Month: September 2026

Introduction
I have been listening to This Isn’t Working’s latest show (The Best Workers Aren’t Woke) and I am astonished and dismayed at the degree to which DEI has morphed into a political monster, especially in the USA.

We need to pause, take perspective and rethink what it is we think we are talking about.

I am going to talk about DEI from the perspective I know best – the Australian (especially NSW) public sector. What is relevant to a public sector isn’t necessarily relevant to a business because there are a set of specific factors to be considered.

I went from marching in the streets for gay, Aboriginal and women’s rights in the late 1960s to implementing Commonwealth anti-discrimination policies when I worked in the Commonwealth Employment Service in the mid to late 1980s to my involvement in Disability Inclusion from 2010. It’s been a workplace interest for me for almost 4 decades.

DEI now isn’t what it was envisioned to be. But the issue is far less about the objective than the methods employed in achieving its goals.

The vision was that people are not excluded from equal participation in a community solely because their gender, sexuality, colour, race or disability. But how that ideal might be achieved is little considered beyond force of law, policy or social sanction through activism. Over the decades, though, our understanding of how the vision might be realised has been transformed through more mature thinking and a lot of research.

I want to make it clear that DEI has done a lot of good. It hasn’t failed utterly. It has gotten lost and hasn’t grown up sufficiently since the early heady days of activism. So now it can’t meet the challenges of contemporary organizations and work cultures.

Below I want to reflect on why I think DEI is now in a crisis and what we might do about it. This is a personal perspective, not a thesis.

DEI is an aspiration, not a directive
In the NSW public sector organizations are subject to anti-discrimination legislation and a policy directive – to ensure the profile of the sector’s workforce reflects the community it serves. That makes sense. It is the community’s money. There’s also the 2014 NSW Disability Inclusion Act that creates a positive potential to make the community more accessible and inclusive for people with disability.

A business in NSW is also subject to anti-discrimination legislation. It is also, subject to compliance with law, free to make policies about DEI on its own account. Many do, especially in relation to people with disability. The Australian Disability Network is headquartered in Sydney and supports private and public organizations to work with staff, customers and service users with disabilities to ensure accessibility and inclusion.

Whether the NSW public sector meets its representative policy obligations is a matter of public interest, and this includes the interests of the workforce members. None of this has anything to do with politics. It is about compliance with law and policy. Acting to ensure an organization meets its obligations might be construed as political, but it isn’t. It’s about accountability – legal and moral.

The truth is that meeting the social policy of representing the community in the constitution of the workforce in a safe way is way harder than was anticipated. The NSW government has recently introduced anti-racism training for its workforce. That should be sounding alarm bells. What happened to the inclusive culture the sector has been developing for decades? Is it that fragile? Or was it never as strong, never as well settled, as imagined?

The reason things are far harder than expected is quite simple – reality is way more complex than our idealism. Good ideas and genuinely noble sentiments become bogged down in the grubby reality of human nature and psychology.

How we respond to that reality depends on how we understand what we need to do change individual and collective behaviour.

Misunderstanding method
Our communities have evolved into being increasingly complex, diverse and pluralistic. This is partially because of how our populations have developed, how our collective values have changed and how our public policies are formed. The scope of changes over the past 50 years has been astonishing.

While DEI law and policy compliance can be enforced in a simplistic way, it all runs up against our individual and group psychologies. We are naturally disposed to be biased and discriminatory. There is nothing inherently wrong here. Bias and discrimination make it possible for us to be psychologically healthy. Unfortunately DEI practitioners have been making bias the villain for a long time.

I live on the edge of a city with over 5.5 million people. I have a natural bias toward my in-group of family, friends and allies. I read somewhere that I can have around 140 who are close to me. Regardless of what that figure is agreed to be, I can count around a third of that. And that’s just fine. I want to keep the rest at bay but without negative sentiments. I want to be kind and inclusive but maintain my psycho-social space as it is. I exclude a lot of people so I can feel psychologically okay.

The key idea that is always left out when we think about bias is whether our biases or our acts of discrimination are appropriate. Anti-discrimination legislation is not against discrimination per se, but against inappropriate discrimination. Being discriminating used to be a good thing. It meant ‘discerning’. Now it has become a crime. The result is misunderstanding and confusion.

For example, I am not fond of the company of any number of people. On a personal and cultural level, we don’t have enough in common for me to include them in my friendship group. I have a right to make that choice. I wish them no ill. I do not disrespect them. I just do not resonate with choices they make. It is not that I do not like them as a class of people, just not on a personal social level. We are all like this.

But as a public servant sitting on a selection panel or making a decision of any kind, I do not have the right to bring my personal feelings to bear on my decision-making. I might know this consciously, but I will still find that bias may influencing my decision-making – unless I take intentional steps to mitigate the risk. It is not insidious, just natural and pervasive.

As public servants we have a legal and moral responsibility not to let our decisions and actions be influenced by inappropriate bias. There is an implied moral responsibility as well – because complying with law is something that we value. This supposes that we have an obligation to understand the risks of inappropriate bias and take clear, rational steps to eliminate it from our work practices.

But how we gain compliance when people are not in agreement with the intent of a law or policy and are not interested in being persuaded to agree with, and act in compliance with, such laws or policy. We can’t just police them and enforce compliance through coercion. We have 50 years of evidence that this does not work.

Changing behaviour is hard – in ourselves and in others. Taking a coercive or punitive approach does not work. And yet it is still the method we reflexively turn to. Studies show that employees tend to think of accountability as being about punishment. Few workplace cultures have the psychological safety to encourage staff to own up to mistakes. The Neuroleadership Institute and the Global Leadership Foundation do powerful work on this theme.

The rights campaigns of the late 1960s led to rights being asserted via law and policy. These are solid foundations from which to launch an aspiration, not flip a moral switch.

Winning the ground to launch an aspiration with general societal assent is not job done. It is only permission to do the hard work that comes next. If we understand that laws and policies are permission-givers for aspirations, and not enforcement if there isn’t the desired level compliance, we can begin to see where DEI went so badly wrong.

Human nature and psychology are huge impediments to aspirational change. The realities of politics and government drive this home daily. And yet we revert to a simple, but entirely illusory, moral enforcement way of thinking with such ease.

So how do we make DEI work?
My biggest concern about DEI is how it became self-serving and didn’t hold the interests of the people it originally championed as the primary concern. It didn’t evolve in the way that thinking about leadership and management has, especially in the past 3 decades.

True, leadership and management have been two fields that have been richly supported by funded research. DEI has not, and so far as I can tell, practitioners haven’t asked. They have assumed that they know.

I often go back to Iris Bohnet’s What Works: Gender Equity by Design. It was published in 2016, decades after the issue of women’s equality was no longer a contested matter. Here is a rational, disciplined professional approach to securing that equality. It isn’t that women’s equality has been a complete failure of course. It’s just that the job was done patchily and Bohnet has put an argument for a method that might get the success rate up.

DEI is a deeply complex field that requires insight into psychology – evolutionary, individual, group, organizational – as well as sociology and history. I have probably missed a few fields, but I hope this makes my point.

The transition from activism (idealism, moral argument and passion) to skilled implementation of a ‘contract’ has never been intentionally taken on a collective level.

I saw this when I became Disability ERG lead in 2016 and started to connect with other Disability leads. When you are advocating for something like Disability Inclusion and you hit resistance you have to do things differently if that resistance will not readily yield. The reflex is to go back into activism mode – because that was successful. But all it really did was get attention and a promise of action – though no commitment to it. This can become a cycle that leads to habituated failure or very slow progress.

