and opened one from LinkedIn because the subject line indicated it was about my former employer. It was announcing the launch of its 2026-2031 Belonging and Inclusion Strategy. I wanted to see what it said about disability. But the document wasn’t yet available to the public. I also wondered whether there was a report on its 2020-2025 strategy. Apparently not. I didn’t expect there would be.
I do not like these grand strategies because they give false expectations for, or, more realistically, they give no real hope to the people who are said to be the beneficiaries. Such strategies were routinely produced by my former employer, and the standard response was to sigh and never look at the things again.
Below I want to reflect on why these documents have no real value and why they add another level of peril to a climate of retreat from believing in the value of inclusion strategies. The ‘anti-woke’ dislike of inclusive policies could point to this strategy as something to scorn – for justifiable reasons.
Why we keep setting up targets for others to hit
I have been following the retreat for sympathy for inclusion with interest and alarm. While I don’t agree with most of the criticisms I can see why they are made. As I have argued in pasts posts I think many inclusion advocates have hit the limits of their imagination and capacity.
As inclusion has become accepted as a social value it has transformed from an edgy passion to a respectable position. The real change work done in the edgy passion stage has become more about affirming continuing ‘commitment’ to the values and ideals espoused than continuing the effort to drive change.
This isn’t a criticism. It’s just how things happen. An edgy passion is risky and challenging of authority – which is usually resisting the desired and just change. A respectable ‘commitment’ to the values and ideals is a safer conformist position held by people with zero interest in putting their situation at risk.
In The Better Angels of Our Nature Steven Pinker reminded me how fundamentally transformative the ‘rights revolution’ of the 1960s was. We won the right to be included, as a person with disability, in our community in ways not hitherto allowed or facilitated. But having a right acknowledged and having that right honoured are two very different things. We had a ‘rights acknowledgement’ revolution, but we haven’t had a ‘rights honouring’ revolution. That’s because the next stage is not a revolution, but an evolution. This requires a very different mindset and skillset.
But what has been happening has been wheel spinning as many inclusion advocates are stuck in the rights acknowledgement phase – relitigating and reaffirming. Inclusion plans are often the worst manifestation of this. They are a target for scorn and derision. And justly so.
Strategies are accountable action plans, not magical thinking
Public sector organisations are fond of writing strategies and plans but not following them. This is mostly because they are exercises in compliance with government policy – where the production of the strategy is the output and the outcome of the activity. In this case a government has affirmed its commitment to values, ideals and principles. This is a large return for a small investment (writing the strategy).
The 2020-2025 Strategy has a section early on that articulates “Our commitment to inclusion”. It says “Our leaders will”
• build their own and team inclusive leadership capability in order to value and actively sponsor inclusion and diversity in the workplace
• recognise the business need behind this commitment and its contribution to building stronger communities
• drive progress towards our inclusion and diversity goals in their workforce and across (the organisation) and develop performance goals and measures to track their team’s progress
• hold themselves and each other accountable for their inclusion and diversity progress and performance.
But there’s nothing about these ‘statements of will’ being accountable KPIs in employment contracts. And this is in a sector that proudly proclaims values which include:
Trust – We value the quality of our relationships and do what we say we will do
Accountability – We take responsibility for our decisions and actions
Integrity – Ethics are at the heart of all we do and we show courage by acting honestly, consistently and impartially.
Here I am not slamming my former employer, just pointing up the inherent contradictions in the gulf of difference between what is asserted and what is actual. The absence of accountability of statements of will as KPIs in contracts speaks volumes.
The rest of the strategy is likewise devoid of credible affirmations of accountability, so I won’t belabour the point. Musa Ai-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke makes the bigger point. The purpose of these strategies is only superficially intended to convey benefits to the people who are described as the intended recipients of their positive outcomes. The real beneficiaries are those who commission them, those who write them and those who approve of them.
What is absent from the strategies is any ‘how to’ that shows how progress on implementation and evaluations of outcomes will be measured in terms of stages of implementation. The 2020-2025 Strategy had “Our success measures” but these were presumed outcomes. For example, the action – “using workforce diversity information to make evidence-based decisions about our people and initiatives“ has the related success measure – “our people feel safe to share diversity information” with no indication how that might be achieved. This has been an issue across the sector for many years and nobody I am aware of has come up with an effective strategy for dealing with the issue. It isn’t difficult. It needs a real commitment to action and actually doing something.
In the 2020-2025 Strategy there’s a section under the heading: Leading an inclusive culture that says, “We will focus on engaging and developing all leaders to role model values of service, trust, accountability, integrity and respect.” It goes on to say, “We will do this by:
- embedding inclusive leadership across all levels of management to achieve improved long-term outcomes
- promoting an inclusive, safe and harassment-free organisational culture where our people feel valued, respected and empowered to contribute, and there are safe, inclusive practices where complaints arise
- developing a sustainable pipeline of diverse talent for senior leadership role”
The problems with these statements should be obvious: - You can’t talk about “embedding inclusive leadership” without saying very clearly how that will happen. That’s a big job that would require focused, coordinated and planned action and monitoring over a sustained period.
- Promoting anything isn’t a strategy. It leaves open non-compliance as a non-accountable option. You could say ‘implementing’ but then you’d have to say how and what measures you will put in place to monitor and evaluate.
