Author: mp2201

Introduction

A friend sent me links to a set of 4 essays on neurodiversity from the Mad in Americawebsite. I have put the links at the end. The authors are John Cromby (Professor of Psychology) and Lucy Johnstone (Clinical Psychologist) and the essays were written in July and August 2024.

The essays are a thorough and thoughtful survey of the complexities, cautions and unintended consequences arising from the growth in interest in neurodiversity. They are:

• Part 1: Neurodiversity–What Exactly Does It Mean?
• Part 2: Are We All Neurodivergent Nowadays?
• Part 3: Neuro-Authenticity, Neuro-Identities, and the Neuro-Industry
• Part 4: Neurodiversity: New Paradigm, or Trojan Horse?

Reflection

The last paragraph of the first essay articulates a sentiment that I share: 

Perhaps we need a better, less contradictory way of acknowledging and accepting our human struggles and skills, similarities and differences. And perhaps we need to think more deeply about why it is so hard to do this. Meanwhile, it seems that much of this confusion could be avoided if we dropped the ‘neuro’ prefix. We are all diverse. We want to live in a society that

accepts all of us. Let us celebrate diversity, while being appropriately cautious about neurodiversity as a way of achieving this.

Conclusion

The topic of neurodiversity is important to all of us. The term was developed by an Australian sociologist Judy Singer in 1997. She proposed it as a catalyst, as an “umbrella term”, in aid of a political movement for human rights. Now, 28 years later, it’s time to reflect, take stock and think about whether the term has arrived at its ‘best before date’.

Do, please, read the essays.

Part 1: Neurodiversity–What Exactly Does It Mean?
   https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/07/part-1-neurodiversity/

Part 2: Are We All Neurodivergent Nowadays?
   https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/07/part-2-are-we-all-neurodivergent-nowadays/

Part 3: Neuro-Authenticity, Neuro-Identities, and the Neuro-Industry
   https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/07/part-3-neuro-authenticity-neuro-identities-and-the-neuro-industry/

Part 4: Neurodiversity: New Paradigm, or Trojan Horse?
   https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/08/part-4-neurodiversity-new-paradigm-or-trojan-horse/

Introduction

Following on from my last post when I introduced the idea of the peer-to-peer model for ERG structures I want to knit together some key ideas drawn from a variety of sources. These are: 

• PurpleSpace’s Networkology – the idea that’s there’s at least an intellectual discipline behind how an ERG operates.
• Impact Networks by David Ehrlichman
• Humanocracy by Gary Hamel & Michele Zanini
• The manager who said the R in ERG should stand for Reference and not Resource.
• A varied set of sources thinking about teams and responding to operational challenges.

Why the staff association model doesn’t work

Staff associations are fine for social clubs and sports teams. I don’t have it in for them. They are just not how you address organisational issues which have serious legal consequences.

In NSW, at the moment, there is a move to alter workers’ compensation legislation to make it harder for people claiming psychological injury to pursue their claims. I agree there is a need to address what seems to be an excess of claims. But I disagree with the proposed remedy.

Workplace induced psychological injury is a serious problem. So psychological distress caused by exclusion and discrimination must be understood as a work health and safety concern. 

Back in 2011, as a member of a Disability ERG, I asked whether the exclusion experienced by staff with disabilities could be seen as a work health and safety issue and was promptly told it could not. The reaction was such that I decided not to press the matter. I had clearly touched a raw nerve.

Of course, the reaction was ridiculous. It was plainly a WHS matter. But admitting that it was would open a can of worms who would not be obedient to orders to get back in the can.

Ultimately fostering inclusion and psychological safety should be a whole of organization affair and integrated fully into an organization’s core business. It should be neither optional nor unskilled.

The function of an ERG should be to assist an organisation to end illegal discrimination and exclusion and to significantly reduce an organisation’s exposure to legal liability. The logic should be that the organisation is highly motivated to reduce its exposure, and the staff should be highly motivated to end their suffering. This should be a win-win. But it isn’t. There should be shared high motivation to achieve a common goal. But there isn’t. Why? As I have repeatedly asserted, answering this question has been a personal mission since early 2017. That’s 8 years ago. Still no answer? I am a bit thick? No. It’s complicated and I have needed to learn a lot.

So, here’s my present situation – why are organisations still okay with using a staff association model to address what should be an urgent staff welfare concern? Why think that a bunch of volunteer amateurs can be the magic solution to the puzzle that your own DEI teams haven’t been able to solve?

Time to move on

The peer-to-peer model is my present rough alternative. I say ‘rough’ because it hasn’t been trialled and refined. It is predicated on several critical notions.

The first is that organisations must move away from any assumption that an ERG is just for the subordinate ranks. It must be representative of the organisation and ensure that membership includes senior executives and senior managers. They can still be sponsors and champions, but they are members and not external extras doing the ERG a favour.