The promise of action might have been sincere, but it was ‘magical’. That is that it was made with good intent as if that alone was sufficient to trigger change. The ‘how’ of changing organizational and individual behaviour in conformity with agreed ideals is an entirely different matter.

In What Works Bohnet described how an executive board issued a directive to HR to make women’s equality happen – an act of magical thinking. The board would have assumed, wrongly, that HR would know how to do this. HR would have delegated the task to an individual or a team it assumed would know how to do it. Everyone in the decision-making chain engaged in magical thinking – until the last person who maybe hadn’t progressed beyond the activism stage. So, nothing of any substance could happen. Maybe there was change that was triggered by a general spirit of good will – but that would just be a case of harvesting the low hanging fruit. It may have felt good, but it wasn’t repeatable. Misreading harvesting low hanging fruit as evidence of an effective repeatable method is common.

We all know that quote attributed to Einstein – ‘Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity’. But this is what humans do in a sane, but not insightful way. We identify a good and then apply the least amount of cognitive effort to achieve it. We think magically repeatedly even when it doesn’t work. It feels natural. It feels good – and it may not really matter if it doesn’t work. We can feel morally justified in failure.

A friend of mine has a long list of certificates in group work, communication styles etc., a post-graduate degree in Counselling and Psychotherapy and a PhD in Applied Psychology. Why? To help people change their behaviour in ways they want. These days you can get a therapist, a life coach, a counsellor or a mentor to help you change behaviour in desired directions. All these roles require education, training and skill development.

And yet we do not require the same of DEI practitioners – inside HR or as consultants or trainers.

My qualifications are in Social Ecology – which is, according to my former professor, Stuart Hill, “The study & practice of personal, social & ecological sustainability…” (Hill 2011). It’s not enough to do the academic work, there’s personal growth required as well. The same is true, of course, other fields in the ‘human sciences’ – engagement with head and the heart is necessary.

Many years ago, I participated in a week-long residential training program in sales techniques run by an insurance company I was briefly associated with. It was training in manipulation of customers, which I found unethical – so I quit. I later completed a conflict resolution course. In both cases, influencing behaviour required knowledge and skill. My application of my conflict resolution skills was highly effective because I was also aware of the dark art of manipulation and the temptation to abuse a professional relationship. I tried harder to be authentic and ethical.

DEI is about influencing human behaviour to be more inclusive, and more equitable. The good will part of us sees this as a good thing. But our fundamental psychological responses respond in a highly selective way. If you are ‘one of us’ then you are included and are treated with a high degree of equity. If you are not ‘one of us’ neither inclusion nor equity are assured. This is neither good nor bad – it’s how we are.

The ideals which govern contemporary western cultures are humanist and universalist. This is evidenced in United Nations charters on rights. But these are aspirational ideals, not statements of actualities. They are also shared, to varying degrees by religious folks. Transitioning from a ‘tribal’ sense of ‘one of us’ to a universalist sense of ‘all of us’ is not something everyone agrees with – and for those who do, it isn’t at all easy to live up to. The shift from baked-in psychological reflexes to ideals, whether on an individual level or collective level, is neither natural nor assured. It must be intentionally worked at.

Those of us who embrace the ideals of DEI cannot assume that others do so as well. We cannot assume that we have a right to impose them. At best we might assert we have a duty to persuade others of our cause. But persuasion is a fine skill. Here’s a guide from Prof Stuart Hill using a Social Ecology perspective on Keys for enabling transformative change:
• Empathic & responsive listening
• Gaining trust
• Meeting other’s specific needs
• Being ‘critically’ supportive & loving
• Mentoring, modelling, inspiring, challenging
• Acknowledging, celebrating
• Creating supportive structures & processes

This requires self-awareness and a decent degree of psychological maturity. Enabling and facilitating transformative change with integrity and competence is what DEI should be about, but we didn’t imagine how hard that would be.

It is tempting to decide that this is just too hard and that morally satisfying activism is easier – and gives us that that ‘feel good’ hit we enjoy so much for way less effort.

Conclusion
DEI was originally about facilitating transformative change in our communities and workplaces, but it got stuck in the activism phase. It was a noble idea that didn’t comprehend the difference between a non-existent moral switch (a form of magical thinking) and the hard work of helping a culture evolve toward a universalist and humanist ideal. To make matters somewhat worse its supporters assumed that attaining that ideal was non-negotiable and easy – and resistance was evidence of moral and intellectual deficiency.

What has happened might have been predictable decades ago, had we the insight now available now back then. But it wasn’t – for most of us at least. Over the past 3 decades our understanding of human behaviour had grown immensely. But that’s of very little use if we don’t access it and employ it.

In Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results (2025), Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi make a strong argument that DEI now has harmful political and cultural baggage, so we may be better off thinking in terms of fairness in general rather than in terms of ‘disadvantaged’ groups. Fairness may be politically neutral (for now) but it is still vulnerable to the ‘people like us’ problem. The book’s appeal for me is in the words ‘data’ and ‘design’ – intentional and informed rather than activist guesswork.

In 2018 I encountered Kate Nash, founder and CEO of PurpleSpace. She gave a keynote address at a conference and introduced me to the idea of Networkology. An ERG could be seen as engaging in deliberate, informed and strategic ways to achieve Disability Inclusion goals for staff with disability? This was the final stage of my transition out of the activism stage and into being a professional change agent. It was radically transformative. I went from being a Disability ERG lead struggling to find the time to perform in that role to being given 3 days a week. When I became professional in my approach, I delivered positive change outcomes and the organization responded by making my Disability ERG lead role part of my ‘real job’.

I am not a great fan of perpetuating the idea of identified disadvantaged groups that were an essential part of the 1960s rights assertion movements. Continuing to rely on them now muddles settled campaigns with current forms of activism that have a strong, if not excessive, focus on gender and sex identity that is irrelevant to the workplace, save in a few very limited areas.

Disability remains pertinent because it has a concrete dimension. Disability Inclusion is supported by serious professional bodies like the Australian Disability Network and PurpleSpace.

We are increasingly moving into a more general need for a cultural change that makes workplaces kinder and fairer. The ‘disadvantaged’ groups are far less disadvantaged as a whole, but individual members might be subject to ongoing discrimination in one workplace setting, but not in others.

However, this kind of change is the hardest of all – because it requires personal assent and commitment. It was part of the original ideal that has not been fully realised. Those most resistant to common goodwill are the hardest to persuade and it’s easy to see this resistance as moral failing. It is not. It’s just not a priority for everyone – and that is okay. We are still free to choose how we respond to propositions that seek to engage our sense of fairness and justice. We cannot deny others the right to disagree.

We have work to do, but it must be done competently. We may not exempt ourselves from the obligation to engage in respectful and consensual persuasion just because we imagine the moral power of our cause is beyond dispute. But we see such exemptions made everywhere.

We cannot demand respect by being disrespectful. We cannot celebrate diversity by outlawing diversity we do not like. We cannot champion inclusion by excluding those who disagree with us. We cannot celebrate equality by denying others their voice.

I aspire to making the transition from ‘one of us’ to ‘all of us’, but it’s hard to sustain. ‘All of us’ was what we marched for in the 1960s. It was, and remains, a high and fine ideal.

Introduction
In a time when ERGs are taking a hammering for being out of control and ineffectual I am relieved to discover that PurpleSpace is running a global summit for Disability ERGs on 15 October 2026.

