Author: mp2201

Introduction

I have been infected with the mad idea of writing a book. It has been haunting the back of my mind for some time, and I was resisting it quite nicely until Donald Trump said rude things about DEI hires. It wasn’t just that Trump was rude, but that DEI had become lost in the chaos of reactive passions.  It has become an easy target for people who feel vindicated by having someone to pick on and denigrate. Its tempting to hate back, but these folks have a disability that impairs their capacity for compassion and respect. We need to break the cycle of mutual accusations of being unworthy humans.

I started off this blog attending only to Disability Inclusion and progressively became aware that there are challenges that embrace anyone who has been excluded for any unfair reason. Disability has singular themes that other ‘diversity groups’ don’t have. A lot of our inclusion needs are physical changes to our environments – landscape and architectural – and material changes to technologies, systems and processes. But we also share the want of awareness and respect in the people we engage with that others also encounter.

Below I want to share some of the themes I plan to explore in depth in the book.

Inclusion is hard to do

It is easy to imagine that because we agree inclusion is a good thing we have a moral tailwind giving us a boost. A lot of people agree with that, and they are positively responsive to our efforts – to varying degrees. Others resist, and it is easy to see them as morally deficient.

I don’t want to attempt an essay on moral philosophy, so I will keep this brief. There are sound reasons lodged deeply within our psychology, and some say our genes, that argue that resistance to inclusion is innate. We may argue that it is now misguided, but it hasn’t always been so.

We are naturally biased. We naturally create stereotypes. We naturally form in-groups and out-groups. Those ancient reflexes can be activated and locked in an ‘on’ setting by historic, cultural, religious, community and personal life experiences. Such experiences may be objectively discriminatory and cruel. Being conditioned by such experiences, which may go back many generations in origin doesn’t make an individual bad.  The expression of those reflexes can be modified with intent and effort – if a person chooses to do so. We need to understand that making that choice can be immensely difficult for some people.

These reflexes are deeply embedded and have become unconscious. They served a pro-survival function in that we were triggered to make choices with little cognitive effort. These days, especially when we live in large, complex, pluralistic communities we constantly engage in automatic discriminatory behaviour. We would become emotionally and cognitively exhausted otherwise.

The question isn’t whether this kind of discrimination is good, but whether it is appropriate in every setting. We will miss out on many opportunities for rewarding interactions because we made assumptions about a person. In a normal social context, usually no harm is done. But sometimes it is, like when a stranger moves into our community and we reject them because some attribute we react to.

Here we have an interesting situation. In our private lives we are free to be as inclusive or discriminatory as we like – up to the point of engaging in unlawful activity. In our communities we are free to exclude and reject – even when doing so causes harm. But in our workplaces, we often have legal and policy constraints on our conduct which may conflict with strongly held personal views.

Is it okay for us to take our biases and prejudices into our workplaces and persist with them in contravention of the legal and policy obligations our employer is required to comply with? This is a genuine moral concern. The issue isn’t whether the inclusion obligations are right or wrong in our eyes. It is whether we honour the obligations put upon us because of where we choose to work.

Organisations respond to DEI in various ways. It can be an investment in shaping workplace culture in ways that deliver financial and productivity benefits. It can be a recognition that the safety and wellbeing of staff is part of the organisation’s core business. Or it can be an add-on compliance cost to meet legal and policy obligations. 

How DEI is seen will determine how it is resourced and supported. Is it valued as an investment in creating a dynamic, creative and productive workplace culture? Is it another compliance cost that diverts funds away from ‘real’ priorities? 

DEI policies and strategies are often efforts to persuade conformity with legal and policy obligations without ever clearly saying so. And they also attempt to persuade those who disagree with the policies to change their minds.

Compliance by a mixture of enforcement and persuasion is how our traffic laws are policed. And despite decades of such an approach non-compliance persists. My point is that DEI has almost zero recourse to enforcement and limited means to engage in effective persuasion. Inclusion is an inherently difficult goal to achieve. This is especially so if the organization’s leadership doesn’t have a clear, rational and conscious commitment to it.

The inverted pyramid of influence

There’s a principle in our psychology that says we are more likely to want to imitate higher status and more powerful individuals. But DEI strategies aren’t designed to first ensure that an organisation’s executive leaders and middle management are aware of, and committed to, DEI ideals and principles. Instead, non-management staff are most often the primary targets. 

The upshot is that when middle management and executive leaders aren’t compliant with expectations of their roles in supporting DEI there is no accountability. This not only weakens the power of DEI to positively change the organisation’s behaviours it sends a signal that there is no genuine commitment to DEI at the top of the power hierarchy.

This in turn puts pressure to drive the desired changes on DEI team members and the organisation’s ERGs when their roles should be collaborating with clear and unambiguous direction from the top.

The absence of strong top-down support for DEI also generates problems for how accountability works out. The popular term now is to talk of ‘proactive accountability’ instead of punitive accountability. Proactive accountability must be leader-driven because it reflects a commitment to growth and learning. This must be modelled from ‘on high’ because this response takes cognitive effort. If leaders are not making the effort, why should others?

Also, in-groups don’t like imposing punitive accountability on their own members. This is why non-management staff are more likely to be subject to punitive accountability than managers who might share responsibility but experience no accountability response. This is a very common phenomenon.

We assume that executives and managers will support DEI strategies and understand them because we assume that’s how it all works. It doesn’t. Power, responsibility and influence are hierarchical, and they don’t confer any magical powers to understand the intricacies and complexities of DEI. Like any kind of cultural influence DEI is trickle-down. This is not just talking the talk but walking the talk.

Of course, there are organisations who do all of this really well. They are led by people who understand and are committed to DEI values and principles. They positively influence their organisation’s culture.

The role of ERGs

When we understand that DEI is a core business investment and not an add-on compliance cost it is possible to survey an organisation’s culture in a strategic way.  From this we can understand where energy must be applied to foster inclusion and equity. Then DEI teams can be engaged productively, and ERGs can be enlisted as invaluable allies.

ERGs are often in the paradoxical situation of being asked to help and solve a problem that the organization has a responsibility to address, but they are then seen as volunteers who must contribute their own time. ERGs will do this because they know their members’ very real pain and they are highly motivated to bring the circumstances that caused it to an end – only to encounter resistance from the organisation.

An ERG must determine whether it has a passive advisory or active change agent role. It cannot flip between the two. The passive advisory role leaves the change impetus with the organization’s usually bureaucratic mechanisms – with resultant uncertainties. The active change agent role generates a host of complexities around leadership, structure and how best to act.

ERGs have a range of functions in service of their members’ interests so it’s not sensible to have a cookie-cutter approach to how an ERG might operate. But all ERGs must have a clear contract with their organisation about what is the problem that they are addressing, who has the primary responsibility, what resources are needed to address the problem in an effective way, and what is the status of the ERG within the organisation.

ERGs have a hard job to perform is they adopt the active change agent role. They must advocate for their members in an effective manner – even in the passive role. That means applying civil but persistent pressure to have welfare and safety concerns addressed in the complexity of personalities, politics, pressure on budgets and constraints on time and attention in getting procedural and behavioural change. That’s a messy space to operate in. Make a hash of it and an ERG’s reputation is ruined. Recovery can be difficult.

DEI is hard to do well as it is, but it’s so much harder for ERGs which may be run by volunteers without critical training, having to put in extra unpaid time, negotiate with managers to get access to paid time, and meet the challenges thrown up by their area of interest as well.

Without full commitment from an organisation’s executive leadership in supporting DEI, ERGs struggle to be effective. We must remember that a lot of critical research suggests that DEI efforts are not successful, and ERGs are ineffective. If the organisation’s executive leadership is disengaged, uninterested and not actively supportive, failure is what you’d expect. For an ERG encouraged to exist as a service to its members, that failure is corrosive.

Understanding the difference between the moral and the evolutionary

DEI has been driven by a powerful moral imperative, and that’s appropriate and necessary. It just isn’t the whole story, and we need to know what that whole story is.

The reflexes that create and perpetuate our biases, prejudices and willingness to exclude can’t be countered by moral demands alone. The environment that crafted those reflexes over hundreds of thousands of years no longer exists for us. I like the expression that we are using stone-age minds in a space-age world. Certainly, over the centuries since the advent of the Industrial Revolution [1760 to 1840] our ways of living and working have been utterly transformed. 

There have been two critical changes – how we live together and how we work. We now have novel communities that have formed from the waves of migration since the end of WW2 and changes in social values since the 1960s. Our organisations have also transformed and have become sites for ongoing experimentation in how we work and live together.

These days we have laws that require we do not discriminate unreasonably and that we act to protect staff from harm [physical and psychological]. These laws are supported by policies that organisations develop or are required to comply with.

So, whether we like it or not, we are subject to pressure to evolve our beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. Such evolutionary pressure imposes demands upon individuals to adapt. Some will, quickly and willingly. They are in a minority. Others will resist, sometimes with determination. They are also a minority. The majority will adapt with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

There’s a handy way of thinking about this. It’s called the 20:60:20 rule. It’s a principle more than a rule, but it works reliably. What it tells us most importantly is that this isn’t a simple moral issue. It’s a complex cluster of factors beyond ready volitional influence. I am not saying there is no prospect of positive influence, just that it isn’t as easy as the advocates for change fuelled by moral passions think it is.

Conclusion

What we call DEI is a critical approach to stimulating positive evolutionary change of our beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. But research into human behaviour over the past 30 years tells us that stimulating such change is a difficult business that requires knowledge and skill.

This has been vastly under-estimated, probably because there isn’t yet an intent to create a freely accessible body of knowledge. DEI is a business for a lot of people – whether independent consultants and trainers or substantial businesses selling their knowledge and methods that resource-constrained businesses can’t afford to pay for – or don’t care to pay for.

The other problem is that passionate supporters of DEI who see their cause as a moral one often have little motive to take a more clinical or strategic approach. This isn’t just a problem with DEI. It’s a common theme across the spectrum of human services, especially in the public sector.

I want to stimulate deeper interest in what it takes to create enduring positive change in favour of those who have been the persistent targets of cruel and exclusionary conduct. This is more critical as staff report greater demands on their time. Whether they are in DEI teams or ERGS they must develop the capacity to ensure their efforts have the best chance of being fruitful. But for this to happen organisational leaders must step up and play their critical role effectively.

I want to tell a story that shows how complex the challenge is. In late 2021 I started this blog to track my quest to answer the burning question I still had when I quit full-time paid employment in June 2021. That question was, ‘Why is Disability Inclusion so hard?” It is hard because, in certain respects, it is a question about why we believe, feel, and act as we do. Inclusion is at the core of who we are in so many dimensions.

Following the adverse political attention to DEI in the USA in late 2024 and early 2025 some have argued that it is time to move away from DEI-related language. While it is true that the DEI field has brought a lot of the derision upon itself that doesn’t invalidate the ideals and principles it stands for. 

It is an attractive option to think in terms of fairness and kindness, but I am not sure that this will overcome the resistance and objections to the inclusive spirit. It could be just a few more words to trash. But this is also a wake-up call to break out of habituated thinking that has become bogged down in an atmosphere of failure and exhaustion as good intent is shown again and again to be inadequate to the task at hand.

If I see a light on the horizon it is shining on a vision of a formal publicly accessible course for professional development that DEI practitioners, ERG leads, and more aware executive leaders and managers might take up. It’s just called Inclusion. If the book inspires the development of such a course, I will be content. If it inspires volunteers in ERGs to become more aware of the potential they have to achieve the changes they desire I will be happier.

Introduction

I bought David Brook’s How to Know a Person *many months ago. It had been sitting in my line up of audiobooks not so much neglected as passed over as books demanding my immediate attention were favoured. 

The book turns out to be an extraordinarily powerful guide on how to be a more inclusive person. The trick is to pay attention to other people as they are, not how you think about them. There’s not a huge amount to say other than if you want to find ways to develop your capacity to be more inclusive, this book is an outstanding guide. 

Below are a few quick reflections

The power of curiosity

What is that person really like? When a person is habituated to being subject to discrimination, they can express reserve and uncertainty. It is easy to appear to lack social confidence. 