The second is that the ERGs must reflect contemporary methods. A project-based reference team can meet the needs of organisation and staff in the sense that it takes a professional approach to addressing the needs of the membership (ending exclusion and discrimination) and meeting the responsibilities of the organisation (eliminating exclusion and discrimination).

This is part of core business. It’s not an add-on or an extra. In the public sector it’s about conforming with legislation and following policy. Doing so is core business, not a nice thing to do when time and resources allow. Again, why do this with volunteer and amateur ERG members who are also time poor and unsupported by their managers and executives? It makes no sense, when you think about it deeply.

Conclusion

Below is my current version of the peer-to-peer model. It’s not a destination but a starting point. It’s something to trigger thinking about what might work best.

The peer-to-peer network model

Essential argument

Staff networks have been based on a traditional hierarchical and bureaucratic model. It is important to ask whether this fits current cultural, workplace and operational trends and needs.

A peer-to-peer network model is team-based with a capacity to be flexible, distributed and localized when doing so is advantageous. It also spreads the workload around. It diffuses the leadership burden in a way that enables adaptation to disruptions and the absences of key people.

It is a more dynamic and responsive operational model better suited to contemporary workplace realities – especially time poverty.

Basic structure

A Core Advisory Team. This is a team of subject matter experts specific to the network. It includes the sponsor and champions who bring higher level organizational expertise 

At least 3 coordinators.  Their job is to organize people and ensure an activity is well-run. But they don’t run the activity. 

The Core Advisory Team (CAT) can be standing and relatively fixed or drawn from network members as required. Members can volunteer to participate in the CAT in an ongoing capacity or as needed.

Areas of expertise needed:

• Coordination and collaboration 
• Organizational insights
• Maintenance of intranet site
• Communication
• Mentoring and coaching
• Special interests related to the network’s theme.

Features

• Takes a distributed network approach with an organising hub. 
• Allows for member-initiated or requested activity at local or divisional level. 
• Supports emergence of special interest-based action which might suit a specific division or business area. 
• Enables the creation of SME sub-groups in particular divisions and enable division-based leadership so network can address multiple issues without taxing central leadership
• Fosters specific competences and capability-based leadership and action.
• The network can engage in whole-of-network action or division by division activity as best suits member needs.
• Primary administration demand is creation and maintenance of member demographics and mailing list. 
• Communications maintenance can be done by a small SME team – Teams, intranet and email. 
• CAT team engages in accountable professional activity that can be put on a CV as a credible element (this requires organization support to promote the status of networks).
• The sponsor and champions have no leadership or supervisory role. But are team peers with specific expertise. Engagement at this level will enhance their ability to perform their sponsor and champion roles. These roles might adopt a coaching or mentoring approach – rather than advisory or problem solving.
• All networks have a code of conduct that governs all activities. 
• Organization recognises that members of CATs are engaging in professional development roles like any other role within the organization. CAT members are eligible to participate in any learning and development opportunities relevant to their network roles. 
• Coordinator roles determined by competitive application. 
• Other CAT roles are determined via EOI and assessed by coordinators and champions – but this is more about excluding applicants who do not meet selection criteria than selecting for superior capabilities. This approach creates a ‘talent pool’ that can supply issue or project specific CAT members.

Introduction

I have come to the end of a 2-year casual consultancy with my former employer, working with leads of ERGs. I know I was of great help to some. There were elements that frustrated and disappointed me as well. That aside, the experience necessitated me taking a deeper dive into what an ERG is and how it operates, and what Inclusion is about, than I understood at the commencement of my engagement.

Below I want to reflect on what I learned about ERGs and Inclusion. 

One ERG Lead is not like the other

There are some basic rules about effective leadership – as there are in any setting. But how they are manifested is utterly dependent on the individuals. 

The first thing I had to do was understand that my job was not to turn other ERG leads into a replica of me. I knew that of course, at a theoretical level. The harder part was making it practice. There were ego and reflex things to be addressed or accommodated – in me and the people I worked with. 

There is an abundance of excellent sources on leadership. Some ERGs leads will read some of them. Others are either not readers or think they already know how to lead. Some do, most don’t. All can do with upgrades to their knowledge and capabilities. Not all leads agree. 

Some ERG leads have leadership experience. Others do not but are highly capable and can grow into the role with support. 

Leads have different ideas about their ERG’s mission. These ideas tend to match their assessment of their own capabilities and reflect their own biases. I had to better understand that not all the ERGs had the same problem-solving focus I had had as the lead of a Disability ERG. Some ERGs saw their mission as principally celebrating diversity and Inclusion. As it happened, I worked more with problem-solvers. I think this was my bias at play. Each problem-solving ERG needed to develop its own style and method. Not all problems are similar.

Having a strong strategic sense of one’s organization’s culture and politics makes a difference. Hence ERG leads will have varying levels of awareness, depending on their experience in the organization and how complex that organization is. 