I regularly celebrate PurpleSpace as the inspiration for my success as a Disability ERG Lead. I went from being well-intentioned but groping to being a radical innovator.

This summit is an important development for several reasons I want to briefly discuss below.

Offering an improved image of ERGs
Disability ERGs are different from other ERGs in that they have a specific focus that other ERGs generally do not have. Employees with disabilities can face particular and concrete barriers to equal accessibility and inclusion. These include policies, procedures and practices that require intentional actions by organizations to reform them. A Disability ERG can be a decisive partner in that process of reform.

Other ERGS have more complex challenges concerning attitudes and behaviors (which Disability ERGs also share). Responding to these effectively requires a level of sophistication few volunteer and ‘amateur’ ERGs can muster. The result is often an ERG that is unfocused and ineffectual – and attracted to ‘celebrating diversity’ or engaging in political activity. Some Disability ERGs end up in the same bind.

An effective Disability ERG, supported by an organization like PurpleSpace, with professional insights can demonstrate the full potential of an ERG as a genuine change partner.

A timely event
The global summit comes at a time when the whole area of DEI is under assault from politically motivated people. Their complaints are not wholly unjustified. DEI has become a problematic fixture in HR without having a clear focus on benefits, outcomes and effective methodologies. It has become more about performing concern, engaging in political activity and preserving the jobs and businesses of those who have benefitted from its growth.

Its time to reenvision what the original intent of DEI was and to see it in the present cultural context. That a is big job. What a professionally supported Disability ERGs can do is lead the way in demonstrating that there is still immense value in the work of ERGs.

Find out about the summit
This isn’t just for people with disability. It’s for anyone who wants to rethink what an ERG is and what it can deliver.

Click on this link to discover more:
https://www.purplespace.org/global-summit-2026

Conclusion
The simple fact that a global summit on Disability ERGs is happening must tell us a lot. So far as I know, PurpleSpace is the only organization who purpose is to support an ERG of any kind – and the fact that is about disability is important – because it is a focused form of activism that can be done professionally.

PurpleSpace was established in 2015, so it’s been around for more than a decade. Here’s a link to some background:
https://wearethecity.com/inspirational-woman-kate-nash-obe-founder-ceo-purplespace/

Introduction
I am a great fan of the podcast This Isn’t Working, set up and hosted by Tanya de Grunwald. It is doing the hard work of re-imagining how HR might perform its roles better and how an organisation’s leadership might better engage with the politics of inclusion and diversity.

In the episode ‘No Debate’ Is Dead – What Now? [came out 10/09/26] Tanya made some comments about staff networks/ERGs that were fair enough in the conventional sense, but which excluded other perspectives – because they aren’t widely known.

I agree with Tanya in that staff networks/ERGs are often not only of no real use but can be a source of trouble within an organisation. They can be disruptive and destructive because they push a political agenda. But they can also be vehicles for positive transformation.

Below I want to reflect on the notion that a staff network/ERG (henceforth just ERG) can be a potent transformative influence.

What an ERG is not
There isn’t, so far as I know, any written down history of ERGs. My direct knowledge of ERGs goes back to July 2010 when I became a founding member of one set up by our organization’s CEO. It had one function – to provide insight from staff with disability to inform HR on developing policies, procedures and practices to ensure access and equity for staff with disability.

HR did all the secretariat work as well as all the policy, procedure and practice development. The ERG was a partner with a clear role. It had a chairperson who had only 2 jobs – run the meetings and sit on a committee.

That was simple and clear, and it worked well for a few years. We were helping the organization meet its identified responsibilities. The organization was in control at every level. And then it wasn’t.

Circumstances changed but the original intent wasn’t reviewed. The ERG continued but no longer with the level of control upon it, or the support it had enjoyed. It could now be more self-determining. Many things subsequently changed – but one thing did not. The ERG remained a collaborator or partner on helping the organization meet its recognised legal responsibilities toward its staff.

An ERG may have a proper role reminding an organization of its legal obligations. This can get quite tricky at times. But it has no proper function in trying to introduce attitudes, beliefs or behaviors which are not arguably part of an organization’s legal responsibilities.

That is to say it has zero entitlement to any engage in political activity undertaken within paid working time or using the organization’s resources or property. And, unless the organization is privately run and its executive leadership has the direct authority to promote or approve political activity by staff, no organization’s executive leadership should give staff authority to engage in political activity regardless of whether it is sympathetic to the cause.

That sounds like a dogmatic statement, but it is not. I have worked in 5 federal and 5 state departments, 1 NGO and 1local government and I have been a contract manager for funded business and disability organizations. Organizational governance isn’t a vague notion.

The need for a goal, a theory and a contract
These needs didn’t become clear to me until I started to do research into why the ERGs that I was contracted to support were having such a hard time. The ERG leads had a common, and real, lament. They didn’t have the time. They had been modelled on the successful Disability ERG I had led – but on a version my successor had adapted, which excluded a key factor I attributed to my success and included an innovation that had some value, but which increased complexity for subsequent ERGs.

I was Disability ERG lead for 3.25 years, stepping down in March 2020. From May 2018 I was allowed to work 3 days a week on the Disability ERG’s business. In September 2020, based on my track record, the organization’s executive embarked on a bold experiment. It offered my successor a fulltime role as EEG lead and other disability related work.

So, why was I allowed 3 days a week as Disability ERG lead? That was unheard of at the time. The simple explanation was that I was delivering results. I ran the Disability ERG as a de facto business unit. The ERG was invited to present at the 2019 and 2020 Australian Network on Disability’s Annual National Conferences to report on the innovations developed and the outcomes delivered.

It is only looking back now that I can see that I had a goal – to end suffering experienced by staff with disability because of inaccessibility, discrimination and abuse. I also had a theory of sorts – hence the notion of the ERG as a de facto business unit. I also had a contract of sorts. The ERG was funded for a 2-day planning session which produced a plan which was presented to, and endorsed by, the executive board.

During my consultancy I asked the ERG leads to give me an ‘elevator pitch’ statement of their ERG’s value to the organization. None could. When invited them to write a strategic plan for the next 12 months only one did so with ease and another did with quite some effort. There seemed little capacity to readily develop a clear sense of their purpose – either in terms of goals or overall function. A common theme that was favored was ‘celebrating diversity’ – but you don’t need an ERG to do that.

What was most glaring was that neither the ERGs, HR nor the organization had any agreed theory on the role and function of the ERGs. There were certainly no shared conversations. So, there was no contract. This was especially evident in the lament from the ERG leads about not having time to put into their roles. The ERGs didn’t think to network among themselves to lobby for more time – probably because they didn’t have the time? The organization’s executive leadership may not have been even aware of this but certainly felt no need to enable the leads to have the time they craved. HR either didn’t the resources or didn’t have the capability to intervene.

My point here is not to assign blame but to illustrate how easy it can be for the critical elements of an effective role for an ERG can be either fragmented or absent. In my case as an ERG lead the key elements were there, but not because we all agreed in a rational way that these were what they should be. Instead, the ERG was successful because those elements were functionally present through the good fortune of the right people being in the ERG, in HR and in the organization’s executive at the same time. Maybe ‘dumb luck’? But you still have to play the hand you are dealt well.

Hindsight and research enable me to look back and understand what worked and why. In part it was down to the caliber of the individuals. The executives and HR leaders I worked with were of high caliber, as were my fellow ERG members. We can put success or failure down to key individuals – but inside an organization we need something more – an operating environment and a culture.