I need Canadian crutches to stay upright. During a break in a meeting of my department’s Disability Employee Network [DEN] when everyone else was standing around chatting, cuppa in one hand and biscuit in the other, I had to find a place to sit and ask somebody to get me a coffee and biscuit. I sat alone. I needed a chair and a table to put my cup on. There was nothing closer than 20 metres from the group. Then the Secretary of my department came over and introduced himself. He said he had noticed I was off by myself and wanted to know if I was okay. I was fine. I just couldn’t stand with the others. We chatted the rest of the break. 

Later, when I became Chair of the DEN, I remembered that conversation. I felt comfortable reaching out to the Secretary and that led to a collaboration that was fundamental to the DEN’s subsequent success. 

Wanting to know whether I was okay became the foundation of a partnership that benefitted many staff with disability. Had the Secretary not been open, curious and concerned I don’t know what might have happened later. I do know that that chat gave me the confidence to build a partnership that was instrumental in transforming how the DEN operated.

When we are uncertain

It is easy to be open with people for whom we have formed a liking and assume there will be reciprocation.   But when we have no idea whether we will like them, or if we see something that hints that we may not like them, we can project our discomfort onto that person and anticipate coolness or rejection. 

Brooks reminds us that we can be centred in our own goodwill, and we can make the interaction about the other person and not about our anticipation. And if we are met with coolness, our concern for the other person’s welfare can guide us to want to know more. Why have they acted coolly toward me? This is better than reacting, feeling offended – “I am a good person. I am hurt by that response.”

It’s not always about me.

We humans naturally make our way in the world about us with a certain ‘selfish’ perspective. Looking after our own needs and making sure we are okay is natural and normal. But so is looking after the welfare of other people in our community. We need that balance to build a healthy place to live and work.

In the complex, pluralistic and diverse community that we live in it would be utterly psychologically exhausting to process every interaction with other people consciously. Our biases, stereotypes and projections are our energy efficient ways of managing interactions. But they are not well attuned to the reality we live in now. We can learn when to be more open to those who are not like us so we can embrace the diversity around us with curiosity, empathy and confidence.

If you see yourself as a good person who is inclusive and not discriminatory – not unkind or unempathetic, you must be conscious of the difference between your reflexes and your ideals. 

Living up to our ideals takes conscious effort to overcome reflexes which trigger anxiety and fear in the face of uncertainty. We can think ourselves open and inclusive but also avoid encountering people who are unfamiliar to us. 

It seems that there is a common thing that was epitomized to me in a story of an American senior manager. He said he was supportive of Disability Inclusion, but he felt he couldn’t approach and talk to staff with disability for fear of giving offence. Maybe that was a climate of militant advocacy in his workplace? But probably not. It could have been he came across a passionate advocate whose message was interpreted as being reactive to inexpert efforts at expressing sympathy for the cause. It could have been that he knew so little about disability he saw people with disability as somehow inherently different.

Still, had he the skills David Brooks explores in his book maybe that uncertainty wouldn’t have been as daunting to overcome.

Being certain isn’t always the best approach though

A few years back I was visiting an office I used to work in for a meeting. I was waiting in reception to be invited into the secure area. Suddenly the fire alarm sounded. It was a drill. I was on the 5^th floor, and I don’t do fire escape stairs because of my disability, so I sat patiently waiting for the drama to die down. I was sitting near the lifts, as I might be instructed in a real emergency.

A woman approached me and asked if she might find my carer for me. I very nicely let her know that I was a fellow employee, a Senior Project Officer, here for a meeting. She fled in embarrassment. I never saw her again. There was no way I was offended. It was hilarious. 

She was so kind. She was concerned for my welfare, and I appreciated that. I still would like to know why she thought I looked like a person who had, or needed, a carer. I liked her confidence. Had she not assumed I was in need of care I am sure our interaction would have gone more smoothly. But then, I wouldn’t have such a good story to tell. 

Conclusion

Being inclusive requires conscious intent. We cannot banish our reflexes, but we can modify them and refine them. 

There’s a reason the Good Samaritan story is in the Bible. It isn’t so much a religious story as a psychological one about being a good neighbour by not reflexively responding to impulses to not see another person in need as somebody worthy of our care and empathy. 

Hospitality to strangers is a common theme in many cultures around the world. In a few cultures reflexively killing strangers is also a thing. That’s unfortunate, but also true.

If you support the ideals of celebrating diversity and living inclusively you support the hospitality-to-strangers principle. 

But in our densely populated world the stranger isn’t necessarily from a faraway land. They could be from next door, from the next desk, or the seat beside you on a train. They could be that person sitting alone when everyone else is standing together. 

I don’t know how my time as DEN Chair might have gone in a parallel universe in which the Secretary assumed I was okay and wanted to be alone. I do know that how things did go was determined in a big way by an act of curiosity and empathy – by an act of inclusion. I am grateful for that. I think a lot of other folks should also be grateful, and will be, now I’ve told this story.

*I show links to Amazon because it is uniquely inclusive in providing information about ebooks and audiobooks which are more accessible to many. I encourage users of 3D books to buy from local independent bookstores.

Introduction

Make Work Fair by Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi was published in late January 2025. It argued that the adverse political passions targeting DEI in the US were a very good reason to abandon the language of DEI in favour of the idea of fairness. There is a lot of merit in this suggestion. But it’s not ideal in my view.

DEI has been denigrated by ultra conservative influencers determined to misrepresent its goals and how it has been implemented. Like any aspirational set of values DEI hasn’t been manifested perfectly, but that’s no reason to attack it.

In her 2023 book Left is not Woke, Susan Neiman argues that the Left isn’t Woke, but it has allowed itself to be identified as such. Being Woke has become an insult because it has become associated with the identity politics that inhabit the Left extremity of the political spectrum. The Right extreme employs the insult against the Left in general, and the Left has fumbled its response.

This fumble has hurt DEI and, by extension, the cause of Disability Inclusion.

What is woke?

Here are some quotes from NPR’s Morning Edition on 19 July 2023. The show’s host is Domenico Montanaro, and his guest is Elaine Richardson is a professor of literacy studies at the Ohio State University. They are discussing What does the word ‘woke’ really mean, and where does it come from?

RICHARDSON: In simple terms, it just means being politically conscious and aware, like stay woke.

MONTANARO: The word has a long history. It was used in Black protest songs dating back to the early 20th century, including by Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, the singer of the 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys.”

RICHARDSON: It comes out of the experience of Black people of knowing that you have to be conscious of the politics of race, class, gender, systemic racism, ways that society is stratified and not equal.

MONTANARO: Modern Black activism and the Black Lives Matter movement used it widely as a rallying cry. At other times, the seriousness of the word has been diluted, used facetiously and ironically on social media. And now the word has been co-opted as a political slogan on the right…

MONTANARO: On the campaign trail, though, there’s no sign of the candidates abandoning the word as they continue to use it to galvanize the conservative base around culture war issues.

DEI isn’t political

DEI is a philosophical value set accepted by people who identify themselves as either Left or Right – to the extent that these terms have meaning any more. Some on the Left prefer to call themselves Progressive, but folks on the Right could do the same – if the term hadn’t become co-opted by the Left.

Wokeness, as Neiman observes, is a term that members of Far Left have adopted to convey concern for just causes, but it has become enmeshed in identity politics through identification with the victims of those real injustices.

DEI risks being identified with Wokeness because it recognises the members of our community who, because of identified attributes, are subject to discrimination. Those who see themselves as members a of minority group within their community may respond to the injustices they experience in ways that don’t necessarily sit well with everyone. Identity politics can play out under the umbrella of DEI without necessarily being an inherent element of DEI.

This creates a complex challenge for DEI practitioners. The principles of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion don’t give cause to exclude advocates of Wokeness who see that being a member of a minority group as a bona fide political concern. A political response isn’t invalid, but it may not be well suited to a setting – especially an organisational one. This can leave a perception management problem that must be handled adroitly.

So, is changing the name the solution?

Name changes can solve problems. I like the idea of fairness at work being a theme. It presently lacks any political contamination. I also like kindness at work. Having a workplace culture that is fair and kind expresses two universal values that no reasonable person would object to – you’d hope.

A problem emerges when we think about to whom we should be fair and kind – the same people DEI intends to help. The how of being fair and kind runs into the same issues the how of DEI struggles to overcome.

DEI lays out principles at a head level in a shorthand way that can be unhelpful. Each word represented by an initial is a conversation that rarely happens. As a consequence its detractors have an easy target to misrepresent what DEI is about. Of course, DEI is Woke in the proper historical sense. It embraces Woke in the contemporary positive sense. But it isn’t Woke in the pejorative sense of identity politics that Right extremists have crafted. But who can figure that out?

On the other hand, fairness and kindness seem to speak for themselves – and from the heart. If we are being systematic, we might say that kindness is the action and fairness is the outcome.

How do we become kinder?

That’s a pretty deep question, when you pause to ponder it. But before we can answer it there’s another question to be asked – Do we want to become kinder?

I will guess that you do, since you are reading this. But can you speak for everyone else in your workplace?

Being kinder is what DEI is about essentially, but it assumes that the way to get there is via formal strategies that focus on individual attributes [especially those that make a person a victim] and training [disability awareness, anti-bias and the like]. This makes sense from a bureaucratic perspective, but it may also explain why DEI practitioners often struggle to achieve the success they desire. In this they are not alone. Efforts at organisational change frequently fail to attain their objectives.

Asking other people to become kinder without asking the same thing of yourself won’t give the best guidance on how to make that happen. If you explore being kinder yourself, you will likely discover vulnerabilities and uncertainties that can’t be explored and addressed in a half day Kindness Awareness course. Some things aren’t as amenable to efforts at training as we’d like to think.

There are better ways to promote the creation of a kinder workplace.

It’s complicated

There’s merit in DEI. Any effort at changing workplace behaviour needs a theory or two, a strategy, measurements and methods of accountability. But then it’s time to climb down out of your head and find a comfortable place in your heart before you devise actions to take. Changing behaviour, even to become kinder, takes cognitive effort. Hence it requires personal commitment that is best stimulated by demonstrated personal commitment from others.

It interests me that DEI training and strategies are something executive leaders expect to be delivered to everyone other than themselves. In one respect they are expected to know this stuff and be competent at it because they are executive leaders. But that’d be wholly unreasonable and unrealistic. It’s also unfair, and not inclusive.

There is an abundance of evidence that when executive leaders live what are considered the core values of the organisation its workforce will follow. We have a natural urge to want to emulate how high-status individuals behave. DEI isn’t bottom up. Its top-down. The same applies with kindness.

This doesn’t mean that we wait on executive leaders to be kind. Kindness is an inherent human attribute that can expand when unshackled from bias. This can be part of workplace behaviour by anyone who wants to participate in being kinder and strengthened by shared engagement.

What the top-down flow does is express a core organisational value that will permeate a workplace culture and dissolve those pockets of resistance that are responsible for most of the harm done.

Conclusion

DEI isn’t inherently political but suffers from the association claimed by supporters and imputed by detractors. It’s a difficult path to manage well. But its greater challenge is that it is often seen as an add-on – a moral obligation imposed from on high. And when those on high do not walk their talk, the workforce gets the message that this value isn’t important.

Arguably we have a right to be unkind and unfair in our private lives, but not at work – if kindness and fairness [indeed DEI] are our employer’s core values. And that’s about performing those values, not just saying them.

There is difference between complying with imposed moral obligations and personally adopting universal human values expressed as kindness and fairness – and embodied in DEI. That distinction is something each one of us must contemplate – and then decide how to behave. 

We can sit under the DEI umbrella and engage in our identity politics provided we are aware that our passions might wreck the umbrella. It’s not about whether our cause is just, just how we campaign for it.

There’s no inherent or necessary separation of philosophy and politics, but the practice of the former isn’t the same as the practice of the latter – and we need to know the difference.

Being Woke in the original sense is a good thing. But it can be enacted in an unwise way. The fact that credible researchers like Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi suggest walking away from DEI language does expose a very real problem – one of a lack of capacity to articulate a compelling defense. 

We have an opportunity to open up the conversation and tap deeper and richer veins of thought and feeling.