As a fledgling consultant I had to get my head around these factors, for which there was no playbook. I then had to get to know each ERG lead well enough to develop an understanding of their capabilities. As this was a voluntary relationship I succeeded with some and failed with others. Not everyone wants a consultant hanging around.

Leadership is a skill apart from the ERG’s mission. 

In this instance ERGs were selected via membership vote. As a consultant I was allowed to learn how many ERG members voted. It was significantly less than 10%. Given that there were no key capabilities required of Leads beyond the desire for the role this meant those who were elected to the roles didn’t always possess the minimum capabilities to perform in the leadership role without considerable support. 

The vital lesson here is that leadership selection must be conducted on the basis of an assessable selection of capabilities, and not the random consequences of elections.

Leadership is a team affair. 

ERGs in the sector I worked in were established based on the staff association model. This foundation led to assumptions that there is a primary leader (the Chair or co-Chair), a deputy chair (in this case 3) and (in some cases) a management committee. 

The problem with this model is that it places an emphasis upon managing the affairs of the group rather than attending to the group’s purpose for being. If we think in terms of a tennis club – its purpose is to facilitate the playing of tennis. It’s not about managing how the players come together. That’s a valid function of the club, just not the primary one.

In many organizational environments these days, staff are time poor. Volunteer members of the leadership team aren’t necessarily the best Inclusion practitioners and Inclusion practice isn’t necessarily confined to the leadership team. This can put too much of a burden on a handful of people who are time poor to start with. Lean administration and intense focus on Inclusion practice is a better model. 

This means a practice support group is a better model than a management committee. This can help the leadership team engage in Inclusion practice, not chairing or managing the ERG.

A better overall model for an ERG is a team rather than association, and my preferred model (for now) is what I call a peer-to-peer model. 

One of my main innovations as a Disability ERG lead was to develop a Guidance and Action Group (GAT) which was the core 15-member advisory group and which I ran as a professional de facto business unit focused on delivering outcomes for members. Admin was minimal – and I did that myself. 

Looking back now, that model was not something suited to everyone. The peer-to-peer model is my current best evolution of the GAT idea. 

Volunteer doesn’t equal amateur

In the sector I worked in ERGs are seen as voluntary staff-led groups modelled on a staff association. Now I think this is very outdated.

This model has led to the assumption that an ERG is an amateur body – by both the ERG and its organization. But trying to address the problems of advancing Inclusion using well-intentioned amateurs without related professional grade skills doesn’t serve the needs of the ERG’s members.

Here is an essential point. By under-estimating the complexity and difficulty of achieving greater Inclusion we have left some ERGs struggling to get traction and gain much success. This is a challenging role to take on and there must be a reasonable effort:outcome ratio. If the challenge is under-estimated that ratio will be poor.

An ERG as a professional partnership with its organization

An ERG has only one function – to serve the Inclusion needs of its members. The low participation levels in elections of office holders should tell us that administration of the ERG is not a high priority. Candidates for offices are not selling their skills as Inclusion change agents but as administrators.

The members deserve the best leadership they can get, and the organization should require the best leadership that can be obtained. This is because the Inclusion needs of staff are primarily an organization’s responsibility that it cannot rightly pass off to a group of volunteer staff members. The logic of having an ERG is that the organization needs staff engagement in meeting its Inclusion obligations – as a partnership – a collaboration. 

In my time as a consultant the major concern raised by ERG leads was not having the time to work on what the ERG was supposed to do. I have previously argued that it is okay for ERG leads to put in their own unpaid time so long as this was about doing recognised professional development work. Running an ERG well takes a lot of skill and sits outside core business. It could be seen as akin to doing a course of study. I will come back to this because it now needs clarification. 

Voluntary work should not replace paid hours. This creates a question of perception as well as practicality. At what point is it reasonable for an organization to sanction and support an ERG in helping it meet its Inclusion obligations (a key element of staff welfare in the workplace) and then not enable the ERG to do what is necessary for it to be an effective partner? 

When is unpaid work okay?

The work of a competent Inclusion change agent is demanding and requires an education and skill acquisition. It should be supported by an organization as the development of high-level skills that have considerable value in other roles influencing behavioural change.

This could be the basis for setting up a developmental program that requires out-of-hours work – provided there is also appropriate formal recognition. The scope of the program should be negotiated with participants – but with required core components.

Resource group or reference group?

A manager I was talking to came up with this insight – preferring Reference over Resource – but I realised I had initially misheard them and missed its import. 

ERG as Employee Resource Group vs ERG as Employee Reference Group sends 2 distinct but related messages. 

We need to ask ourselves what resource a group of employees is – the lived experience of not being included. By contrast reference is a verb – and denotes a relationship – a group referred to as a source of expert knowledge. In the case of disability this is not just the experience of living with disabilities but also of experiencing exclusion in the workplace because of those disabilities. Let’s also add the potential of expertise in policy formation, management and leadership and other areas of professional insight. 