Having a goal, a theory and a contract agreed upon by the ERG, HR and the organization’s executive is critical to create the operating environment – and the extent to which that is coherent creates a capacity to positively influence the organization’s culture.

The pointless notion of staff networks
I recently reviewed the NSW Public Service Commission’s guidelines for establishing and running staff networks. I commented extensively on them in my previous post. I still struggle to understand why bother having them. In this regard I agree with Tanya’s remarks about them. The guidelines suggest little more than somebody’s ‘good idea’ that ends up being a tepid soup of ‘feel good’ sentiments.

You certainly don’t need a group of ‘volunteer’ amateurs getting involved in policy. And if staff networks are not intended to have any real power – which they are not – are they anything more than a tokenistic distraction to deflect staff belonging to minority groups from being as aggrieved about their mistreatment as they should do – especially if an organization has a legal duty they are ignoring or underplaying.

At best this vision of staff networks/ERGs is well-intentioned but naïve. It dwells in a fog of good ideas, as imagined by people who have no direct experience of actual exclusion and discrimination. What I saw was ’learned helplessness’. My early encounters with Disability ERGs left me bewildered by people who articulated serious grievances but then settled into a habituated sense of failure. Their disorganized efforts at attracting attention and concern had come to nothing. They assumed moral indifference. But they did nothing to alter their insights or their behaviour.

Hence organizations were content that they were being ‘progressive’ by having ERGs, and the employees who joined them felt a sense of vindication. HR figured it was doing its job. It wasn’t often that anything became an effective locus of change – enabling an organization to meet its legal obligations and ERGs to deliver outcomes for members.

I divided the ERGs I worked with into 2 categories – problem solvers and celebrators. I have a bias toward problem solving because that’s about meeting the needs of staff experiencing real disadvantage and contra the obligations of the organization toward its employees.

I worked in the NSW public sector. It has a policy obligation to ensure a diverse workforce that reflects the community it serves. That imposes a different set of obligations from a corporation seeking to maximize profit or ROI. The public sector has, sadly, no equivalent to either. It is guided by foggy notions of public benefit and political expediency. In such an intellectual/moral environment ERGs have an inherently ill-defined role. I am guessing that the idea of staff networks originated in the public sector because such a vapid notion could not have arisen in any well-functioning for-profit organization.

Employees might join an ERG because it promises a prospect of change to adverse workplace experiences, behaviors and cultures. But the ERGs are not designed to enable such changes, just appear as if they are.

The NSW public sector is subject to anti-discrimination, disability inclusion and work health and safety legislation. All these impact staff with disability. There’s a policy to employ more people with disability under the logic of being representative of the community. There is, however, no corresponding strategy to identify and address discrimination, abuse and bias against employees with disability. This is despite comforting words to the contrary. ERGs could be engaged as a highly effective partner in addressing these concerns.

The alternative approach
I have demonstrated that an ERG can be a highly effective partner in addressing real risks and threats to staff with disability by proving critical lived experience feedback when policies and procedures don’t work – because they are flawed or because they are not being followed.

ERG members are seen as volunteer amateurs. But that’s unkind and unfair. By the time I became Disability ERG in November 2016 I had around 22 years’ experience in disability fields including 6 years as a Disability Support Manager and 10 years as a Senior Project Officer. I also had earned Masters and Masters Honours degrees majoring in Social Ecology and had an Associate Diploma in Applied Management paid for by my employer.

Being an amateur at running an ERG isn’t the same thing as being an amateur in a host of contexts. A Disability ERG member might be a Senior Policy Officer who brings the added insight of lived experience to the job to policy development.

My point in making the Disability ERG a ‘de facto business unit’ was precisely to instill a professional discipline in what we did. We consulted on policy development from the perspective of being on the receiving end of policies, strategies and other efforts to generated desired change as well as also fully understanding policy formation. It isn’t really the field of esoteric expertise it is pretended to be. In that respect it’s a lot like HR.

By making an ERG a genuine partner and collaborator two important things happen. The first is that an organization that is serious about meeting its legal obligations toward employees will get genuinely frank and fearless advice that gets around the self-interested filters of the standard hierarchy. The second is that there is a professional and civil influence that carries a genuine sense of urgency. Staff experiencing exclusion, discrimination and abuse must not be asked to take a number and stand in line. Response to those needs must have priority.

Conclusion
I largely agree with Tanya that ERGs as they are presently imagined are neither fit for purpose nor otherwise useful to the extent that they should be ‘tolerated’.

They are not ‘fit for purpose’ because that purpose has been neither defined nor agreed upon. No business area in any organization should be so loosely defined. I personally don’t see the point in having an ERG whose function is about celebrating diversity. I confess this is a bias. If genuine problems that impact staff members wellbeing and welfare are neglected I can’t see the point in prioritizing celebrations of difference. Let’s be ‘One’ before celebrating that we are ‘Many’. This is an entirely personal perspective that fuels my passion to ‘end the suffering experienced by staff with disability’. There’s no hyperbole in that statement.

You can’t be ‘fit for purpose’ if the purpose is not clearly articulated and agreed upon by all who have a material interest. I have moved away from the idea of an Employee Resource Group to an Employee Reference Group. This wasn’t my idea. It came from a DEI manager.

The difference between Resource and Reference is critical because it relocated the notion of an ERG to entirely within the core business of an organization. This is often overlooked or mistaken. Core business isn’t just about an organization’s outputs but also its governance – not just behaviour but also health.

I have avoided using the word ‘moral’ here because I want to focus on legal responsibility because it is clearly delineated and unambiguous. How an organization addresses its legal duties to its employees is about method, style and strategy.

But then there’s moral dimension. Organizational processes can grind slowly as problems of resourcing arise and are confronted. In the meantime, how do you face the staff who, because of their disabilities, are feeling the pain of being excluded, discriminated against and even psychologically abused? This happens out of sight of organizational leaders. And when it is raised by staff subject to such conduct, they are often subject to more of the same.

Without a sophisticated and professional Disability ERG there is no protection, no trusted voice. In the NSW public sector, the number of staff with disabilities who take leave for psychological injury because exclusionary, discriminatory or abusive behaviour by team members or [mostly] managers has been cause for alarm. But the idea than an effective Disability ERG might be able to reduce such claims isn’t a popular notion. I understand why. The logic is just dumb.

I am not arguing that an ERG is the ideal answer. In fact, it isn’t. But in the type of ERG that I developed there is the seed of a solution to the challenge of genuinely meeting the needs of the ‘diversity groups’ we have been encouraged to embrace and include.

The current message seems to be that this is all too hard and stupid, and we should go back to being how we were. My argument is that we need to stop engaging in sloppy emotional reactions and start thinking clearly about how we are going respond like mature self-aware adults.

ERGs haven’t evolved with the workplaces they were designed for over 16 years ago. They are stuck in a time warp because there has been almost no serious thinking directed at them – because they were invented to be ineffectual displacement activity rather than genuine agents to change in response to evidence of inequity and injustice. I don’t think this was an intentional conspiracy – just what we do stuff as humans.

We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
by Musa al-Gharbi is an excellent exploration of why this is the case.

PurpleSpace is what can happen when you take running an ERG seriously. PurpleSpace’s founder and CEO, Kate Nash gave the keynote address at the 2018 Australian Network on Disability’s [AND] Annual National Conference in Sydney. Kate introduced me to the concept of Networkology. I could run a Disability ERG as a professional body? That was a novel idea. I tried it out and it worked a treat. I was invited to the AND’s Annual National Conferences in the following 2 years to report on our progress. So far as I know no Disability ERG in Australia has been invited to do similar.