- The third statement is meaningless. How would you ‘develop’ such a ‘sustainable’ ‘pipeline’? How would it work? How long would it take? This is another case of something that would be demanding to create and develop in real life.
There’s little wonder there’s no ‘How’d we do on the 2020 – 2025 Strategy?’ report.
So why bother?
An anti-DEI critic might justly call the Strategy woke nonsense and argue that it’s a waste of time and money to produce such a document since it is full of language intent on seducing the mind into a hypnotised state of believing what is being read is meaningful.
When we ask ourselves why the Strategy was written we struggle with the notion that it was to ensure that those who are said to be its beneficiaries will actually experience a greater sense of belonging and a stronger sense of inclusion.
The most compelling argument is that the sense of ‘job done’ ends with the document being crafted, published and promoted. This is why we cannot find the kind of details about implementation and accountability a real strategy would have.
So, we must acknowledge that, even given this, the document has a value because if it wasn’t crafted the signal that the ideals and values it contains are good things would be absent.
Conclusion
This isn’t a useless or pointless document. But we must not mistake it for being what it is not – a blueprint for action. We are better off feeling good about belonging and inclusion than feeling nothing or feeling averse.
But here’s the hazard. Because the document is called a strategy, it appears to be. But it’s not. It is an affirmation of positive sentiments shared by the politicians, the executives and the managers (well most of them at least).
What it isn’t is a genuine ‘call to action’. This must be understood by the ‘woke’ who will mistake it for such a call and the ‘anti-woke’ who not only make the same mistake but also find the affirmation offensive.
The biggest danger with such a document is that might be substituted for a genuine ‘call to action’ by those who style themselves as Disability Inclusion activists or advocates who are trapped in affirmation of sentiment – the affirmation of rights – phase and who cannot transition to the ‘rights honouring’ evolutionary phase.
It does nothing to further the cause of Disability Inclusion in any concrete sense because it addresses none enduring impediments to genuine inclusion – predominantly the reluctance of senior leaders to genuinely hold managers and staff accountable for entrenched discriminatory and abusive attitudes. The kind of behavioural, attitudinal and cultural changes that are necessary are difficult to implement. They require sustained committed leadership over time. And they require sustained committed advocacy.
There’s a reason Disability ERGs were created in the first place. Organisations can’t make these changes unassisted. But that insight requires a genuine commitment to change from all parties. Instead, we are seeing performative affirmations of values and aspirations that are not a conduit for action, only ‘feel good’ sentiment. This weakens the spirit of Disability Inclusion and pins a target on our backs for the ‘anti-woke’ and other critics to aim at.
If the trend toward defunding and closing staff networks/ERGs continues and organizations decide to just leave things up to such as internal belonging and inclusion strategies, the evolution toward more inclusive work culture will continue its glacial pace. This will leave many staff with disabilities without real support or representation. We must remember that Disability ERGs were created for a sound reason. But they then often fell afoul of the same preference for affirmation of values that has no genuine operational intent behind it.
Disability Inclusion is a real ‘struggle’ to ensure affirmed rights are honoured and realised. This requires an operational strategy with teeth backed by an active assurance of accountability. The most critical insight is that a Disability ERG is performing a role that is part of an organization’s core business – ensuring that the organization can meet its legal responsibilities toward its staff. It is one thing to have a policy of increasing the diversity of staff to reflect the community being served. It is another thing entirely to ensure that good intent is backed up by active accountable measures to ensure staff safety. These measures are not optional and don’t need strategies. They need effective governance.
But things like Belonging and Inclusion Strategies blur this distinction completely. Organizations prefer to maintain the confusion – because it’s easier and cheaper. I learned this back in 2011 when, at a Disability ERG meeting, I asked HR staff whether Disability Inclusion might be covered under work health and safety responsibilities. There was an immediate chill in the room. I was assured it could not. But all my efforts to discover why this was thought to be true were met by immediate deflections to another subject.
The whole point of having a Belonging and Inclusion Strategy is that there is an evident need for one. This is because belonging and inclusion don’t come naturally or easy in all workplace situations. The result is people of ‘diverse attributes’ suffer – are harmed. There’s a reason that people who are covered by DEI policies are sometimes called ‘protected groups’. They are vulnerable to real harm – mostly psychological, but sometimes physical.
Whether organizations like it or not, this is a genuine work health safety concern. A substantial number of staff in the NSW public sector go off on workers compensation because of the psychological stress caused by discriminatory conduct.
As ERGs and DEI team are defunded, diminished or disbanded in favour of organizations addressing inclusion needs of their staff through their own culture the worst-case scenario is reliance on the likes of Belonging and Inclusion Strategies as an organization’s idea of a credible and effective solution to the problem they know they have.
We must surrender the seduction of the safe fog of affirmation that can make us feel so good – and the self-induced confusion that envelopes us. And we must remember those who aren’t feeling as good as we ‘encourage’, ‘promote’, ‘develop’, ‘improve’ and ‘strive’. But not actually do anything.
Reading We Have Never Been Woke will help. You can get it as a 3D book, an audiobook or an ebook. At the very least do read my earlier blog post – The limits of caring.