Following the principle of nothing about us without us an organization’s efforts to eliminate exclusion must include the insights of the people being excluded in the following ways:

• Assessing the sufficiency of policies
• Feeding back on the efficacy of policy informed actions
• Advising on the level of compliance with policies at a local level
• Reporting on the impact of exclusion on individuals and teams.  

Expanding the embrace of ERGs 

ERG membership tends to be predominantly junior staff. There are many reasons for this. In the case of disability, senior staff are less inclined to say they have a disability for fear of discrimination from their peers. If ERG membership flags membership of a discriminated against minority group it’s not what you want to be known for. Being ‘one of us’ is way better. Members of minority groups are less likely to be present in senior grades. And being a member of a staff-led volunteer group isn’t a good look for an executive. 

What I have proposed in the peer-to-peer model is that executive sponsors and champions aren’t roles apart from the ERG but members of it – but without ranking authority. 

This has a few advantages. First, it brings executive expertise and insight into consideration of issues. Second, it feeds insight on Inclusion issues into executive leadership ranks. Third, it validates membership of ERGs by senior managers and executives. 

The problem of being staff-led

Under usual conditions the organization controls the conversation, and the ERG is a passive partner. This was the model of the ERG I joined in 2010. We were able to speak up when we were asked whether there were any questions. But as a rule, it was staff-led only in the sense that meetings were chaired by a member of the ERG. The organization was, otherwise, fully in control. 

I changed this in May 2018. The ERG identified issues and initiated engagement with the organization. The ERG wasn’t just staff-led in its internal functions, the drive to make the work experience for staff with disabilities fairer and safer was also staff-led. 

While the organization had the duty to ensure the work experience for staff with disability was more inclusive it needed the ERG to drive the cultural change necessary to make this a habit practiced by staff at all levels. 

The dynamic between leadership, policy and culture is not well understood – by leaders, policy makers or ERGs. 

Conclusion

My success as an ERG leader is at the foundation of my former employer’s current ERGs. But the rationale for how they now operate wasn’t fully based on what I did. The result has been a misunderstanding of how an ERGs might best operate and hence I was invited to consult. The upshot is that some ERG leads have benefited from engaging with me and I may have influenced some changes in how ERGs are understood. But it is also clear that we don’t see eye-to-eye on a theory of what an ERGs is and how it might operate. 

What I did to be successful isn’t fully translatable to any other ERG lead. I had a unique set of experiences and skills. By that I mean only that they were mine, not that they were superior. 

What I did was to set up some key elements for success. The peer-to-peer model is my version of what I did well matured into a foundation for contemporary ERG. 

However, there are also several not negotiable elements as well:

• ERG leads must have a minimum set of capabilities and must be selected by and agreed competitive process that is not an election
• ERGs must be seen as a professional partner in assisting the organization meet its Inclusion obligations. This should be confirmed in a policy. 
• There must be a clear contract between the organization and the ERG that places a priority on addressing Inclusion needs of members and has a clear contract that forms the basis for understanding what resources are required and provided, and the setting of accountable outputs and outcomes. 

In the final analysis exclusion causes injury and it hurts. Eliminating exclusion in a workplace is neither easy nor quick. But it can happen easier and faster when efforts to make it happen are done well – and professionally. 

I was successful only because I had 15 ERG members who formed the Guidance and Action Team. I have said that these people were the heart of our ERG. They were because they had been hurt and were still hurting because of being excluded in some way. They were a constant reminder to me of the ERG’s purpose – to end suffering. 

While I was successful at the time I can see that ERGs need to mature to be able to meet the realities of now. 

There’s a very interesting essay by Alberto Vásquez Encalada on Disability Debrief in which he laments that Disability Inclusion workers have become professional and have lost the passion to drive Inclusion with the energy of years ago. What he means is that they have become professional bureaucrats and no longer change agents. He makes a powerful point. But I want to add that a lack of professionalism as a change agent can turn an ERG into a staff association unable to trigger the change it was established to foster. Hence it cannot do what was formed to do – end the suffering of its members.

Introduction

Last year I had a conversation with a person who described themselves as neurodiverse and a person with a disability because of their neurodiversity. During our conversation, I observed that not all forms of neurodiversity were a disability. They disagreed with some energy, and I asked if we could continue the conversation later. They agreed, but it didn’t happen. 

I have been concerned about the argument that neurodiversity is a disability as more people seem to be making the same claim, but often without any clear argument to back up their claim. 

I fully appreciate that for many, especially older people with a late diagnosis, discovering that they might be neurodiverse can help them make sense of their life experiences. And I am not saying that neurodiversity doesn’t provide a basis for understanding that some forms of atypical cognition and behaviour do fit the description of a disability. 

What I am noticing is that identification as being neurodiverse, while offering explanation for experiences, doesn’t sufficiently distinguish between difference and disability. It also seems that those for whom the disability explanation is valuable are claiming to be neurodiverse as a form of identity. 