Introduction

Some of my former colleagues are still traumatized by actions of egregious discrimination and abuse perpetrated by those who hold positions of power. Others recall acts of astonishing insensitivity and bewildering refusals to act in response to access requests to avert impending injury. Former colleagues have had to resort to workers compensation claims for psychological injuries caused by such insensitivity – and breach of the organization’s obligations. Never once has the person responsible been known to have been required to account for their conduct. 

A former colleague and friend who had experienced an extraordinary degree of discrimination because of their disability was horrified when I sent them a draft of this post – now completely rewritten – because I argued that accountability begins with us all. Yes, abusive leaders should have been held responsible for what they did. But they weren’t – and that reality still causes very real distress. I wish it were otherwise. 

If we are ever to ensure accountability is an inviolable core value in any organization we must understand why it is so hard to make it real. 

If we want equity and inclusion, we need a culture of accountability that enables self-correction at an organizational level. Those at the bottom of the power pyramid cannot passively stand by and demand those at the top model what they want – even though they really should be doing so. 

Accountability can’t live in one part of an organization’s culture and not elsewhere. It must be manifested as universally as possible. As social creatures we tend to conform to norms – so to make accountability the norm to which others will conform we must begin with ourselves. This does not excuse past wrongs. But creating a culture that honors accountability might lead to reflective self-awareness by perpetrators and those who looked the other way. Well, to be honest, I don’t hold out much hope for that. But we must start somewhere.

My purpose here is to support the reader who might be frustrated or distressed by those who talk accountability for discriminatory actions but do not convert words to deeds. Learn to understand why this happens, and then you can formulate an effective response.

We don’t do accountability well as a culture. I think this is because we have a culturally ingrained reflex to see accountability as a punitive response.

I grew up in a time when getting a hiding from one’s parents or teacher was acceptable. Those whose role it was to love and guide us thought inflicting pain was the right and good thing to do in service of guiding our behaviour. No wonder we don’t like being held to an account – if it means pain or shame. 

There are fundamental psychological difficulties as well. We are more lenient on our in-group members and tougher on members of out-groups. I learned this lesson a few decades ago in a stark and powerful way

A few decades ago, I was urged to run for the role of chair of a community board responsible for managing a funded community service. I was urged to do so by the service’s staff who were distressed by the behaviour of their manager. They had been complaining about him to the board for months. The manager sat in on board meetings, so the staff were perplexed that nothing had happened. 

At my first board meeting, as chair, I ensured the manager would not attend and asked the board why it had not acted in response to complaints from staff.  There was a pause and one member spoke up. They had talked about it privately. They felt that taking action against the manager would be an act of disloyalty. Of the 12 members of the board 9 were managers in their own right in small businesses in the community. They understood how hard it was to be a manager so they couldn’t punish this guy. So they did nothing. 

This is a true story. It was the first time I had experienced in-group protection so starkly, but I had no language for it back then. It was just a stunning experience I filed away for later. Now I look back and realise that punishment was the only option to the board. These were blokes in a country town, and they couldn’t imagine acting in a caring or nurturing way in this scenario.

The big problem with striving for inclusiveness for any ERG is what to do when one’s organization, despite avowing zero tolerance for abusive behaviour is utterly unmoved when one of its managers or executives is implicated in bullying or discriminating against a staff member who is a member of a ‘diversity group’. 

How do we transform inaction into meaningful, effective and accountable action?

How should we respond?

For reasons noted above accountability is a complex matter – especially when it is seemingly absent. We must respond with insight, patience and respect. Self-righteous anger, or frustration, can muddy the message and lead to push back.

Accountability can become a chorus line repeated by people who know it is a good thing, but who haven’t yet found the need to look deeper into how it may happen. Nothing is more counterproductive than talking at cross purposes and with emotional heat on a matter everyone essentially agrees upon.

In my union delegate days, I was often dismayed when my comrades misread the intent of management representatives and generated conflict when there was no need at all. We can come out fighting from our corner when the other party wants to parlay, but we don’t yet have a shared language. And the reverse is also true. We want to talk but are met with defensiveness and anticipatory retaliation. Same problem – no shared language crafted from mutual understanding and trust.

The creation of a cultural climate in which mutual understanding and trust is necessary before anything else about accountability can change.

Making accountability a person-centred thing

There will be times when a punitive response to an accountability issue is warranted. Maybe it is the only thing to do. Being responsible for such an action is tough enough, especially if the individual in question is a member of one’s in-group. 

If an organization openly says inclusivity is a core value but does not respond when a leader does not uphold that value it is easy for others to see that, despite the talk, it’s not really. Under these circumstances a punitive response is neither reasonable nor fair. 

So, before we can muse on whether a failure to be fair, kind or inclusive merits a punitive response we need to address commitment to values at an organizational level. 

With the exception of 5 years (1996 -2001) I worked in the NSW public service in 4 departments. The commitment to values has been generally strong but the failings I witnessed were stark – and unaccountable. This included an alleged rape of a subordinate staff member by an executive. It was unreported because there was no faith in the accountability process.

The current NSW public service asserts its core values. Here’s an excerpt:

“All NSW government sector employees are required and expected to act ethically, lawfully and in the public interest. This can be achieved by adhering to the government sector core values of Integrity, Trust, Accountability and Service.”

I am going to sound like a pedant here, but please bear with me. When I see wording like “(All) employees are required and expected to…” I wonder why anybody would approve such a contradiction in terms. Required brooks no exceptions. But expected does. We can see the echoes of expected everywhere.

The 2024 People Matter Employee Survey [PMES] showed that 81% of respondents had a favorable view of the sector’s ethics and values but 61% had an unfavorable assessment of leaders’ decision making and accountability. However, we must remember that the survey’s overall response rate was 51%. These numbers could conceal a deeper level of discontent. 

I prefer to look at these figures a different way – as if people mattered. If 19%, nearly 1 in 5 staff, are not content with the sector’s ethics and values and only 40% (2 in 5) are content with leaders’ decision making and accountability a different picture emerges. The problem with PMES results is that there’s an openly declared ‘pass mark’. A score of 80% looks good until you see it in terms of people – 20% or 1 in 5 are discontent. Is that okay?

The survey ranks the score into 3 groups – 0-49%, 50% -74%, 75% -100%. The impression I get is that it is a bit like grading school work into fail, pass and credit. That doesn’t work for people, surely. 

Generally speaking, the 2024 figures seem pretty good – only 14% experienced bullying, only 5% experienced sexual harassment [but that might be close to 10% of women], only 8% experienced discrimination [of what kind?], only 4% experienced racism [what portion of the workforce is likely to experience racism.?] But again, that’s only of the 51% of the sector who responded. Non-responses to surveys are for a variety of reasons – including disengagement and despair. Even among respondents the employee engagement score is only 62% positive (2 in 5 not feeling it) 

The 2024 survey had only one key topic area (ethics and values) at over 75% (81%). That’s 1 of 20 key topic areas.  There were 3 ‘fails’ – action on survey results (42%), pay (44%) and senior executives (48%). 

I think the PMES deserves a deeper and more sophisticated assessment than a school mark approach. Official interpretations understandably are inclined to put a positive spin on the scores, but digging deeper is something we must do. What’s a pass mark when it comes to psychological wellbeing of staff?

The 2023 State of the NSW Public Sector Report shows that 13.2% of staff experienced bullying but only 25.5% of the 49.2% of staff who reported bullying were satisfied with the outcome of their complaint. 

Let’s put that another way. Only half of the staff who say they experienced bullying reported it and of those who did 75% were unhappy with the outcome. 

Some readers might object that not all perceptions of bullying are real. That’s true. But satisfaction with an outcome of a complaint is more about how it was handled than whether the complaint felt justified. Regardless, this is still a woeful number. 

I am not picking on the NSW public sector here. There’s no reason to believe any other public sector is any different. I just happen to know the sector well. I also have extensive experience in complaints investigation. 

Here’s an excerpt from the 2021 State of the NSW Public Sector report. 

“As with other negative workplace behaviours, the numbers are low. However, any level of discrimination and racism is unacceptable, and we need to work together to ensure that everyone has a positive experience at work.” This is an entirely sensible statement, but I want to draw the reader’s attention to the word “unacceptable”. 

It’s another soft articulation of a declaration of required behaviour. 

Bullying has decreased from 29% in 2012 to 20% in 2016, and 18% in 2019. So, a score of 14% in 2024 can justifiably be seen as a significant improvement since 2012. That’s a 50% reduction in reported incidents over 12 years. 

I am not critical of the NSW public sector, but I do want to point up a problem that is deeply entrenched in bureaucracies, organizational culture and individual behaviour. 

It is that if you require a certain standard of behaviour as an expression of core values it isn’t okay to water down the language and change required behaviour to ‘expected’ and prohibited behaviour as ‘unacceptable’. 

Saying behaviour is ‘unacceptable’ and that better behaviour is ‘expected’ is what we have heard as children from people who voice their disapproval and nothing else. There is a message that shaming a person for misconduct is enough. If we are powerless to act to hold a person to account, an expression of disapproval and frustration might be the best that we can muster. 

Even if the younger generations don’t have similar experiences those attitudes are already baked into organizational culture and bureaucratic culture.

The data on bullying, even in 2024, shows that it is still happening to at least 1 in 10 people. Okay, let’s change that and imagine 100 colleagues. Now imagine 10 say they have been bullied, only 5 feel it was worthwhile drawing this to the attention of leaders, and only 1 later said they were satisfied with the outcome of their report. 

Ask yourself how this fits with an organization’s assertion that accountability is a core value. 

Here we have several problem areas. The first is when we reduce people to numbers. The NSW public sector can look at the rate of bullying and celebrate that the rate has halved since 2012. Or it can be horrified that still 13% of staff report being bullied, reporting rates are so poor, or that so few staff are happy with the outcome of their efforts to seek accountability. If accountability is genuinely a core value that number should be 0%. 

There’s a fundamental difference between an aspiration and a core value. Accountability isn’t expressed as an aspiration. It’s what is on all the time. Can you imagine a public sector with integrity, trust and service being expressed as an aspiration? We want to get to the point where we act with integrity and can be trusted. I don’t think service is a core value, that’s just lazy thinking. 

Core values are what we embody all the time and what others expect of us – all the time. 

So why is it so hard?

Thinking a punitive reaction is the only response is ingrained in our cultural reflex –  that’s one problem. 

If we want a person to be held accountable for their actions but think a punitive response isn’t the right thing in any circumstance – that’s another problem. 

If being punitive is easier and more satisfying than supporting, guiding or coaching a person whose behaviour is in need of correction – that’s another problem. 

Add the in-group leniency and over-reaction to out-groups into the mix. 

In short, we can paint ourselves into corners and become unresponsive and ineffectual because we confuse ourselves by mixing up core values and aspirations. I think the NSW core values are aspirations and its dishonest and misleading to claim otherwise. It’s as if the authors didn’t understand the distinction and those who approved the text weren’t aware there was a contradiction. It is fine to have aspirations, but not as a string of single words. Calling them ‘core values’ makes single words seem more potent. We are trapped by brevity and then confused.

Researchers into organizational behaviour and effective leadership say breaches of core values must be responded to with immediate and effective action that leaves no doubt that required behaviour is just that, not expected behaviour. 

I am not suggesting a plan to fix problems related to accountability not being upheld. That’s a big thing to fix. What I want to do is stimulate reflective thinking on what we mean by accountability and what we expect – of ourselves, our colleagues and our organization.

The risk is that when we sense that accountability is lacking it is easy to become frustrated and disengaged. If we go this way our capacity to productively raise concerns about accountability will be impaired. 

There are some important takeaways for ERG leaders here. They are:

• Accountability is a complex matter, so any attempt to engage one’s organization on the matter must be informed, nuanced and blame free. 
• Nurture or coaching based accountability is initially preferable, unless the person in question is recalcitrant and irredeemably averse to changing their conduct. But commitment to remedial action to change behaviour must be present in all related parties. 
• Be realistic about what you can achieve. But also be prepared to have a nuanced conversation with your executive leaders. Talking to executive sponsors and champions first is a good idea. 

Conclusion

There is no doubt that the cause of inclusion and fairness in any organization is impaired if accountability is asserted to be a core value – and then there’s no follow through. There must be an agreement or protocol on how there can be effective and consequential follow through. 