ERGs can be imagined as genuine effective agents of change in service of an organization and its employees.

Michael Patterson
[email protected]
11 September 2026

Introduction
I figured it’s time to remind the reader why I think the way I do. It didn’t come out of the blue.

I was a conventional thinker about Disability ERGs from July 2010 to May 2018. Then I attended the Australian Network on Disability’s (AND – now ADN) Annual National Conference in Sydney. The keynote speaker was Kate Nash, founder and CEO of PurpleSpace.

Kate introduced me to the idea of Networkology and the next day she ran a workshop on the theme.

My transition to being an active and even radical Disability ERG lead was fast. Below I want to explore some of the key inspirations that Kate triggered and why they made such an impact.

A methodology
The idea of Networkology was one of those “Aha!” moments for me. I had been used to thinking about Disability Inclusion as being opportunistic – getting what attention and focus I could between doing my ‘real’ job.

I stopped thinking in fragments and started to join things up – a discipline of envisioning, conceiving, planning, executing, reviewing. It was a project like any other work I was doing. I was, after all, a Senior Project Officer.

So, I rethought my role as ERG lead as a project and not ‘hobby’ – something to engaged in in my ‘spare’ time. This was a critical change because it instantly made me ‘professionalize’ my perspective.

Networkology was a powerful idea to me because it instantly reminded me that there was a professional discipline at the foundation of Disability Inclusion. Now I had a plan and was conscious of the need for a strategy.

The experience couldn’t have been more timely. My conception of what I was about was radically disrupted when I was on the cusp of an extraordinary change in my work environment. I was to transfer to a new division and be given the opportunity to put as much time into the Disability ERG as I wanted.

Always on
Disability Inclusion was something I thought about routinely because I was almost always making some assessment about my own needs. My grip and mobility disabilities impacted my working in some way every day.

But thinking about Disability Inclusion for others, as Disability ERG lead, was a different matter.

I was a founding member of the Disability ERG back in July 2010. It met 4 times a year for a generous full day. We were backed by HR who organized and paid for everything. What we were doing was taken seriously.

But things change and people move on. Shortly after I became ERG lead HR had to pull back its support. The department was undergoing more restructuring, and HR resources had to be re-assigned. Besides there was good progress being made on the Disability Inclusion front. This was true.

But Kate reminded me that Disability Inclusion isn’t just a bureaucratic process. The progress being made didn’t mean that less effort should be applied. It meant that we should be grateful and then ask what else must happen?

The withdrawal of HR support simply signaled that we had to re-imagine what the ERG was about. We had to evolve beyond the bureaucratic phase of changing policies, systems and procedures and become agents for cultural change.

I didn’t understand this properly until recently. Back in 2018 all I had was a dimly formed intuition that Disability Inclusion was an ‘always on’ state of mind. I was energised by a huge sense of excitement and an extraordinary opportunity to make something happen.

Later that year I called for volunteers to help me. I had the privilege of having my employer’s support to have the time work on evolving the ERG, but I didn’t know a great deal about how my fellow ERG members were experiencing their workplaces.

My call for volunteers led to the creation of the Guidance and Action Team (GAT) – 13 passionate, frustrated and highly principled people with a range of disabilities who wanted to make positive things happen. There were also 2 allies who brought their own useful perspectives.

The first thing that happened for me was an intensive education about what members with sensory, motor, chronic illness (like MS) and mental health disabilities constantly experienced in the workplace.

This was an intense time. My work with disability goes back a long way and includes providing personal care, intimate aids and ensuring the delivery of social and health services. But that did little to prepare me for the existential pain of adults feeling marginalized, disrespected and psychologically abused in their workplaces.

Perhaps because PurpleSpace was a separate ongoing organization the idea of being ‘always on’ made perfect sense. But how could that become anything close to being real in my workplace?

The gift of time
In June 2023 I was invited to act as a consultant to my former employer’s ERG leads. The first thing that became evident was that there was a shared complaint about not having the time needed to work on ERG business.

This was a legitimate complaint because there was the expectation that an ERG was a voluntary employee-led body that had organizational sanction but no formal standing. ERG business had to fit into an ERG lead’s regular workload, which had priority.

Kate’s keynote address at the conference was possible only because she, as founder and CEO of PurpleSpace, had the time to formulate her ideas and methods. She had time to think, time to research, time to collaborate and communicate

Also at that conference was our Disability ERG’s Executive Champion, a Deputy Secretary. Her role in what happened next cannot be under-estimated.

In the space of a few weeks, I went from spending a lot of my evenings, weekends and leave working on Disability ERG matters to having at least 3 days a week to do that work. I was able to create a communications infrastructure that enabled the GAT to interact daily. I also sent out monthly reports to members, supporters and champions, and had a regular presence in the organization’s newsletter.

The benefit of having time is undeniable. But the foundation for this rests on two critical factors relevant before I was granted that gift of 3 paid days a week. And this was before the AND conference and Kate’s speech.

The first was that I had created an active presence for the Disability ERG in the organization. And I had established a value to members and the organization. This was hard time-consuming work that had to be thought through very carefully. I had the good fortune to have had a decent grounding in writing. In the past I had written a satirical workplace newsletter that was shared widely. I had won literary competition awards for short fiction, essays and poetry and I had written a Masters Honours thesis.

The ERGs I worked with from June 2023 to June 2025 mostly belonged to a very different phase to the one the Disability ERG was created in. They were mostly modelled on the Disability ERG’s success but with none of the roots or foundational experiences.

They were established with minimal organizational support and with no theoretical foundation to what they were and how they were to succeed. That’s not a criticism. I didn’t have a theory either. The Disability ERG’s success depended on multiple factors, none of which included having an overall theory. We had a great strategy though.

Having the time is one thing. Knowing what to do with it is another. In June 2023 I sympathized with the ERG leads who complained they had no time. They didn’t. But it was only half of their problem.

Theory aversion
Hindsight is a wonderful when we have the luxury of developing it. So, I can look back of the Disability ERG’s success and, after several years of reflection and research, write about why that success came about. I wasn’t prescient so much as fortunate enough to be at the right place and the right time. But I also had some attributes and capabilities that enabled me to take advantage of opportunity.

In July 2010 the CEO of my department formed the belief that there was inadequate support for staff with disability while the department was responsible for providing support for people with disability across the state. Some of that support was being provided by staff with disability. There was, then, a clear sense of moral and legal responsibility – hitherto overlooked. Within this sense the Disability ERG was formed to provide input to inform how this newly formed sense of responsibility for staff with disability was to express as action. This was done well for a few years.

But, like so many initiatives, when the department’s Disability Inclusion behaviour matured from creating to maintenance, there was no corresponding theory of purpose and role negotiated with the ERG. Nobody thought this was necessary, understandably. What we were doing was still novel.

When I took on the ERG lead role in November 2016 I had several advantages. I had decent experience in leadership roles. I had a background of working with business and organizational leaders (mostly modest scale entities) in previous roles. I had Masters and Masters Honours degrees majoring in Social Ecology. I had been reading in management, leadership and organizational behaviour informally for several decades, and I had an Associate Diploma in Applied Management – a 6-months course my employer paid for.