Why make the claim? A former colleague (team member) and a friend is a case in point. After a meeting, a director approached me to ask me to please manage my team member’s behaviour in meetings. They were constantly asking ‘inappropriate’ questions. I was surprised. The questions seemed pretty much on the money and showed a lot of insight. But maybe they were impolitic? Showing up leaders like that wasn’t a good look. 

So, I decided to ‘manage’ my team member’s behaviour. We had a chat. It turned out that this wasn’t an unusual reaction and they were often getting into bother with senior managers. They were puzzled because they never intended to be offensive in any way. I had an inspiration. I asked them whether they had ever had an IQ test. They had. I asked the score and was told. Problem solved. They were seriously way smarter than the Director. 

Solution? They could choose to continue asking questions but with the awareness they were showing up the senior managers. If they wanted to do that, that was fine. Or they could take a more subtle and strategic approach. The questions still got asked, but only sometimes, however the problem went away. 

I tell this story because it demonstrates a form of neurodiversity – a singular perspective on issues that others did not have. There was no disability but there was a need for modification of behaviour – or accommodation of it. The Director didn’t have the self-awareness to adapt their behaviour, so it fell to my team member to adapt theirs. The ideal would have been to embrace the diversity of perspectives and accommodate them. But that’s not what usually happens.

There’s another problem with insisting that one’s claim to have disability because of claimed neurodiversity (I say claimed because apparently there’s a lot of self-diagnoses – which nevertheless might still be accurate). It is the difficulty of demanding others accommodate your behaviour because you have a disability and are unable to self-regulate. This might be true, but it would take good clinical insight to argue that self-regulation is out of scope for you. 

The risk here is that a narcissistic inclination that might dispose a person to claim disability as an alternative to self-awareness and engaging in self-regulation. And what might be a better claim than to be neurodiverse? How common is this? We all know people who have declined to self-regulate before neurodiversity became an identity option. 

Now I am not claiming all or most assertions that a person has a disability because of neurodiversity are false or dubious. I am simply cautioning that such claims should have competent clinical grounds to substantiate them. 

Neurodiversity is meant to assert that some forms of cognition and conduct are so significantly at variance with the ‘normal’ as to be recognised as worthy of remarking upon. In this regard I have also encountered claims that neurodivergence is the same as neurodiversity. It isn’t. Divergence and diversity have distinct and different meanings.

I asked my former colleague and friend whether they saw themselves as neurodiverse. They said, “Under my own definition, yes.” I didn’t ask what that definition was because the point was made for me. We can define the word on our own terms.

Difference, disorder or disability 

There is a range of conditions which are described as forms of neurodiversity, and which are often seen as inherently a disability. But it is better to say that they should be seen as a disorder. And not all disorders are disabling. The two most common are ADHD and Autism. The 2nd D in ADHD is for Disorder and autism’s fuller name is autism spectrum disorder (ASD). 

However, whether these are necessarily disorders is contested. Jessie Hewitson, writing in The Times Magazine in early June 2025 says that ADHD “is not a disorder but a brain type, a variety of which is perfectly normal, not a problem to be fixed”. Her article was titled Everything you think you know about ADHD is probably wrong. She is the author of ADHD: How to Raise a Happy ADHD Child.

Hence, we also have a problem of using familiar terms while no longer believing they mean what they literally say. Is what is called a disorder a dysfunction or a deviation from the norm and called a disorder simply because it is disruptive to the norm?

Both ADHD and ASD can express in severe forms that can be called a disability. And even in milder forms of expression can create a need for some form of accommodation. But we make accommodations for other people all the time. It’s that we have limits on what we decide is okay and what is worth our effort.

One of my nephews has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. For a long time, his social interactions were dysfunctional beyond people who had gotten to know him. He had needed others to adapt to his behaviors because he hadn’t been able to adapt on his own account. But in chatting with his parent recently I was told his ability to adapt has been growing steadily in recent years.

A need for accommodation can be considered a disability because the individual’s range of action is impeded by a condition not amenable to their intentional action. But we must be careful how we think about this.

The social model of disability is often invoked here. But I am wary of this. We can remove a lot of disabling barriers to inclusion by mandating modifications to our physical, policy and legal environments but we can’t mandate greater compassion, patience, empathy and insight by individuals. When it comes to cognitive and behavioural differences or disabilities this is the most important thing to consider.

When does a neurological difference become a disorder and then a disability? And how can we best respond?

Is neurodiversity being misrepresented?