Issues of accountability arise in several key contexts:

• Egregious acts that require a formal response.
• Failures to act, or misguided action that are generated by unintentional action, including being exacerbated by stress. These can be dealt with in a supportive manner – as a learning or developmental opportunity or just some help – and no judgement.

Many ERGs will have terms of reference that prohibit direct intervention in incidents that give rise to demands a colleague or leader be held to account for their action or inaction. These are necessary limitations. But that doesn’t mean that discussion on, and negotiations about, how accountability works as a core value can’t or shouldn’t be engaged in. Neither does it mean that an ERG may not be supportive, acknowledging the pressure middle management is under to be across many complex demands. ERGs often have subject matter experts who could be supporting over-taxed middle managers.

Accountability is a fundamental value that informs who we are as individuals in our private lives, and how we behave as staff members as we add our personal dimension to the character of our organization’s culture.

It is the one core value that defines the organization and creates a climate in which ERGs can be effective contributors to achieving their agreed missions in partnership with the organizations. Partnerships with no functioning capacity for mutual accountability don’t work and can’t survive.

I will come back to this theme in coming months because talking on such a complex theme requires ideas that are well-developed and language that is comfortably employed. And it may take a bit to get there.

Opening note

I have been getting comments from people who have discovered the nearly 2- year-old post. These comments have moved me to repost it. The need hasn’t changed, and I do hope I might inspire you to make a commitment to financial support. I am on a very restricted income these days, but I still contribute the very modest sum of AUD$10 a month. If a lot of us do the same thing, we can have a big impact. It doesn’t hurt us, and it helps our friends with disability in Bali immensely.

Introduction

I am not a fan of the tropics. I’d rather go to Antarctica than Bali, though I suspect accessibility might be an issue there – do Canadian crutches [despite their name] and ice go together?

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Bali – from Linda – a friend and associate I thought I had lost contact with. I had left a message on her Facebook page so long ago that I had forgotten. She likes Facebook as much as me, so years later she gets around to updating – and sends me an email.

Some background 

We worked together back in the late 1990s up in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales writing grant applications and delivering government funded projects when we were successful – which was often. We were a pretty good team and kicked some major goals. Linda’s career morphed into working on international aid projects, and I moved south to Katoomba to join NSW Department of Ageing Disability and Home Care. On one of Linda’s aid projects she contracted Haemorrhagic Dengue Fever in Vietnam around the time I got GBS in Katoomba. She was left with a debilitating poly-arthritic disease that created mobility issues as a complication of her Dengue Fever. Linda went to India in search of a cure and found it. It’s a wild story, worthy of a book or movie. 

She lives in India most of her time these days, but still travels doing humanitarian work. She returns to Australia regularly to visit family.

Disability support in Bali

For the past 12 years, Linda has been supporting a non-for-profit organisation in Bali called Yayasan Penduli Kemanusiaan (YPK) Bali, founded in 2001. Linda tells me a rough translation of the name is ‘humanitarian care foundation’. Bali doesn’t have a National Disability Insurance Scheme [NDIS] or even strong legislation to support people with a disability, so people living with a disability rely on…well YPK Bali and similar organisations. That’s it. To date, YPK has helped 5,234 people with physical disabilities, and has conducted 59,950 hearing checks. The organisation survives on volunteers, and grants in an increasingly constrained pool of opportunities. It does astonishingly well with what it can pull in, but it’s a constant struggle, and it shouldn’t be.

Bali’s population is around 4.36 million. In Australia the prevalence of disability in the community has been estimated at 1 in 6 or 1 in 5. I don’t know what would be a fair figure for Bali, but for the sake of this argument I will propose 1 in 10 to make my point. That’s 436,000 people – not all of whom will require support or services. Let’s say only 25% do – that’s 109,000 people, but if the number is only 10% that’s still 43,600 people. YPK is one of only a handful of services supporting people with disability. 

YPK was set up by Purnawan Budisetia, who is regarded as the father and leader of the organisation. He sadly died September 2022, leaving a gulf in skills in international networking and fundraising. Linda is the senior consultant, working pro bono for YPK. She is the only westerner, and the only one who can write grant applications and provide marketing strategies for YPK to help it continue to raise the funds that it needs to continue its work. The difference between Balinese culture and the European culture [the source of grants] is significant and this makes grant application writing a major challenge.

What YPK Bali achieves on what, for most of us the smell of an oily rag, is remarkable. For younger readers that image may be unfamiliar, but it’s the difference between a can of petrol and just the fumes. YPK Bali operates on the equivalent of less than USD$186,000 [AUD$282,000] a year. With modest resource it employs 23 staff, and provides equipment and services for rehabilitation, education programs, a mobile rehab clinic to villages, hearing testing for ALL children, and transport for clients to the YPK centre. That’s stretching limited resources impressively.

Why supporting YPK is a smart thing

You may wonder why I would think supporting a disability org in Bali is a good idea when I have been banging on about the lack of movement at home in Australia. Don’t get me wrong. I think supporting YPK has self-evident merit, but it can be a win-win as well. Sometimes taking attention away from ourselves helps our cause.

The contrast between Bali and Australia is telling in several important ways. The currency conversion is, at the moment, AUD$1.00 to 10,241.00 Indonesian Rupiah. When you can divide a dollar into more than 10,000 parts that suggests you can ‘get a lot of Balinese bang for your Aussie buck’. YPK’s annual budget of around USD$186,000 [AUD$282,000] is next to nothing in our terms. That’s around 10 NDIS clients [give or take]. YPK had 222 active clients in February. That’s as well as an education centre [120 kids in February 2023] and a mobile outreach [106 clients in February 2023]. 

Indonesia has a population of 275.40 million [2022] and a GDP of USD $1.186T.

In contrast the GDP of Australia is USD $1.553T, with a population of 25,

978,935 in 2022. Even so, we can scarcely afford our NDIS – and our aged care system is seriously underfunded. The prospect of people with disability in Bali being supported by domestic funding is a long way off. This is no criticism of the Indonesian government, just a reflection of the realities of demands on the

public purse.

It’s tough competition for funding in an increasingly constrained international

funding environment. Linda assists YPK by chasing international grants of 

around USD$30,000 [AUD$45,000] to survive. That’s an exhausting pressure on an organisation that isn’t culturally attuned to seeking funding on European

terms.

There is the constant risk of failing to attract sufficient funds.  In the aftermath of the global paralysis caused by the pandemic, donors have signalled funding reductions around the world.

Disability solidarity 

Climate aside, visiting Bali would be problematic for me because I would have concerns about accessibility. But I could not, in all conscience, expect publicly funded enhancements to the public space – as I do here. Even what I enjoy here in terms of accessibility isn’t ideal. But it is a huge improvement on how things used to be, and I am grateful.

A google search tells me that Accessible Indonesia is a member of the European Network for Accessible Tourism [ENAT], so perhaps I shouldn’t be so concerned. Still, there’s the climate thing for me.

As I became aware of how things are in Bali, I became acutely conscious of how immensely fortunate I am. Yes, in terms of our expectations, I am doing the right thing in pressing the issue of disability inclusion. But it also seems so much like a ‘first world problem’ in comparison. I can do both – continue to agitate for positive change and support YPK. These days I am on such a limited income I was thinking about having a donate button on my blog. Somehow that now seems self-indulgent. I can afford $10 a month.

Bali has been called ‘Australia’s playground’. It’s only been fairly recently that we have been committed to ensuring our own playgrounds are inclusive. I am a member of my local council’s Accessibility Advisory Committee and I have been deeply impressed by the commitment to ensuring that playgrounds are

inclusive. Great journeys begin with small steps – we must support disability inclusion for people with disability in Bali before we can expect an assurance of accessibility when we visit.

How to help?

There are presently three important ways to help YPK.

1. Assistance with fund raising is vital. Ideas for and help in executing fundraising activities are always welcomed.  
2. Skilled grant application writers for international tenders are immensely valuable. It’s better to have a team than a solitary hero.
3. Financial support is foundational. The disparity in currency values means

that a little in our terms can have a lot of impact in Bali. There are donation buttons on the website ypkbali.org. The website needs updating to better accommodate potential international buyers of products in their online store. That’s being addressed. 

There is a range of things we can do.

• Disability activists can widen their vision from their own imperatives to include a wider perspective on how they can help.
• Disability ERGs can add support for the YPK to their own philanthropic vision.
• Individuals who are people with disability or allies can set up periodic contributions and/or preferentially purchase from the website [when updated]
• Those skilled in grants writing can offer their services pro bono.
• Down the track I can imagine setting up an online community that can actively develop other ways of helping.

Conclusion

Linda has always challenged my thinking, and I have always been grateful, well mostly. It had been around 22 years since we last spoke, and it felt like it was just yesterday. Some readers will understand this sensation.

My focus on disability has been laser focused on my experience and context. That’s perfectly fine. But now that focus has been disrupted and suddenly there’s a far greater dimension to my appreciation of disability. Seeing a kid in

a wheelchair in an environment that will not be friendly to wheelchairs causes me to pause. How tough do they have it?

My immediate response was to write something reflecting my reactions to what I have learned. My second was to set up a AUD$10 a month payment to YPK.

A final thought. AUD$282,000 is only 2,350 people donating $10 a month. That’s not much, is it?

You can contact Linda via her email [email protected] or WhatsApp +61 419 427 274

Introduction

Reading Impact Networks has obliged me to reflect deeply on what a staff network is. The book is about human service-oriented networks and networking practice in general, rather than a deep dive into staff networks. 

We use the term staff network without really defining the term. What is a network? How do the words staff and network go together here? Is what has been created really a network? If not, am I okay with that?

Below I want to reflect on what I took from the book, including revisiting my own time as a staff network chair in the context of thinking about whether it was really a network. But first I want to think about ways to imagine what a network might be

What is a network?

We are familiar with the idea of road and rail networks, and electricity networks. Elements are interconnected and purposeful activity flows through them. 

We now understand that forests are networks of trees and other plants joined together beneath the soil as their roots and fungi create a mutually sustaining web – the wood-wide web. Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest is an especially inspiring book on this theme.

Networks are the foundation of who we are and what we do. They are based on relationships grounded in trust and mutual regard.  On an organic level they are the basis for ecologies. On a systems level they are the foundation of effective complex communities. 

Essentially, when 2 people come together we have the germ of a network. What purpose it has and how effective it will be in achieving that purpose is what we need to think about next. 

Creating intentional purpose driven networks that are effective in attaining their objectives is what Impact Networks is about.

A Disability Employee Network

When what is now called the DCJ DEN [Department of Communities and Justice Disability Employee Network] was created in 2010 it was a network in the sense that staff with disability came together 4 times a year to provide input to the department’s HR team on issues impacting staff with disability. At some meetings there might be 6 or 8 HR representatives present. 

There were around 20 staff with disability from across the state who had volunteered to join the DEN, and who came together only at the meetings. This was a time before virtual meetings were usual. The meetings started around 9:30 and continued to 15:30 -16:00. Back then the DEN was essentially controlled by HR. It was a consultative network. 

I changed that in 2016 when I unexpectedly became DEN Chair. Member numbers had crashed because of a departmental restructure that saw a lot of staff leave and we merged with another department which brought in new staff with disability, but who were unaware of the DEN. 

My immediate task was to rebuild the membership. That happened well enough, but I was still thinking in the same old way – the 4 meeting a year were the focus of activity. Things changed in 2018 when I was introduced to the idea of Networkology by Kate Nash, CEO of PurpleSpace. My immediate realization was that there was a ‘science’ behind this – and that we (staff with disability) could drive it what the network did. 

