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]