Wikipedia has an interesting entry on neurodiversity. Here are a few excerpts:

• The neurodiversity paradigm is a framework for understanding human brain function that considers the diversity within sensory processing, motor abilities, social comfort, cognition, and focus as neurobiological differences.
• The neurodiversity paradigm argues that diversity in neurocognition is part of humanity and that some neurodivergences generally classified as disorders, such as autism, are differences with strengths and weaknesses as well as disabilities that are not necessarily pathological.
• Neurodivergent individuals face unique challenges in education and the workplace. The efficacy of accessibility and support programs in career development and higher education differs from individual to individual.
• At first glance, neurodiversity-lite appears to offer an important cultural shift. It reframes conditions like autism and ADHD in a more positive light, emphasizing strengths such as creativity, attention to detail, hyperfocus, or out-of-the-box thinking. In doing so, it counters the historically deficit-based narratives that have dominated psychology and medicine. This framing can help reduce stigma, encourage self-acceptance, and support hiring initiatives that recognize neurodivergent talent. For many, this more affirming view has opened doors—both personally and professionally.
• However, this surface-level positivity comes at a cost. Critics argue that neurodiversity-lite risks overemphasizing exceptional abilities while erasing the real-world challenges many neurodivergent individuals face—especially those with high support needs, intellectual disabilities, or non-speaking communication. It is most visible in corporate or media narratives that promote the idea of neurodivergence as a “superpower”, particularly when it serves productivity and innovation—often framing autistic individuals as ideal workers in tech and STEM fields. These narratives selectively uplift individuals who can “perform” in neurotypical environments with little to no accommodation, leaving behind those who do not fit this mold. In doing so, they reproduce existing inequities under the guise of inclusion.

I recommend the whole Wikipedia entry. There were several relevant takeaways for me in this context:

1. Not all forms of neurodiversity express as disorders or disabilities. It is an inherent part of the human condition.
2. Neurodivergent individuals may have unique challenges in workplaces and in education.
3. The neurodiversity movement moves away from the deficit model to a more positive and affirming approach.
4. It is possible to misdirect our thinking about neurodiversity into celebrating exceptional capabilities and in so doing turn attention away from real and more common needs – learning styles, communication styles, and forms of relating.

The neurodiversity movement arose from the work of autism advocates who focused on difference and not deficit. It has developed into a much wider movement – which is a good thing. But Wikipedia says something vital – “The neurodiversity paradigm argues that diversity in neurocognition is part of humanity.” We are all somewhere on a neurodiversity spectrum.

Hence to describe oneself as neurodiverse, and hence a person with a disability is an identity claim that seems to be potentially problematic.

I am in sympathy with people who get a diagnosis of a condition asserted to be a form of neurodiversity which then makes sense of life experiences. It can be a ‘light bulb moment’ that can make chaotic and traumatic life experiences at last comprehensible. And I mean no disrespect in offering a critical reaction to identity claims that might arise consequently.

Neurodiversity is a natural phenomenon, not a category. We need to be careful that our language is honest and clear rather than swathed euphemisms. 

Being neurodiverse is being contrasted against others who are described as neurotypical. But having established that humans are neurodiverse as a species and some, maybe the majority, can be said to be neurotypical others, a minority should be described as neuroatypical.

I think that here ‘diverse’ is a euphemism for atypical or abnormal. I entirely understand that atypical or abnormal are terms frequently used in a pejorative sense. Normal is good. To be thought not normal is to be identified for exclusion and derogation.

Back in the early 1990s we were educated about people with ‘special needs’ and this morphed into ‘special people’ who even had ‘special abilities’. It was an effort to make disability more acceptable, but it backfired. For a while being called ‘special’ was a cruel insult. You can’t solve a problem of attitudes and beliefs by fiddling with language.

I grew up with a sense of ‘wrongness’ about me. I didn’t quite fit in. I was a gifted child but also often awkwardly out of sync. After listening to detailed descriptions of autism in Neurotribes by Steve Silberman I recognised elements of Asperger’s Syndrome in me – but in a mild form – and not enough to feel that a diagnosis is appropriate. It was enough to trigger me to pause and reflect and understand why I had the experiences I did. This inspired me to look at my ‘tribe’ and realise that its members are all distinctly neuroatypical. 

I want to be empathic toward those who feel drawn to describing themselves as neurodiverse but also wonder why not say neuroatypical with confidence. Its more accurate.

The risk I see with using a term like neurodiverse as an identity tag is that it is easy to point out that you can’t rationally use that term to distinguish yourself from neurotypical folks because ‘diverse’ and ‘typical’ are not related opposing terms. Diversity embraces the typical and the atypical alike. And the typical is still a spectrum – although on a more granular level.

If we were thinking about height rather than cognition, we would understand that we humans have a range of heights with extremes we call dwarfs or giants. We have an informal ‘normal range’ that isn’t nailed down but it ranges between 152 cms and 183 cms in my experience. I am 185 cm, so I was abnormal or atypical for my generation. Would I call myself height-diverse? No. Because its meaningless.

I want to assert that calling oneself neurodiverse is also meaningless and argue that saying “I am neuroatypical” is much stronger and clearer. If you know you are ‘different’ it’s hard to make that case when others neither see it nor respect it. 