Over the following 18 months we built (or contributed to the building of) a network comprising:

1. 15 colleagues with disability from across the state, and with a variety of disabilities. This was the Guidance and Action Team (GAT). The GAT had 4 full day meetings a year when we consulted with invited staff from key business areas. We also had running conversations via email that seemed to be daily. The GAT became the heart of the network.
2. A supporting alliance of leaders was created. It included the Secretary, the Deputy Secretary Corporate Services, another Deputy Secretary who was the DEN’s Executive Champion, another senior executive (who subsequently became the Executive Champion following another restructure), and the Inclusion & Diversity Manager. The DEN had nothing to do with setting this up – other than establishing that we could be trusted. More about this later.
3. We grew the number of network champions from 1 to over 30 over 12 months. While some were immediately active, others were well-intended but in need of guidance. For a time, the Executive Champion at the time worked to craft a champions network but that work ended when they left the role. There was a great untapped potential there. 
4. We encouraged staff without disability to sign up as allies. At one stage the number of champions and allies exceeded the number of DEN members with disability. Being an ally could be cover for people with invisible disabilities to be safely engaged with the DEN.
5. I created relationships with the CEOs of PurpleSpace and the Australian Network on Disability and an independent accessibility consultant. 
6. I also reached out to the Executive District Directors, nearly all of whom were responsive and supportive of the DEN in regional areas.  
7. We set up program of roundtables where volunteer staff with disability told their stories to colleagues and executives under managed circumstances. The roundtables were run by a DEN member who had offered to take on this additional workload.
8. I set up and oversaw consultations between staff with sensory disabilities and IT staff on tech accessibility concerns.
9. We initiated or participated in forums where I and several other DEN members talked about the lived experience of being a person with disability in the workplace.

Creating linkages was one thing and maintaining them was another. I emailed monthly reports to all members and had a separate monthly Champions’ update. I also worked with Officer of the Secretary to ensure there were regular messages from the Secretary in support of the DEN going out to all staff. New DEN members received a welcome email from the Secretary. I later discovered that this was an extraordinarily powerful thing.

Looking back, what we worked to create was a genuine network. The Big Idea I took from the concept of Networkology was that what was needed was energy that was focused and steady. Meeting 4 times a year with occasional consults in between fitted the purpose of the department, which was in control. But it didn’t suit our purpose. We had to be politely but persistently impatient. We wanted things to change, so we took the initiative to get moving. Our approach was collaborative, so we had the essential attributes of a network – interconnection and energy. We were impactful. We were trusted.

We had the essential elements of a genuinely impactful staff network in place:

• The GAT and an engaged membership
• A strong relationship with our Inclusion & Diversity team
• A strong relationship with our executive leaders.
• A growing number of engaged Champions.

Key features of an effective network

The title of Impact Networks makes it clear that the book about effective networking. Making an impact is important to me. Why get involved in doing something that doesn’t deliver a positive outcome for the people in whose interests I have decided to act? Here are some things I jotted down while listening to the audiobook. 

• Relationships are the heart of networks.
• Without good relationships effective collaboration is not possible.
• Relationships must be trust-based. Without trust, networks cannot function.
• Networks are not hierarchical.
• Develop a deep and nuanced understanding of the cause of the problem/challenge being responded to. 
• Driving systems change – is a goal but should be envisioned in terms of “pockets of possibility”.  For example, disability inclusion might be a universal goal, but a disability staff network can effectively work only within its organizational context. If it does that right, then the impact might travel to a beyond the organization. But if fails to have that local impact there will be no enduring change for the better. We work to create the possibility of positive change.

Impact Networks has excellent advice on how to structure and run a network that can be scaled down to staff networks. Here I want to focus the idea of networks rather than a ‘how to’.

Building relationships and growing trust

There is nothing more vital to a network than trust-grounded relationships. I reached out to one of the executives in point 2 above to get some deeper insight. 

In most cases there’s a power imbalance to be addressed. If there is a mistrust of executives that imbalance is exacerbated. It is impossible to establish a relationship of trust if the regard is not mutual.

Executive sponsors and champions have an opportunity to actively engage in connecting with network leads and to have exploratory conversations. This can go a long way toward mutual trust building.

The message I’d convey to staff network leads is that if you want executive leaders to support your network, establish a relationship that can confirm your credibility and earn their trust. Regardless of who initiates the relationship, it should not be about one-one connections. It is better to meet with sponsors and champions along with other members of the network leadership group. A discussion facilitator should be identified ahead of time. Initially this would best be an executive – just to address any status anxiety that might be triggered in network members. Besides, executives may naturally want to take on this role. An agenda would be a good thing to have too.

Trust is always earned, never demanded. Sound leadership always wants evidence of, or a compelling case for, a value proposition. Whether its private or public money evidence of, or a compelling argument for, a return on investment is expected, if not required.

Trust is built on more than sentiment.  A staff network might be a good cause, but its ability to deliver desired/agreed outcomes is the ground upon which trust is established. Hence this is the basis upon which investments in the network continue to be made.

A group-based interaction has the chance of creating a shared sense of community with a common commitment the network’s purpose. We need to remember that relationships are not purely transactional. This can be a difficult thing to adjust to for network members accustomed to interactions that are not only predominantly transactional but also carry an acute awareness of power imbalances.

In the context of executives and senior leaders [as sponsors and champions] being members of the organization’s leadership in-group there’s much to be said for them taking the lead in establishing relationships with network leads – if building that relationship seems to be slow in happening.

The org wide web

Large organizations are ecologies. They are like forests. Their cultures are key factors in determining how healthy they are. Staff networks can take on the role of ‘forest carers’, looking out for the culture, shaping it towards inclusion, fairness and kindness. But this should be an active and equal partnership with inclusion professionals and executive leadership. Indeed, with anyone who wants to participate.

It is important to understand staff networks as intentional dynamic systems that arise from within a complex organizational environment to influence behaviour in favour of a shared sense of wellbeing. They are not apart from that environment, but an expression of it. 

Organizations tend to be bureaucratic and hierarchical for necessary or habitual reasons. But the organization’s culture is neither bureaucratic nor hierarchical. That’s where staff networks sit. Our vision for the DEN was that membership embraced sponsors, champions, allies and staff with disability. All were invited to meetings as participants.

What we created wasn’t perfect, but it did create a sense of what was possible and converted many possibilities to actualities.

Conclusion

All staff networks are ERGs, but not all ERGs are staff networks. Regardless, all ERGs engage in networking to some degree. Below I will refer to what staff networks do as ‘active networking’.

ERGs must decide whether they are active networks or whether networking is just a strategy.  If they are active networks, becoming familiar with Networkology is essential – and Impact Networks is a very well-crafted tool. I also highly recommend PurpleSpace, but that’s a membership-based org. You will probably have to get your organization to pay the membership fee.

If the response is that your ERG is not a network, I’d suggest revisiting your ERG’s mission in the context of the problem you are responding to. It’s not that I am implying a criticism. It’s just that ruling out being an active network is a huge methodological commitment to make. Maybe read Impact Networks to be sure the best choice has been made. 

The thing about networking, as I learned, is that you can do it sub-optimally and not be aware that you could do far better.  I was fortunate that I had an epiphany in May 2018. I could have been a passionate trier fated to be marginally impactful were it not for the discovery of Networkology. I see on the net that the name has been colonized by an IT org. That’s a pity. It should have been left alone as way of knowing how to do networking very well.

Introduction

I have been arguing that we need to re-imagine ERGs for some time and reading Make Work Fair and Humanocracy confirmed to me that there is both a need and an opportunity to re-invent the ERG. 

My sense of what we might do has been stimulated by Humanocracy. Its subtitle is Creating organizations as amazing as the people inside them. The essence of the book is that bureaucracies are not organizations that optimize the potential of the staff, and that other forms organization are better. 

ERGs are micro-organizations that are also vulnerable to bureaucratic sclerosis.

Here I want to explore some ideas that might free up ERGs to be more effective. 

What is an ERG?

There are 3 words here – Employee, Resource and Group. Some call these Staff Networks, but I will stick with ERG. 

Employee needs no deeper exploration. The people we are thinking about are employed by the organization. 

Resource leads us to ask what that is. What is the resource that is being tapped – or exploited. Here I don’t use ‘exploited’ in any negative sense – though some may beg to differ. 

Group leads us to ask about the nature of the group – how it is formulated and structured and operates. 

The ERGs with which I am familiar operate like a club or a committee. There’s a traditional leadership structure with office holders and a membership. The most common approach to selecting office holders is via elections. 

ERGs are created to address problems. (More about that later). These problems may arise because of the bureaucratic character of the organization. This poses the question as to whether the ideal way to tackle such problems is via a bureaucratic ERG. 

Contemporary organizations increasingly rely on teams with a light touch leadership. This is especially the case when team members may be more expert in some aspect of the organization’s operations than those in management roles. Hence there is now a greater emphasis on leadership as a skillset. 

Humanocracy also observes that bureaucracies generate hierarchies which overtax the individuals in senior roles relative to the workplace demands – more complex performance challenges and less time to respond. 

As well as core business demands, there has been a massive increase in demands to address staff rights as reflected in the DEI related concerns as well as universal concerns for staff welfare, health and safety. These greatly increase the pressure placed on middle-management – with the result that efforts at reform often stall.

So, if the problems that ERGs are expected to participate in addressing are in part generated by bureaucratic structures, freeing up the ERGs to deliver optimal effort makes a lot of sense.

What might this look like in the real world?

Clarification of an ERG’s purpose. 

ERGs don’t hold responsibility for solving the problem they are created to address. But they have an implicit responsibility to their members to drive resolution of those issues. For example, a disability ERG isn’t responsible for ensuring workplaces are accessible. But they are accountable to their members on the matter of the organization’s progress toward that goal. 

It’s one thing for an ERG to have a sense of mission and quite another for there to be a clear understanding of what the problem to be solved is. Maybe ensuring the workplace is accessible is part of the problem, but it certainly can’t be just that. 

The question as to why this is a problem the organization itself can’t fix must also be larger part of that problem. If the people with the authority, power, money and means can’t make a workplace accessible – why is that? How can an ERG contribute to addressing that issue?

In medicine it is well known that what ails the patient must be determined as accurately as possible before the remedy is applied.  The same logic applies in machine maintenance and other areas of skilled endeavor. Human behavioural services are notoriously far more complex than machines but are often far less well understood than medical services. 

We guess about the causes of behaviors and frequently misdiagnose. We often assign blame to individuals who are powerless to act as we desire. The remedies we apply thus have little remedial impact and often exacerbate the problem. For example, anti-bias training is shown to (a) be ineffectual and (b) sometimes make the ‘trainees’ even more biased. 

This is an important observation because ERGs are in the human services business. Hence, they are vulnerable to misdiagnosing their own mission and misapplying remedies. 

The organizations which sanction ERGs are also in the human services business – as well as other kinds of business. Human Resources is acknowledged as part of an organization’s core business – hence HR departments are staffed by paid skilled workers. 

But the relationship between the organization and its ERGs in relation to a shared human service concern is not seen as part of core business. This is even though the organization is technically responsible for solving the problem – and has a duty to do so. And because it’s not seen as part of core business it’s okay to have volunteer and amateur ERGs be part of the ‘solution’. 

Often, however, HR also hasn’t done a good job of defining the problem – mostly because it is a relatively novel problem and there is no expertise in this kind of identification and analysis. 

Accessibility is a handy example because it raises a host of questions about duty or responsibility and commitment to action. There are often tensions between the demand for action and the ability or willingness to act. This poses the question – why it is a problem that requires any intervention at all. 

The answer to these questions can be found in organizational behaviour and culture. We can pick any area of traditional DEI interest, and the answers will also converge on organizational behaviour and culture. The advantage of thinking fairness instead of DEI is that the answer is still the same, but the question is less complicated, less political.

In Humanocracy we see a similar stripping away of complexity in framing the critical question to get to a clearer, but still complex answer. Here the traditional bureaucratic organizational structure isn’t ideally suited to deal with contemporary needs – so alternative organizational models are employed. They are often thought to be innovations. But they are not – they are just more effective behaviors in achieving the intended outcomes – and applied to an organizational context. 

This matters for ERGs for several reasons:

1. They are often formed to address pain points for their members – so there is an imperative to get results. 
2. They are run by volunteers who already have a full-time job and are often time poor. 
3. Changing behaviour in organizations is so difficult professionals are frequently engaged to make it happen- and even so the success rate is still low.  Hence, is it fair to expect time poor amateur volunteers to do a great job?

The question we must ask is whether the ERG as currently conceived can ever be up to the job of being an effective change agent.

So, forget about ERGs?

No. That won’t help at all. In re-inventing ERGs, the role of the organization must also be re-imagined. ERGs are not separate from their organization, but an expression of it. 

They are an expression of a shared healing impulse. They are part of the remedy, but they can’t be effectively employed if the diagnosis is off the mark, or if the rest of the remedy is not also being applied.