Depending on the organization, requirements for ERG leadership vary. In my department ERG leadership was determined by popular vote with no particular selection criteria. This frequently led to relatively junior staff with no leadership, management or project management skills being elected. This had the result of ERGs having no idea of the benefit of having a theory of what they were about, or how they fitted into the organization. And given the organization had shifted into a different understanding of what roles ERGs played without developing this into a shared theory, it also had no theory. There was bound to be confusion.

My advantage was that I was able to quickly grasp the value of Kate’s idea of Networkology – once I had become aware of it. Because our Executive Champion was at the same event, and the executive board was actively supportive of the cause of Disability Inclusion, there was an implicit shared understanding of the Disability ERG’s role. It was not, however, explicit. We hadn’t advanced that far. Nevertheless, that implicit understanding enabled good things to happen.

What I found interesting and frustrating during my consultancy was that there was an aversion among many ERG leads and within the DEI team toward any attempt to develop a shared theory of function and role, and to engage with executive sponsors and champions as a shared-interest group.

Perhaps this was too radical an idea? But I am reluctantly obliged to consider also that a lot of folks are just averse to doing good research and thinking. This isn’t a criticism. I must confess to being something of a nerd. I like research. There’s no reason to criticize those who don’t, but there’s good reason to wonder aloud whether somebody who doesn’t would be a good pick as ERG lead, given the amount of learning that is required.

Its one thing to develop a theory of what an ERG is, and what it should do, and another thing to have it shared and agreed to. Everyone associated with an ERG must be in agreement – the ERG, the DEI team and the organization’s executive.

Employee led or employee directed
The official position on ERGs in the NSW government clings to the outdated notion that an ERG is an employee led ‘network’. Network is a completely vague idea, which is why I don’t use it. Networking is something we do for personal advantage or to influence decisions or actions. The moment an organization has an interest in networks for its staff it time to pay attention.

The Disability ERG I joined as a founding member was called a network, not because it was an actual network, but because that was the term in vogue – as it still is today.

From Guidelines for Employee Networks we read “An Employee Network is a voluntary network of employees formed with common interests and objectives to enhance the workplace experience of target employee demographic/s.” That’s awfully soporific, bland and essentially meaningless. It sounds and feels good because it puts your brain into a coma – as intended.

Under the heading, Benefits to the Agency, the first benefit is, “Develop sources of expertise and support for employees with specific needs in the
Agency.” It is not, “Identify and address issues that lead to inaccessibility, exclusion or discrimination so that staff can experience safe workplaces and rewarding work experiences.”

Under the heading, Benefits to the Individual, the first benefit is, “Personal development opportunities.” It is not, “Identify and take up opportunities to increase inaccessibility and reduce exclusion or discrimination so that staff can experience safe workplaces and rewarding work experiences.”

In Appendix – 3 there is a Member Sample Survey which asks the question, “Realistically, how much time can you devote to providing support to the Employee Network each month?” The last of 4 options is “More than 8 hours per month.” That’s over 2 hours a week – 24 minutes a day. That’s not enough for ERG leads. There nothing, notably, recommending anything about paid time being made available to help the employer meet its responsibilities toward staff. The organization is ‘hands off’, except in telling employees how to run their network.

The idea of ‘volunteer employee network’ here is as a social club not intended not to have any impact on addressing real problems of exclusion, discrimination and inequity. It’s about a public posture to affirm a sentiment the sector is expected to affirm, but not genuinely deliver on. The cost of doing so exceeds that tolerance of those in power.

Employee are expected to contribute their own time to participate in a group that is focused on soft personal targets. This is a remarkably flaccid approach that can come only from those who have never experienced discrimination, exclusion or abuse. Nobody who has such experiences would ever write such guff.

Under the heading Why have an Employee Network? We can read “Building an inclusive workplace culture is important for retaining top talent and ensuring the public sector continues to deliver high-quality services to the people of NSW.

It is proven that when employees feel they can bring their whole self to work, they are more engaged, productive and motivated to drive innovation and growth.

Recognising the diverse needs of employees and empowering them to achieve their full potential at work will enhance the quality of services delivered to the people of NSW.”

So, let me put that into perspective, the author of this document imagines that these things should be done by employees in their own time? The employer is the one who has the responsibility of “Building an inclusive workplace culture” and “Recognising the diverse needs of employees and empowering them to achieve their full potential at work.”

This document reflects the complete confusion of the sector’s grasp of ERGs. It sets a high standard of imagined benefit, for which agencies are actually responsible, on moral, policy and legal grounds. But it offers no concrete support beyond creating a document that provides an unworkable set of guidelines, which, as I saw in my consultancy, leaves ERGs floundering under workload demands and no real benefit for effort put in.

You cannot achieve the imagined benefits with ‘volunteer’ networks without considerable organizational support and contribution.

The compelling observation is that ‘networks’ of this kind are ‘good ideas’ invented by people with no direct experience of discrimination or exclusion, and who imagine that polite informal conversations are all it will take. What the author this document seems unaware of is the people most motivated to joins such networks are those who experience personal disadvantage arising from attributes that class them as disadvantaged in some way – disability, gender, ethnicity, sexuality.

My former employer also had ‘networks’ for staff who were carers and/or older. Both may be subject to inflexible and/or uncaring attitudes and/or discrimination.

The only positive network was The Young Professionals, which, because it was based on positive self-interest was a genuine network.

Some ERGs which started off as problem-solvers transitioned into being more about celebrating identity and diversity because the grosser forms of discrimination have been seen to have been addressed. Whether celebrating identity and diversity is a proper function for an ERG is not something I will discuss here. It is sufficient that I flag genuine scepticism.

Problem-solving ERGs are what interest me intensely. The Disability ERG I led was established because there was a problem. Staff with disability were subject to discrimination and sometimes abuse. They were denied equal opportunity to participate in the work experience because of multiple barriers – physical, technological, systems, processes, practices and attitudes and behaviours.

Addressing these issues isn’t just about employees with disability getting together in a ‘network’. It is also about them asserting their rights for equity and inclusion.

This isn’t a universal entitlement. In NSW the public sector is obliged to ensure that its workforce reflects the community it serves. So, employing staff with disability isn’t a business efficiency proposition. It’s a social obligation. Its also then about anti-discrimination and work health and safety legal obligations.

Consequently, precisely why the sector imagines that making ‘voluntary’ groups putting in work in their own time a responsible party in meeting these responsibilities is something I genuinely find utterly baffling.

Conclusion
The current backlash against DEI and ERGs stems from, I think, the absence of shared theory of function and role. The NSW public sector guide for staff network hammers this home starkly. It has no real theory, just a collection of platitudes based on no genuine insight about what might motivate employees to join an ERG.

Research into the impacts of discrimination, exclusion and abuse indicate that the brains of those who experience such treatment in their workplaces register it the same way physical pain is registered. Precisely why, then, should ending this suffering be a casual matter flicked off to unskilled and over-taxed employees? By ‘unskilled’ I mean only in the context of addressing the suffering of their members.

Let me put this remark in a more precise context. In early 2021 (I think) the NSW public sector expressed concern about the high level of workers compensation claims. For good reason. A substantial number of the claims were for psychological injury. These included claims related to discrimination and what amounted to emotional abuse of staff with disability.

The response was to try to make such claims harder to establish and defend. There was reason for that, but what struck me most was the absence of any acknowledgement that many claims were justified. I have detailed knowledge of several. Comment on this theme must be left to a separate post.

The goals of ERGs must be the goals of an organization in relation to the safety and welfare of staff. Here is mutual self-interest. An organization has a legal and a moral duty towards its employees and it could create a partnership with its staff to help it fulfill those duties.