We humans have a bias for normal and different is a pain if it means we have to pay more attention and adjust our behaviour. Neuroscience helps us understand that cognitive effort can equal threat and that sometimes it is only in-group affiliation that turns that sense of threat into loyalty.

If you are different in a disruptive way, it would be nice for others to accommodate that. But that’s unlikely unless those others are atypical in a way that triggers empathy – or that they are sufficiently inclusive to care enough to make the effort.

The danger of identification and making demands

We need meaning in our lives. Things happen to us, and we don’t know why. Then one day we are given an insight and suddenly so much of what we have experienced makes sense.

I have listened to people who have received an ADHD diagnosis late in life. It’s recognised as a form of neurodiversity. So, I understand that seeing oneself as neurodiverse is much better than seeing oneself as having ADHD. CBC’s Ideas program Neurodiversity and the myth of normal Part 2 is a useful show.

But then progressing to seeing oneself as having a disability because that is more respectable than having a disorder? Again, that makes sense because we have a positive attitude toward disabilities relative to our attitudes towards disorders. The word reeks of negative connotations.

I don’t know whether this is true for the person I had a conversation with. I reacted to their assertion that neurodiversity is a disability thinking “That isn’t true, but why would a person say it is? What would motivate them?” I liked the person (I still do) and I wanted to learn more. But they chose not to continue our conversation.

I tell this story because I am seeing an emergence of what seems to me a trend toward disability identity politics. I am not asserting that here is an intentional instance, only that in this story we might see how it might happen.

Several months ago, I witnessed a forum featuring 3 people who identified as neurodiverse and having a disability in consequence. I listened to the session with fascination and puzzlement because of two things. The first was that none of the speakers said anything about their disability. The second was that no speaker gave any hint that they were anything other than highly articulate, very intelligent and socially confident. The 3 speakers could have been any 3 younger people having a chat about their work lives.

I was left puzzled. What was going on? Had I missed something or was I just seeing the emergence of a disability identity movement as it broke into my awareness?

In Visual Thinking Temple Grandin worries about the readiness with which Asperger’s syndrome diagnoses are made, observing, “When does being a little geeky become autistic?”

The rise in interest in neurodiversity must be welcomed and then advanced beyond its reliance on euphemisms. There isn’t a tyranny of the typical or normal, though it looks like that. The typical or normal mindset prefers stability, predictability and the absence of cognitive effort. There is a tyranny of other atypical mindsets. Wanting political power or immense wealth are atypical desires that can warp the normal. So many things that are wrong with our world come down to atypical desires.

But there is a domination of the typical or normal, it’s just not a tyranny. The normal can be dangerous, oppressive or even terrifying to the atypical. Being atypical is, in its own way, normal. That is that it is normal to have people who are neuroatypical in our communities.

This is a really important thing to understand. Our human psychology isn’t set in stone, but it is slow to change – subject to evolutionary influences. Railing against this slowness or trying to manipulate it politically cannot work.

We are psychologically disposed to take our cues from leaders and to emulate them. If they are not disposed to be inclusive through their examples in action or are prepared to alter the way language is used, we are left with the options of persuasion, subversion or rebellion. We cannot afford to do whatever we choose to do ineptly.

Disability Inclusion is about embracing diversity. We want to get to the point where we can celebrate human diversity, period. The Scottish dancer and choreographer, Claire Cunningham, observed that disability is just part of the spectrum of being human. I wish we could take the same perspective on neuroatypicality and be clear-eyed about being different. 

But we cannot deny the heritage of our psychology – being cognitively and behaviorally abnormal or atypical will always be a ‘threat’ to the normal if such difference isn’t seen as the seat of power and authority.

Being atypical doesn’t inherently mean something adverse. We celebrate atypical people, we ignore them, we fear them. We can also embrace them by expanding the scope of ‘one of us’. This means putting in the extra effort to be more receptive. Accommodating people we are unfamiliar with is part of our inclusive and compassionate aspiration as a culture. It’s a goal we must work toward together.

Militant identity politics seem to be the flavor of these times. Being atypical or being thought to be atypical can be the source of real injury. The pain of exclusion triggers the same parts of the brain as physical pain does. But how we respond matters. We can’t demand inclusion while excoriating and excluding the people we accuse of excluding us.

We need to preserve the idea of diversity as embracing everyone, not a tag to apply to a few. Celebrating diversity is about celebrating people for who they are, not about creating categories with which to distinguish them from us.

Conclusion

In strict terms we can’t describe ourselves as neurodiverse as a category apart from neurotypical. But we may feel the need for a synonym for atypical or abnormal, given their history of being used to identify and exclude non-conforming individuals or groups. 