In Make Work Fair Bohnet and Chilazi observe that DEI needs a rethink because of the adverse political climate, but what they don’t make fully clear is that what they recommend is the fruit of contemporary research. Humanocracy is likewise research driven. Contemporary scientific data (psychology and organizational behaviour fields) tell us that while our social instincts toward fairness and inclusion are on the money, our ways of doing things must be far more effective. 

ERGs re-imagined are potentially an outstanding way to positively influence organizational behaviour in favour of staff – which is, after all, what ERGs have always been about – albeit in a less clear way than we might now be able to see. 

Redefining how ERGs function. 

ERGs happen when staff come together to respond to a need to address a problem (maybe many).  The normal thing has been to organize in traditional ways. However contemporary work environments don’t favour traditional thinking and behaving any more. Placing demands on a small hierarchical leadership team doesn’t work if they don’t have the time to devote to the tasks at hand, or the opportunity to learn to be more effective. 

An alternative is a leadership peer-to-peer group of 12-15 members who choose how to organize to meet the challenges they identify. Some of the benefits are:

• You can get is a mixture of skills and experience blended with enthusiasm to make stuff happen. 
• The group can include allies and champions to ensure the skills/experience mix meets needs. Because it’s a peer-to-peer group difference in ranks or grades don’t apply. 
• Peer-to-peer groups don’t do freeloading. Instead, they have a high sense of ownership and mutual accountability. 
• A leadership group of this type has potential to form in novel ways – including splitting into sub-groups in a large organization and then forming a coalition. They get to choose how to organize.
• A leadership group of this kind can model high quality team behaviour and hence be an outstanding learning environment in effective teamwork and leadership. 
• If the membership reflects the organizational hierarchy and has manager and executive members, it can also be a development ground for coaching and mentoring. 
• In addition, with the right mix of skills and experience group members will enhance critical skill development in analytical and strategic thought, planning and problem solving.
• Finally, peer-to-peer groups communicate better, and build more effective relationships with other groups. Their internal cohesion enables more mature thinking, and more nuanced behaviour.

This approach can be win-win-win. The organization solves its problem. ERG members have their concerns addressed. All parties involved grow their skills and are recognised for the extra work put in. 

Creating such an environment not only increases the chances of creating a more effective ERG it also creates a professional development opportunity for team members. The organization gets a return on its investment and leadership team member also can get a return on their investment of time and effort.

I know from direct experience that this approach can seem risky. The stages of group development can get passionate – and may need gentle guidance. When I created the 15-member Guidance and Action Team (GAT) it took 12 months to craft a passionate and dedicated team as we worked through the stages of group formation. The payoff was worth the risk. The Disability ERG that I lead was very effective and influential.

Another reason to keep ERGs and enhance their effectiveness

Large organizations (300+) not only create cultures but manifest the 20:60:20 rule. This is an expression of the normal curve/distribution and asserts that 20% of staff will actively support, 60% will be passively supportive and 20% will be obstructive on any given matter.  

It’s a general rule but the principle seems universally applicable. Personally, I find a 10-80-10 rule more useful. Essentially the normal curve is the rule, but how we employ it is up to us. The essential takeaway seems to be that in any given population [over a certain number] there will be a portion that is polarized in either positive or adverse ways. So, to put this into context, in an organization of 10,000 people you could reliably assume you will have 1,000 who are very enthusiastic about X and 1,000 who are very negative about X. But, here’s the thing, the middle 80%, can be broken down in the same way – so there’s the foundation of a way of thinking about how to go about changing behaviour in such an organization in a strategic way.

If you think that 60% or 80% of staff are persuadable in varying degrees toward supporting a cause you can plan better. It also means that you have to be realistic that 20% or 10% of a given workforce will not be persuadable and may even be actively hostile or quietly obstructive. The point being that this isn’t random, it is reliably predictable. Depending on how pessimistic/realistic you are you can calculate the challenge ahead.

Hence, back to the 20-60-20 rule, that resistant 20% might be anywhere in a bureaucracy, including in key authority roles. In fact, there is good reason to think that authority roles will have more of that adverse 20% than roles with less formal power. The upshot is that ERGs can have a more critical role in influencing workplace culture than might be generally believed.

There’s a critical role to be played by executive leaders in shaping organizational culture but that isn’t sufficient by itself. ERGs whose membership is drawn from the 20% active and positive responders working with the positive 20%ers in key formal roles can shape organizational culture powerfully. The negative 20% will eventually change in order to conform – or they will stand out and leave or be removed. 

ERGs can not only key influencers of organizational culture, they can also be critical collaborators with other business areas on informing decision-making and feeding back on how the changes intended to address member concerns are working out.

ERGs can be essential partners for driving desired behavioural change. This idea of partnership is central to the potential efficacy.

An accountability contract 

Any ERG must be bound by a code of conduct and terms of reference to ensure its conduct remains accountable. Freeing up how we think about ERGs doesn’t mean easing off on accountability.

But this plays both ways. What is often missing, from the ERG perspective, is a corresponding actionable commitment to accountability from the organization. This is an immensely complex subject, and I am drafting a separate blog post on the theme. Here I want only to flag the necessity of it being recognised as a mutual and balanced expectation.

The bottom line is that ERGs must negotiate an accountability contract with their organization, and this should include a resolution mechanism for when the need arises. This seems to be absent from the thinking of most ERGs I have encountered.

Resourcing and recognition

By seeing ERGs as part of an organization’s core business several things can change:

1. ERGs can be resourced commensurate with the shared understanding of their role and value. This is something that must negotiated in a spirit of mutual understanding and commitment to shared goals.
2. The professional skills need to run an effective ERG can be recognised formally and membership of an ERG leadership acknowledged as a high-status position that has a meaningful place on an individual’s CV. 

Conclusion

ERGs must evolve along with thinking about DEI. They have a high potential to act as significant highly effective behavioural change agents supporting the work done by organizations to meet their obligations and aspirations concerning fairness and employee wellbeing. 

There is an abundance of research that is changing how we understand the challenges facing, and opportunities open to, organizations and their staff. This research must be employed to give access to updated insights into individual and organizational behaviour.

This research also converges upon a crucial and inescapable observation. The future of organizations and the wellbeing of those who work within them will depend upon the willingness of influential actors to engage in intentional personal growth. 

There is virtually no source of commentary on contemporary organizations that does not implicitly or explicitly convey the message that there is a critical need for greater psychological maturity and emotional intelligence. Our capacity for behavioural change remains resistant to efforts which are still employing last century beliefs and methods.

The evolution of ERGs into effective behavioural change agents is a theme I will return to regularly in the coming months. It isn’t easy or simple, and I am continuing to research and refine my arguments.

Resources for further exploration

There isn’t any specific research into ERGs. I reached out to Iris Bohnet who outlined methodological challenges for formal research – and there’s probably not a strong motive to do that research given the general agreement that ERGs aren’t effective in line with a lot of other DEI activity. With this in mind, I have cast a wider net to tap onto insights generated by contemporary research. The following resources have an organizational focus and have a consistent message.

• Make Work Fair [Fairness is a universal value]
• Humanocracy [Organizations should foster human potential]
• Tribal Leadership [On understanding a staff member’s stages of self-expression and awareness]
• Google themes like peer-to-peer groups – and anything else you are curious about.
• Podcasts – there is a range of useful podcasts that support the overall theme. I particularly like Your Brain at Work and HBR IdeaCast.

Introduction

The 2025 political climate in the USA has stimulated some DEI practitioners and researchers to reimagine that sector.  

Can we do it differently and better? A key example is Make Work Fair by Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi, published on 28 January this year. Bohnet and Chilazi argue that most efforts at DEI are ineffectual and should be replaced by a fairness-based approach that is measured and accountable. 

One major failing they noted was that DEI was an add-on, an extra, rather than embedded as part of core business. In this sense it is seen mostly as compliance cost to be minimized rather than an investment to be optimized.

Another key problem with DEI is that it has political roots that can lead to polarization. It is, in a sense, a legacy which should be honoured rather than perpetuated. This is nowhere more apparent than when contemporary research adds further evidence that the legacy methods and beliefs do not meet contemporary expectations of evidenced based practice.

No matter what our sentiments are our efforts at causing change in behaviour will not be effective if they do not conform to established ways to change behaviour. This observation is resisted because moral sentiments require less effort than informed and learned change methods.

We humans like to save energy – or at least imagine we do. Ineffectual efforts at changing behaviour do not save energy in the long run because the adverse consequences of unfairness and unkindness will play out.

So, let’s re-imagine DEI.

The power of words

Bohnet and Chilazi say that ‘fairness’ is not only not political, it is a universal value that all psychologically healthy people honour. Others, like the Future of Work Institute at Curtin University, say that ‘kindness’ has a similar quality.

Being fair and kind is a deceptively simple idea that lacks the head-oriented sophistication of words like justice, dignity and respect. These words inhabit a more abstract place in our culture and let us climb out of our hearts and into our heads where we can avoid personal confrontation and accountability for being directly involved in changing behaviour.

We are not good at the heart stuff as a rule, and yet it is where the secret to behavioural change lies.

Fairness and kindness are simple ideas anchored in heart responses. But surely DEI is more than this? Is being kind and fair all that is necessary? If neither are practiced intentionally, then, no. No behavioural change is going to be effective without intentional practice. However, it is easier to practice being kind and fair than being inclusive of particular needs, responsive to diversity and sensitivity to equity needs. You need to respond to 2 words only rather than a DEI manual.

This isn’t to say that being fair and kind is easy. It does mean needing to be mindful of biases and stereotypes that you operate with and setting them aside intentionally [and maybe with effort] when the situation requires it – i.e. you are at work.

What you do in your private life is your own affair, but it is a reasonable bet that being fair and being kind are requirements for groups you belong to – even if expressed in robust manners. You can select which group you belong to, and these may be groups which intentionally exclude some groups of people. A chess club may exclude people who play darts but not chess for example.

An obligation to be fair and kind can’t be universal, as much as that being a desirable thing for many. As a rule, you are expected to be fair and kind to members of a group you are affiliated with. It’s often a condition of ongoing membership.

As an employee you are a member of a group of fellow staff members. What distinguishes this group from most others is that you don’t get to choose who you interact with, or how. There’s a fundamental difference between, say, a sporting team’s club where you get to choose who to interact with more closely, and a workforce.

The requirement to be fair and kind applies in any case, but in the latter, it is a universal requirement without exceptions when you are at work. This applies not only to fellow staff members but to your organization’s customers or service users, suppliers and partners or collaborators. In fact, anybody you engage with as a representative of your organization is covered by the obligation to be fair and kind.

If I had tried to say the same using the language of DEI it would have taken many more pages. So yes, words matter. The fewer there are the simpler and more potent the message.

Driving behaviour change through accountability

Organizations which don’t see that fairness and kindness are core business requirements won’t be able to benefit from efforts employed to drive behavioural change. Not only will the implicit requirements to comply with DEI related legislation and policies nor be met, but neither will wider staff wellbeing obligations and expectations of customer/service user engagement standards be met.

I don’t think it is possible to guarantee that all present DEI obligations will be met by a focus on fairness and kindness, but it seems certain that many issues will go away.

Bohnet and Chilazi reminded me of the 20-60-20 rule which broadly asserts that in any given matter 20% of a workforce will adopt desired changes to behaviour readily, 60% will be persuadable, and 20% will resist. This suggests that accountability demands, and follow up, can be targeted. How that might happen is another matter.

The key point is that there’s no point in threatening accountability and then not following up or taking a scatter gun approach. Change resistance isn’t a novel thing. Neither is deceptive non-compliant behaviour. 

No organization benefits from ineffectual efforts at accountability. In public sector agencies this is more of an issue because there is no well-defined ‘bottom line’. Its easy to avoid creating transparent accountability measures for a public sector agency and hence making accountability on key behavioural change concerns much more problematic.

The good news is that fairness and kindness have such broad positive potential and are such simple ideas that an effective and transparent accountability process would be simple to create and implement – if there is a will to do so.

Conclusion

Rethinking DEI has the potential to reduce ineffective efforts at changing behaviour undertaken under the standard thinking about DEI and simplify and broaden efforts taken and the positive consequences generated.