The Disability ERG I joined in July 2010 did that to a reasonable degree, given in was a new approach. The ERG I led from November 2016 to March 2020 did that as well. In each case there was a commitment from the organization’s executive, from HR and from the ERG members.

Active commitment and engagement from all 3 (the ERG, HR and the executive) are essential to ensure certain risks do not emerge:
• Politicization of the ERG.
• ERG members, HR staff or executives pushing ideological or personal agendas.
• The capacity for shared conversation breaks down with a loss of perspective, misunderstanding and suspicion of motives arising.
• A lack of professionalism in how an ERG is led is not identified and addressed through coaching, mentoring or leadership change.

Ultimately an ERG should be part of an organization’s core business in addressing its responsibilities toward staff and be supported and resourced accordingly. For this to happen there must be a theory of what the ERG’s function and role is – agreed to by the ERG, HR and the organization’s executive. When these things are in place good things happen. When they are not inequity, exclusion and discrimination persist. It is not just the ERG that must be fit for purpose to meet employee needs and rights, but HR and executive sponsors and champions must be fit to support and facilitate the intended outcome as well.

The post’s title suggests a radical approach. What PurpleSpace demonstrated to me was that a thoughtful, disciplined and professional approach to Disability Inclusion in the workplace will deliver the outcomes that organizations and ERG members want.

I adapted Kate’s insights to suit my capacity and the needs of my organization. In 2019 and 2020 we were invited to present at the AND (now ADN) Annual National Conferences on the innovations introduced and their impact. That’s a decent enough acknowledgement of success – contributed to by the ERG, HR and the organization’s executive. What we achieved required all 3 to be working together in mutual respect, trust and harmony.

I guess that’s radical.

Radical thinking isn’t a solitary business. I was inspired by Kate Nash, supported by my department’s Secretary, the ERG’s Executive Champions, other senior executives and the Manager of the Inclusion and Diversity team. I was energetically abetted by the 15 members of the GAT and ERG members in general. As well, I sought and obtained the collaboration of other executives and managers, many of whom became Disability Inclusion Champions.

Kate’s critical insight that Disability Inclusion was a professional matter triggered a cascade of insights and innovations. My main contribution was that I ran the ERG as a ‘de facto business unit’ – and I had the background and skills to do that well. This allowed me to position the ERG inside the organization’s core business – where it properly belonged.

Michael Patterson
6 September 2026
[email protected]

Introduction
This has been an evolving theme for me for getting on for 3 years now. While my focus has been on Disability Inclusion, the reality is that what must change to make Disability Inclusion real embraces a far wider field of issues.

The Social Model of Disability is only one manifestation of the social models of inclusion that have changed the lives of many people over the past 60+ years. It is distinct in that it has introduced physical changes that have transformed public and organizational spaces to make them more accessible to people with mobility and sensory disabilities. The changes had made life easier for other people as well – parents with prams, people carrying stuff for example.

There are other changes we can see as well. Websites are more visually accessible – where web accessibility standards are adhered to. We can see signers in meetings or on screens to aid deaf audience members. Tech providers like Apple and Microsoft design accessibility into their products. Organizations have introduced workplace adjustments that enable staff with disabilities to work in safer ways. Accessible parking spaces are more common.

There’s a long list to demonstrate that life for a person with a disability can be a lot better now than it was decades ago. There is now legislation and policy and a broad commitment to continuing to make things better.

But a lot of people with disabilities don’t experience these benefits to anywhere near the extent we might believe. The social model has certainly created a momentum of change in the right direction, but it isn’t a standalone model. It has a companion component – a cultural dimension.

Below I want to reflect on why the cultural dimension is lagging behind the social dimension and why this is creating tensions and problems we need to recognize and address.

The bigger picture
The ‘rights revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s progressively transformed our cultures over subsequent decades because there was a lot of enthusiasm for greater equality and inclusion. Laws were developed and passed. Policies were formulated. There were plenty of people eager and impatient for change.

And then things toned down a lot. Greater inclusion and equity weren’t being flat out denied, just slowed down. Those of us who marched in the streets in the 1960s got older, got jobs, created families and mortgages – and suddenly, when confronted with intransigent attitudes, found we no longer felt inclined to be quite so confrontational.

What happened? Consider Iris Bohnet’s book, What Works: Gender Equality By Design, was published in 2016. The book description says:
“Gender equality is a moral and a business imperative. But unconscious bias holds us back, and de-biasing people’s minds has proven to be difficult and expensive. Diversity training programs have had limited success, and individual effort alone often invites backlash. Behavioral design offers a new solution. By de-biasing organizations instead of individuals, we can make smart changes that have big impacts. Presenting research-based solutions, Iris Bohnet hands us the tools we need to move the needle in classrooms and boardrooms…

What Works is built on new insights into the human mind. It draws on data collected by companies, universities, and governments… It points out dozens of evidence-based interventions that could be adopted right now and demonstrates how research is addressing gender bias, improving lives and performance. What Works shows what more can be done-often at shockingly low cost and surprisingly high speed.”

“Iris Bohnet is the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government and the co-director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. She is a behavioral economist, combining insights from economics and psychology to improve decision-making in organizations and society, often with a gender or cross-cultural perspective.”

Here’s my point. Women’s equality was achieved in principle in the 1960s and 1970s. But it took far longer for it to become widespread reality. So much so that over 40 years later a prominent academic is moved to publish a book with the subtitle – Gender Equality By Design.

My former employer has a decent record on gender equality. Its not ideal, but its also not terrible. In 2025 61% of staff were female. Women are well represented at manger grade or higher in most divisions. In my 19.5 years in the department 73% of my managers were women.

Gender equality is well in advance of Disability Inclusion – if only because there are way more people advocating for it. So, if gender equality has become so problematic there has to be serious research undertaken and remedies proposed, please imagine the under-researched reality of staff with disability.

These days I routinely hear reports of staff with disability experiencing significant levels of discrimination and sometimes abuse. The Social Model seems frozen. Something isn’t working.

Bohnet sees it as well. The intended momentum of change seems to be on pause – unable to go further in the passionate and fluid way that drove the early energy for change.

Why momentum freezes
It isn’t about moral failings but the limits of our psychological capacity to adapt without a compelling motive to do so. We are change averse. Change usually means there is a threat we need to adapt to, so the cognitive effort we employ has a pay-off – we survive, and maybe flourish.

Many of the threats we encounter now are existential. They concern our sense of identity and meaning. These are no small matter, but they are also complex, and beyond my capacity to explore in this context.

There are, however, two critical considerations. The first is that identity is fast becoming a singular theme of our time. The second is that we have a choice about how we respond to the challenge it represents. We can go with the cultural flow and become engulfed in popular sentiment. Or we can step back and engage with intellectual and emotional discipline. Why does this difference matter?

Popular sentiment is reactive. It may be idealistic, but it is about sentiment and not strategy. Feeling good isn’t the same as doing good. Feeling good is about affirming ideals and values. Doing good is about translating those emotions into actions that deliver benefits to the people we say we want to help.

This isn’t a complex or an esoteric matter. The tension between well-intended sentiment and actual beneficial action is baked into our cultural psyche. In its worst aspect the well-intended sentiment is cynical and manipulative, rather than just ineffectual. But that weakness may exist precisely because it is inherently difficult to convert good intent in effective action.