I am reminded of one of the principles of Inclusive Design – solve for one, extend to many. As noted above I can’t guarantee that focusing on kindness and fairness will be a panacea. But I do imagine it will expose any residual failings in a climate of greater willingness to effectively address them. 

Greater fairness and kindness have the potential to establish a baseline cultural attribute that will, like a rising tide, lift all boats. It will likely make the more egregious failings stand out more starkly and those ill-disposed to be fairer and kinder also be more obvious. 

Nothing to do with driving desired behavioural change is easy, and little will change without intentional and accountable effort. Nothing to do with driving desired behavioural change is easy, and little will change without intentional and accountable effort. By trying to create greater kindness and fairness all we are doing is making the task that much simpler..

Footnote: It is worth pausing a moment to contemplate the greatest efforts at behavioural change in our culture – Christianity. 

We can have passionate debates about its efficacy (I am not a follower) but the psychology of yet further simplifying the ask to a single theme is compelling. It reduces fairness and kindness to love. 

Mark 12:31 says “Love your neighbour as yourself” This is also a version of the more universal golden rule – Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

The point of mentioning Christianity here is to remind the reader that kindness and fairness are not innovative notions other than in the context of DEI’s elaborate conceptual structure. A single principle is confronting because there is nowhere to hide – which is probably why elaboration is so attractive. It is also worth remembering this is an ancient struggle. We are making progress slowly. Hence, we need to pause at times, reflect on how we are going and jettison the intellectual baggage we have accumulated. We need to keep it simple.

Introduction

I was introduced to the idea of belonging in the inclusive sense a few years ago. Whether it applies to a workplace, family or a community it is a deeply powerful idea. 

This was no better demonstrated in David R Samson’s Our Tribal Future where he cites research by a Dr Stewart Wolf which commenced in the late 1950s into the US community of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Wolf found that “heart disease was nearly non-existent” in the town. However, it turned out that “the Rosetans typically didn’t exercise, were heavy smokers, and many were clinically obese.” 

Samson notes that the “secret to the Roseto mystery, Wolf and his team surmised, could not be diet, exercise, genes, or location, and therefore had to reside somewhere in the way Rosetans, as a group, were living their lives.”

We humans are inherently social creatures. In Tribal, Michael Morris asserts what made it possible for humans to evolve into the world dominating species we have become was our ability to form powerful groups of critical mutual support. Samson adds a fascinating dimension in saying, “Humans are compassionate and this capacity for empathy is contagious.”

A strong sense of connection and belonging is fundamental to our wellbeing.

We crave connection and belonging and when we can’t get it in a healthy manner, we will take it any way it comes. The epidemic of loneliness and psychological ill health that has become a hallmark of the past decade seems to be a consequence of our misguided hyper-affection for individuality.

All this has been reflected in the toxic environments in social media where offensive behaviour, mobbing and bullying and gaslighting have become pervasive. 

Neuroscience reveals that the emotional pain we feel when we are excluded activates the same regions of our brains triggered by experiencing physical pain. Despite our craving for connection and belonging we still can be driven to treat others in profoundly unkind ways. If belonging is our deepest need, withholding it becomes powerful. We can use such withholding to punish or to define who is or is not one of us.

It is in these conditions that we must think more deeply about our workplaces and the consequences of discrimination, exclusion and the denial of belonging to people we see as members of an out-group – as not one of us. 

Thinking about inclusion

For the past near 20 months, I have been supporting leads of several ERGs operating in my former department. I have had to expand my focus from Disability Inclusion to inclusion in a far wider context. 

I discovered that being inclusive in relation to one particular theme doesn’t work as well as we hope. You can’t ask a person to be inclusive of only your group and be an effective champion of inclusion in general. 

Being more inclusive takes effort that is particular and an intentional focus on modifying our thoughts and behaviors. Consequently, asking people to break up their efforts at inclusive thinking and behaviour into diversity group themed chunks is unreasonable – and it doesn’t work well. 

I learned this as lead of a disability ERG, but it took a long time before it sunk in. I was justly chastised by my deaf and blind members because I forgot about their needs regularly. My disability is mobility related, and I just didn’t get sensory disabilities. It wasn’t a lack of empathy or respect. It was just cognitive overload. I was focused on a disability in particular – and not on the person.

But if we are asked to think and act in a way that is inclusive regardless – just a kinder thing in general – the rewards are available for everyone [the includer and the included]. And the reward-for-effort payoff is high. We can shift from thinking we have to be mindful about specific diversity attributes and just focus on the person.

Instead of ‘disability awareness’ training we might have ‘person awareness’ training?

David Rock of the Neuroleadership Institute reminded me that efforts to introduce change rarely work well. If people see imposed change as a threat they will resist.  Change requires adaptation and hence cognitive effort and that alone can be enough to trigger resistance to staff already under pressure.

So how do you sell change as a reward – so that staff will move toward it and gladly put the necessary effort in? How can being more inclusive become an effort worth undertaking?

I want to suggest that being intentionally kinder to everybody may be the way to go.

How diversity categories can work against the good intent that created them. 

In an effort to foster greater inclusion we draw attention to differences in the belief that by making people more conscious of differences that trigger bias, stereotyping and discrimination we will be more motivated to overcome our adverse reflexes. I have had to rethink this rationale. 

Samson argues that we are inherently disposed to stereotyping and bias. But we are also inherently disposed to building and sustaining connection and belonging. The two go together, naturally. But they are not a contradiction or a paradox – it’s a necessary balance.

Samson says that age and sex are our primary biases because breeding and bonding are our most essential needs.  We are driven by a need to identify ‘fitness signals’ – indicators that a person might be a member of our key in-group. We can apply this bias even when we have no need for a mate or another member of any other in-group we belong to. It seems some biases are always on.

In our private lives we build connections that reflect our needs and our reflexes. Psychologically we have a limit to the number of people we can count as friends and allies. So, in a large complex community we must exclude to stay psychologically healthy. This creates a need to manage how we include and exclude – something we do reflexively, and sometimes thoughtfully.

In an organizational context we must balance our personal reflexes to stereotype and be biased against the interests of the organization. It is a rare thing that these two interests fully align. 

Putting aside our personal reflexes in favour of our organization’s imperatives may be difficult if we don’t agree. And even if we find ourselves in accord with them it doesn’t necessarily mean our behaviour will match our beliefs. 

There’s good but unflattering psychological research that tells us we not only overrate our abilities, but we also are expert self-deceivers. Put simply, while we are disposed to be caring and compassionate, opening up the scope of who is one of us means struggling against some powerful reflexes.

By drawing attention to diversity group categories, we risk highlighting differences and activating biases because we are stressing one only aspect of a person’s identity. This is interesting because we are drawing attention to what we want to be ignored.

Our goal as individuals is to be accepted as just another person who has multiple aspects to their identity. We are more about finding reasons to include a person than reasons to exclude. But not all fitness signals are visible. However, let’s be clear, so many of the ‘diversity group’ members are identified by visual signals [think gender, race, sexuality and disability]. We can activate biases from a distance.

I think Hugh Mackay in The Kindness Revolution has the right approach. Kindness toward a person gets us beyond the visual clues about what makes us different in some way and closer to the non-visible signals that a person is one of us.

Rather than talk about being inclusive of people we have categorized as ‘diverse’ it might be better to think in terms of being kinder to all people – of being willing to go beyond the stereotyping mask we have put over their faces.

But this brings us into contention with a deep reflex – not all people are ‘one of us’. That takes a philosophical effort to shift into all humans are ‘one of us’. We have to work at that. Again, we may believe we are that open, but we are probably not really. We have to evolve our ‘stone-age’ mind with all its reflexes into a consciousness that better suits our ‘space-age’ community and social environment.

Thinking about belonging

Belonging is a powerful idea. It is not just about being included. It is about feeling bonded to a community or culture or place. 

It was only when I turned 46 that my addresses stopped outstripping my age. I moved into my current home in 2002 and that still amazes me. I feel deeply connected to where I live – my home, community and place.

Before I left full-time employment, I had been with my employer six months shy of 20 years. I did feel I belonged, but I left because I felt less engaged. I felt connected to my team well enough, but not to the overall workplace culture. It was time to go. 

Contemporary workplaces are complex environments facing many challenges concerning demands on staff re workloads, the need to constantly adapt to environmental stressors and endlessly imposed changes, and a growing demand to address welfare concerns for staff. 

Public sector agencies are expected to respond to well-intentioned legislation and policies to assure staff wellbeing – but often without the resources necessary, nor the understanding of just how complex the task is. This development is necessary, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that workplace cultures are way more complex than the originators of the good intent understood originally or understand now.

The past 25 years have generated a breath-taking amount of data delivered as books, articles and podcasts. But it’s hard enough keeping up with immediate demands on our time and attention without having to adjust beliefs about how things work on an ongoing basis.

Unfortunately, the public sector seems reluctant to invest in strategies that can foster ongoing professional development and awareness of better ways of doing things. 

So where does this leave the idea of belonging in the workplace? It is still crucial, but it must begin at a very local level – the work unit team. This puts the focus on the team leader – and that is a challenge I will address shortly.

One of the great ideas is that when you have a sense of belonging you can bring your Whole Self to work. In a climate of psychological and cultural safety this sounds like a good idea, but its one I have struggled with because it can seem to be a naïve ideal. My immediate rection is that not all Whole Selves are workplace ready or suitable.

A more critical consideration is establishing a kinder workplace culture, so staff feel safe in revealing more of themselves. Bringing you Whole Self to work seems like putting the cart before the horse. Let’s make kinder work cultures first.

In On Belonging: Finding connection in an age of isolation Kim Samuel observes that workplaces risk becoming places where many may feel isolated because of how technologies are being used, and work is performed. You don’t have to be a member of a diversity group or a minority to feel isolated.

A common lament in public and private sector organizations concerns the level of demand on staff members’ time and attention. We need to remember that being at work isn’t a separate part of a person’s day. Rather it is a distinct phase and maybe an intensification of demand on our cognitive capacity. We can feel alone in a crowd – and feeling we belong there may be of little compensation.

There are good reasons to value belonging at work, but we risk turning the idea into what seems like a glib notion pushed by enthusiasts. Creating and sustaining a workplace atmosphere of belonging for everyone is no easy task.

On making oneself more inclusive

Being more inclusive is fundamentally about being more self-aware. And this requires genuine cognitive effort. We have to work at it. 

It is interesting that this is also true of learning to be an effective leader. You have to be inclusive of the diversity of your team members. Being inclusive and an effective leader require the same core skills. 

Here, in talking of the diversity of team members I don’t mean in the sense of diversity groups but the genuine diversity of staff. We are all very different, but we so often get treated with a cookie cutter mentality. It is just psychologically easier to apply stereotypes. They take less cognitive effort, and when you are under pressure that’s attractive.

However, near enough is not good enough when it comes to seeing and acknowledging an individual’s personhood.

Being a leader isn’t about position within an organisational hierarchy but about the ability to influence what happens in an effective and desirable way. The demands on leadership are the same demands on anybody wanting to be more inclusive – develop greater self-awareness and emotional intelligence and practice both through kindness and with courage.

One of the weaknesses of our current situation arises from the steady demand on managers to be more attuned to the needs of their staff as individuals – sustaining their rights to inclusion and equity, considering their welfare and safety needs, assuring psychological safety, building a high performing team and so on.

These expectations are in line with the recognition that staff as ‘knowledge workers’ are no longer disposable the way they used to be. Employers have duties of care and staff have rights to dignified and safe employment.

Managers are the lynch pins in the process of transition from the old set of values and practices to the new set – which is largely still aspirational. They have a deep potential to influence workplace cultures – but I think we are overtaxing them, overloading them. ERGs can share in the change demand load by spreading it around. 

Greater inclusivity is the fruit of kindness. It’s less complicated than a pile of policies, strategies and programs but it can deliver the same desired results.

Conclusion

I think we have over-complicated the situation by over-thinking it. Our good intent, the recognition of genuine need, and a sense of mission have driven a desire for action that hasn’t been informed by anthropological and psychological evidence.

We have framed the need for change in political and social justice terms. That was a good beginning – because that’s been the only way equity and inclusion movements have been launched. But now data has caught up with what we have always known to be right – and it offers insights to guide more effective practice.

We are deeply attuned to belonging to groups which affirm our fundamental identities. We are also imbued with reflexes that express as bias and stereotyping as we respond to our primal needs. 

It’s all good. We are doing what comes naturally. If we didn’t discriminate and exclude, we’d not survive psychologically.

But we must adapt our behaviour to respond to contemporary values and expectations that guide our organisations’ efforts at creating healthy and effective work environments. Like any evolutionary need to adapt to novel circumstances we must work at changing by engaging in intentional effort. It is better that this effort is informed and guided by data rather than being driven by good intent alone. 

We are inherently compassionate, but we can also be misguided and end up applying the scarce resources of attention and emotional commitment to no great effect.

Belonging is an important idea within the scope of our reflexes and our needs. But we can’t carelessly apply it to workplace cultures just because it sounds and feels good.

Belonging is vital in the wider community context, but workplace belonging is no substitute for community belonging. Staff with no effective sense of belonging in their personal lives beyond their employment are vulnerable at work if they experience exclusion. This means that any harm done can’t be ameliorated elsewhere. We must act with care.

I am increasingly drawn to kindness rather than inclusion as a goal – to the journey and not the destination. We don’t have to be concerned whether exclusion at work might be a breaking point for a staff member whose private life may already be placing them at risk of psychological or physical harm. If we are kind, then we may create the sense of safety and trust that gives our team members good cause to be open about their needs.

There are two points about creating safe and inclusive workplaces:

1. It resonates with our natural desire to be compassionate and make where we work a good place to be.
2. There are obligations on organisations to provide safe inclusive working environments.

But, as I observed above, we under-estimate how difficult it is to convert good intent into consistent practice. This difficulty doesn’t arise because what to be done is inherently complex or difficult. Rather the difficulty arises because we find intentional effort to become more self-aware and more emotionally intelligent hard work.

Workplaces are remarkable settings in which our aspirations to be a more inclusive culture are tested in a unique way. People who have no point of connection, other than the fact that they work for the same organisation, come together with a general agreement that they work together with mutual positive regard and respect. Sometimes that agreement is specific in the form of a code of conduct. This is also usually backed up by legislation and policy.

We have ERGs because this agreement is not uniformly honoured, and breaches are often not subject to an effective accountability process. Why that is so is complex and I am working on a draft post on this theme. However, I can say that part of that complexity is that we don’t do authenticity and vulnerability well as a culture. 

That means accountability is seen more as a punitive response than a need to nurture deeper insight and better skills. And we aren’t into punishing our in-group members. But neither are we comfortable about nurturing them in an authentic way. Accountability becomes the ghostly ‘elephant in the room’.

This post started with a consideration of the idea of belonging and then looked at ways in which we might be hindering desired outcomes by too much of a focus on attributes we want others to ignore. Even saying we support and foster inclusion and belonging can seem remote and cerebral, even political. It can become words that get signed off because the sentiment is a good one.

Is that what we really want? I’ll remind you of what Samson said, “Humans are compassionate and this capacity for empathy is contagious.”  When we create policies, programs and strategies in favour of inclusion we transition into head language. We could say that we are kind and our capacity for empathy is contagious – provided we get our heads out of the way of our hearts.

We are doing a decent job of being kind, but we are exposing gaps between ideals and reality, and we seem to be pretty bad at closing those gaps. That’s often that ‘elephant in the room’ and our response is more policy, strategies and programs – as if they are going to close the gaps by some kind of magic.

There is no substitute for greater self-awareness and emotional intelligence and the commitment to employing those capabilities in service of greater kindness and accountability.

Introduction

Being inclusive of people with disability is something we generally aspire to as a community. This is part of a wider willingness to be inclusive across a spectrum of ‘diversity’ groups.  But we live in a community that is as diverse in behaviors as it is in attributes. 

Stimulating movement toward a common goal of inclusion by admonition is akin to herding cats. If you want cats to go in one direction at roughly the same time you put a reward in the direction of the desired destination. 

My point about the herding cats metaphor is that it’s what you do when you don’t understand how cats behave. People are more like cats than we imagine.  They are not inclined to be herded either. 

I have been listening to an audiobook of Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst which explores the biology of human behaviour. It is essential that we do not mistake biological triggers for behaviour for moral ones. A resistance to changing behaviour may be more often grounded in our biology than our morality. If we understand this then we can appreciate that ‘good people’ often behave in ‘bad ways’ simply because our biology trumps our morality more often than we care to confess. Think of all the times your good intentions have been derailed by impulses and reflexes you haven’t had control over – get more exercise, have a better diet etc. 

I have noted previously that efforts at Disability Inclusion at a communal level have been going on for over 60 years. Various tactics were employed – including militancy to crack through the hard shell of the in-group/out-group divide. For a long time, disability was concealed from the wider community. 

So many organizations that support people with disability have evolved from coalitions of families who had come together to insist that their family members with disability were entitled to equal opportunity to live the best life they could. 

This resonates with me because in the early 1970s I worked in a huge sprawling psychiatric hospital on wards populated with people with profound levels of disability. We delivered ‘care’ and control in a deeply impersonal way. There was very little love or affection. In fact, exhibiting such feelings was forbidden. These days people with similar levels of disability are at home or in group homes with individual needs catered to. 

In the broader community we are progressively making the physical environment more accessible and amenable to people with disability. I am a member of my local government’s Access Advisory Committee, and I have witnessed an impressive and genuine commitment to making our public spaces more accessible to people with disability of all ages. 

As a community we are moving forward, although unevenly and perhaps more slowly than many think fair. In terms of meeting ideals and catering to the just impatience of those who feel excluded we can do better. But what we are doing is good – just not good enough. 

How can we do better?

I was reading recently that children who are praised for being smart do less well than children who are praised for trying hard. Since we are more likely to repeat behaviors, we are praised for we can imagine here that there’s an opportunity for growth and a response cul-de-sac. Where can you grow if you are praised for being smart? Only your ego can grow. 

With punishment we have a similar problem. Mostly it doesn’t work and creates negative emotions. If you punish a person for not being inclusive you are excluding them from your set of ‘good people’ and you are not making them feel more kindly toward the people you want them to be inclusive of. 

Punishment is also a poor response because it is rarely thought through well and almost never addresses the reason for the lack of desired response. It also assumes that non-compliance with inclusion is a willed act, rather than an unconscious reflex. 

Accountability for one’s actions is an essential value for all of us. But the idea that this means punishment is the best response is inconsistent with our best understanding of human psychology. 

With the proviso that there will be a few people who will be poorly disposed toward being Disability Inclusive for deeply pathological reasons there are some general assumptions we can safely make about people in general

1. We are mostly well-meaning and kind. 
2. We have a natural potential to be very inclusive. 
3. The extent to which we are inclusive is influenced by our experience of disability within our in-group (family, friends etc – we have multiple in-groups)
4. If we are becoming more Disability Inclusive a lot will depend on what we need to do – the effort required to adapt our behaviors and the extent of competing demands on our emotional and cognitive capacity. 

These 4 assumptions will instantly tell us that in any given group of people there will a spectrum of responses to the proposition that they might be more Disability Inclusive. 

Such a group might develop a culture of inclusivity which will stimulate its members to become mutually supportive. In-groups are more likely to support members who don’t adapt as fast as others. 

As our culture trends toward greater inclusivity individuals will also trend toward being more inclusive. If we are held to account for our degree and rate of adaptation the question is ‘What is the nature of that accountability?’

I would want to be praised for the effort I have applied and supported to be more so. 

A few years ago, I read of managers in the US who said they were supportive of Disability Inclusion, but they were fearful of asking about disability (of which they were ignorant) lest they give offence. 

My immediate response was to be disappointed that the advocates of Disability Inclusion had contributed to such an atmosphere of anxiety. But I knew from my own experience that this was not unusual. When I became chair of a disability ERG in 2016, I realised that members were frustrated and impatient and some were understandably angry. But othering those who seemed to block our aspirations wasn’t the way to go. 

Over the next 3 years I worked to create an openness that enabled a frank two-way exchange of thoughts, a relentless spirit of civility and positivity, and an approach that was strictly professional. It has been generally acknowledged that we achieved a lot during that time. 

But even so, I left my role still without understanding why there was resistance to Disability Inclusion. 

Experiments in changing our behaviour

I quit full-time work in June 2021 and undertook an inquiry into how to do Disability Inclusion better. I wanted to understand why there was resistance from people who were sympathetic to the cause and who were also helpful.  What were the limits to goodwill? 

What became an obvious danger was too narrow a focus on Disability Inclusion. On advice from a former colleague and Manager Inclusion & Diversity I read Iris Bohnet’s What Works: Gender Equality by Design. This was an exploration of why the promise of gender equity wasn’t being realised. So, the problem wasn’t disability alone but inclusion in general. We were dealing with something fundamental to the human psyche, something hardwired in our behaviour. 

Over the past 4 decades I have been reading in management theories – how to manage workforce members to get the best performance from them in service of organizational goals. There is a tremendous amount of research on management and leadership. There are university business schools and businesses devoted to crafting better people managers and leaders. 

In recent years in the US there seems to be a growing backlash against DEI. From the various comments I hear and read it is apparent that DEI has become profoundly misunderstood and misrepresented. That suggests to me that at the very least this is down to the advocates. If we can’t get it right, if we don’t understand what we are doing it isn’t reasonable to assume supporters, let alone the skeptics and opponents (regardless of their motivation), are going to shift their positions in the direction we desire. 

I can think of no human environment that has been subject to as much scrutiny and analysis as the workplace. Organizations continue to be experiments in collective endeavors in service or for profit. 

I have worked in 4 federal and 5 state departments spanning 5 decades (I started young) and over that time the public sector work environment has been utterly transformed. The environment I started in and the one I left in have one thing in common – each (and all in between) reflected the culture of the day. What has transformed the most has been attitudes toward staff – especially their safety and welfare. Even so staff are still exposed to ongoing situations where their wellbeing is at risk.

One of the most important developments in management and leadership practice has been the degree to which these roles have become so much more demanding of a manager/leader in terms of their emotional intelligence and maturity. There’s an interpersonal moral imperative imposed upon individuals that wasn’t there a few decades ago. These roles require personal growth in ways they never used to. They have become (in the literature at least) personal stretch roles. This isn’t playing out widely in practice because the insights from experimentation and research are applied very unevenly. The demands on managers/leaders aren’t matched by enabling support. 

What has this to do with advocates of Disability Inclusion? Managers and leaders are charged with changing organizations and workforces, and Disability Inclusion advocates and activists work with the same cloth, but with a fraction of the insight and skill demand. 

Contemporary organizations are experiments in evolving human behaviour to be more productive and keep staff safe at the same time. That’s stretching our collective ability to work well together. 

Inclusion (disability and all the rest of the diversity groups) is an additional stretch factor. We are asking a lot of people of goodwill, and we are not doing as well as we hope. 

There is an option for any diversity advocate to become better skilled in, and more knowledgeable about, fostering more inclusive behaviour in workforces.

Conclusion

As a community we are engaged in a shared stretch exercise as we move beyond ancient prejudices and biases toward a harmonious diverse and pluralistic shared reality (present adverse currents notwithstanding).

Certainly, for the past quarter century our workplaces have been Petrie dishes in which organizations have experimented with ways to turn moral imperatives like inclusion and equity into shared valued experiences. But the efforts have often been haphazard – with more expectation from on high than realistic support.

We are still entranced by the cognitive silver bullet delusion that insists that information and injunction alone are sufficient to generate change. This has never been true. We can’t behave that way. We are not reliably good at changing our own behaviours in line with even urgent personal needs. Changing any behaviour is hard if we misattribute the cause of the need and misdiagnose the problem.

It is precisely because we are inherently disposed to be more inclusive that we have the problem we now have – things aren’t moving fast enough. This is more like a traffic jam than a breakdown. We are all going in the same direction but for different reasons and with different destinations (an excellent image of diversity) – and in doing so we inadvertently impede others in their efforts to get to where they want to be.

Changing our behaviour to make inclusion work in a more fluid way takes effort that will be better rewarded if it is guided by insight and patience.