This may seem like a transgression into waffly philosophy and away from the subject making Disability Inclusion a reality. It isn’t. If we misdiagnose the reason for things not happening as fast as we would like the consequences can be dire. Misdiagnose an illness, prescribe the wrong medicine, patient continues to suffer. How is that any different?

Iris Bohnet’s research is an admission of misdiagnosis and prescription of the wrong remedies over more than half a century by idealistic, well-intentioned, highly educated and skilled practitioners. How could they have gotten things so wrong? They weren’t asking the right questions? They didn’t have the mindset that allowed them to formulate the right answers?

In an evolutionary context both questions are real, but neither imply incompetence or moral failing. We just haven’t become aware of the potential we have to have beliefs, attitudes and behaviours beyond what we presently have. To adapt to that we need an education.

I remember when our Learning & Development teams were championing Life-Long Learning. It was a good idea in theory, but it radically over-estimated the level of interest. And there was almost zero serious effort to promote it, to be blunt. I am a total LLL nerd, but I also figure that understanding why such a ‘good idea’ isn’t popular is critically important. We can’t justly blame those unenthusiastic for not ‘getting with the program’ if they didn’t agree it was important in the first place.

How do you become a Disability Inclusion champion if you have no insight into Disability Inclusion? You might be totally empathic and keen to be supportive. But your ageing mum might need attention, your kid needs your engagement, your relationship isn’t exactly bliss, and there’s crap going down at work.

So yeah, these people demanding equity and inclusion have legit concerns that we support. But, unless an organisation is going to make easier for me to engage, my capacity for cognitive concern, they going to have to take a ticket and stand in line as I work through the order of my priorities for attention and cognitive effort.

The Neuroleadership Institute (NLI) has formulated a neat model for thinking about organizational leadership – GPA. This identifies 3 key attributes for contemporary leaders – G = Growth Mindset, P = Psychological Safety and A = Accountability.

For those unfamiliar with the term ‘growth mindset’, it’s the opposite of the idea of a fixed mindset – the disinclination to learn and develop new skills. A growth mindset asserts the proposition that we can all change what we know and believe by application of patient effort.

I like the idea of GPA because it neatly sums up the critical elements of a response to change demands that go beyond the demands of formal organizational leadership and embrace situational and contextual leadership (which applies to ERGs and effective activism) and our personal responses to contemporary challenges in working environments, regardless of where we are in any hierarchy. This also applies to our role in any community.

The work of Iris Bohnet and the NLI are only elements of a general trend toward developing greater personal awareness of operating in our contemporary social and organizational environments.

The most recent indication of this collective and shared pressure can be seen in the critical commentaries on the introduction to AI. I make this observation only because AI represents a spectacular change potential in work environments, and, notwithstanding the massive degree of over-hype, the need to adapt intelligently is still compelling.

The key phrase (not yet a buzz word) is ‘meta-cognition’. We cannot under-estimate the value of this term. It is described as ‘thinking about thinking’. But that’s too nerdy. It’s about self-awareness and self-reflection. The danger signal is that us we are not aware of the hazards and potential of what is ahead of us, we can become cognitively debilitated. The alternative is that we have a sense of control over our destinies.

This may seem like I am veering into nerdy esoteric territory again. Far from it. We are familiar with the litany that we are swamped by change and that in organizations change is mostly done badly. But change is also experienced badly by those who don’t have a ‘growth mindset’, who can’t adapt in an environment that doesn’t have a spirit of psychological safety and which has no culture of psychological safety.

This is to say that it’s a rare organization that enables its staff to adapt to critical changes in a conducive atmosphere. And, if it’s tough in an organizational setting, how much harder is it on a personal and individual level.

What, you may be wondering, has this got to do with Disability Inclusion and the idea of a Cultural Model of Inclusion?

The shift to a Cultural Model of Inclusion requires two vital steps:
• An organizational commitment to going down that path
• A willingness of individuals with authority and/or influence to make the changes to their personal beliefs, attitudes and behaviors that are necessary to make any objective set realizable.

The fundamental reality is that any transition toward a cultural model requires personal changes in behaviour – and that requires focused personal effort to meet asserted standards of behaviour.

The changes we want to see are aspirational on a cultural level, and are, consequentially, personal challenges. We must evolve our beliefs, attitudes and behaviors in an intentional way.

Just agreeing that something is a good idea isn’t enough. This has become a cultural assumption built on myth because of religious beliefs rather than any actual insight into our behaviour. Were it otherwise we could easily reverse the direction of our feelings.

Disability Inclusion is beyond the empathic sentiment and about the gritty reality of making it happen.

As I have noted above the issue isn’t about ‘moral failing’ – the standard destructive complaint. It’s about our in-built resistance to being and doing more than we are. Evolution and aspiration are not the same thing. The former relates to an implacable mechanism and the latter to what we dare imagine we can be. But both work together.

We must always choose to be better than we are if we want to progress the evolution of Disability Inclusion.

The transitions between the ‘rights securing’ and the ‘rights honouring’ phases in our culture’s evolution are demanding – as all adaptive transitions are. The initial cognitive demand changes to familiarity and ease of engagement. This is where we are with Disability Inclusion as a secured right. That’s Phase 1. Phase 2 is the rights honouring step.

Think of this in terms of buying a new device, like a smart TV. That’s Phase 1. When you get it home and set it up you need to pick up the user’s manual and learn how to operate it. There’s a method of use that works very well. Or you can just guess.

The cultural model of inclusion doesn’t have a single volume user’s manual, but maybe thousands of sources – books, podcasts, articles, videos. And the piece of technology isn’t physical hardware – it’s our psychology and the organizations and communities we have created.

Conclusion
I am not arguing that there’s only one right way to do things. But I am arguing that there are critical and unavoidable steps to be taken to ensure that we transition to a rights-honouring approach to Disability Inclusion effectively. In fact, as Iris Bohnet reminds us, this applies to all forms of equality and inclusion.

In January 2025 Iris Bohnet and co-author Siri Chilazi published Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results. This was in response to the backlash against DEI that had been simmering quietly until Trump triggered open hostility. Bohnet and Chilazi argue that fairness is a better way of thinking than the familiar DEI themes.

Fairness is a great idea in a culture where rights have been secured but not yet honoured. But it’s still a cultural shift at an individual level – and there are many user’s manuals to guide.

Kindness at work is a growing theme – see kindnessatwork.com. I am also a huge fan of the Global Leadership Foundation, which works to grow the emotional health and emotional intelligence of staff in organizations and the wider community.

The ideal of fair, kind and emotionally healthy workplaces should a no brainer. But making the ideal a reality requires intentional, deliberate cognitive effort. None of the desired benefits and outcomes will arise by some mysterious process of aspirational osmosis – although that background atmosphere of good intent must not be dismissed as irrelevant. It is essential. It’s just not enough.

What does this mean at an organizational level? How do we make things happen? I have already argued that it is better to see Employee Resource Groups as Employee Reference Groups, rethink them entirely or to move away from the model of an ERG being employee-led in the traditional sense to a Peer-to-Peer model. The idea of an employee-led ERG is now hopelessly out of date [in most cases] and confers no benefit to staff who think their needs are being represented effectively to the organization. This set up also gives an organization a justification to ignore such an ERG as something optional or outside its core business.

But, more importantly, ERGs, DEI teams and executives must be talking to each other, be on the same page in terms of their understanding what is to be achieved, and how, and be capable of developing and implementing a mutually agreed plan. This might be demanding, but it’s not difficult – provided there’s a shared determination to make it happen.

Michael Patterson
1 September 2026
[email protected]