The challenge is to make neuroatypical okay because neurodiversity is part of the human condition. Taking a political perspective may be attractive, but it’s not helpful. We must be way more subtle and gentle. Because we are talking about changing the beliefs, attitudes and behaviors of individuals the only valid and respectful option we have is persuasion. There’s a huge treasury of scientific insight on the art of ethical persuasion that offers us better outcomes than the politics of injury and angst.

Identity politics is inherently tribal. It’s about them vs us. From a personal perspective I am happy to acknowledge my sense of being neuroatypical to myself because it makes sense of so much. But do I want to wear a badge saying this is who I am? No, save in contexts where doing so is meaningful and useful.

Maybe the political dimension is a precursor to the emergence of reasoned and confident assertion of personal identity based on deeper knowledge and greater self-awareness? We are far better off celebrating neuroatypical people as ‘just one of us, only different’. It isn’t easy. There are a lot of bad, harmful, habits we need to break. But what are the alternatives that you feel okay about?

What I have said here is not an attempt to make a definitive assertion. Disability Inclusion is a constantly evolving area of thought and I want to stimulate conversation, not kill it. I have attempted to articulate my concerns on this theme with balance and respect. This is too important a theme to get wrong or flee from out of fear that disagreeing will incur an avalanche of wrath.

We identify because it is important to us. But that doesn’t always mean the identity we assert now will endure as we discover more about ourselves and the world we live in. How we identify others matters too. We once used the gentle and inclusive word eccentric to described atypical members of our community.

Viva neuroatypicality! Or maybe “Viva Eccentricity!” Even “Vive la différence”

Introduction

I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts, the seriously nerdy You Are Not So Smartand discovered a chat with Greg Satell, author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement That Drives Transformational Change. I had listened to an audiobook version of the book a while back a figured a refresh was in order.

It was a handy refresh, and I encourage the reader to click on the hyperlink on the word chatabove.

Below I want to reflect on why changing how people feel and behave is so difficult to do effectively. I started this blog in late 2021 to chart my efforts to get my head around the nagging question – “Why is disability inclusion so hard?”

The mistakes we make

When we are passionate about a cause, like disability inclusion, that seems so self-evidently right, we expect other people to also ‘get it’. And we expect them to change their attitudes, beliefs and behaviours to conform with our clearly morally valid position. But, as experience tells us, many don’t. They don’t ‘get it’ and they don’t change. What’s wrong with them? Nothing.

We have been sold the fantasy that good people will respond rationally to information about people suffering and will adapt their behaviour to be more compassionate. It’s a nice fantasy. We have a simple faith in the inherent goodness of other people, and we believe they will rationally respond to evidence that they need to be kinder and more inclusive. But many won’t and don’t. And this isn’t because they aren’t good people. They are ‘good people’, but we don’t understand them.

We humans are profoundly complex. Philosophers have known this for millennia. Religions have preferred a pared down zero-sum game of simple binary opposites: One of us = good, One of them = bad. This mindset has suffused our culture and has dominated how we imagine and how we choose to act. This isn’t to say that religious people are in any way a problem, only that the wider cultural impact of religious attitudes has been to activate our inherent propensity for bias.

When we feel morally justified in our beliefs it is easy to think that people who don’t agree, or don’t act, as we think is best, are morally deficient.

In relation to disability inclusion this can become a huge problem because we can believe that failure to act on what changes we want is a moral failing. We can then see ourselves as moral heroes fighting the good fight but are defeated by morally deficient, but stronger, opposition. So, we can get a serotonin hit from our brains that makes us feel good as failures.

There’s a popular saying attributed to Einstein. It is: “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.” Now, Einstein didn’t really say this, but I do know that this behaviour is typical of groups who say they are change agents but have an awful record of routine failure. If failure gives you a reward (like a serotonin hit) there’s a risk the reward becomes more important than the mission.

My education on this was as a workplace and regional union delegate in the latter half of the 1980s. Our reflex was confrontation on the grounds that ‘management’ was inherently opposed to worker rights. It wasn’t. We ended up having fights that were pointless and losing arguments we should have won just because of our attitude. We were encouraged to feel like heroes in a struggle when, in fact, we were fools who squandered opportunities.

Disability ERGs can’t take a militant perspective, but they can assume their failure to get the changes that they justly want is down to management not caring about staff because of a moral failing.

Now it is true they often don’t care. But it’s not a moral failing. Its way more complex than that. If you want to drive effective change in favour of staff with disabilities you need to put aside your moral bludgeons and take up a scalpel.

You may not like complexity, but it’s what you have

We humans are complex enough as individuals but put us in groups and things get a whole lot harder. Add organisations into the mix and the level of complexity is enough to blow your mind.

There is a vast industry dedicated to making organisations work. There are academic researchers engaging in highly disciplined research. There are consultancy businesses offering solutions. There are businesses offering training, coaching and mentoring services. All of this effort is dedicated to the goal of helping an organisation to be the best version of itself it can be.

There are two opportunities. One is that an organisation taps into this pipeline of evidence and support at whatever cost it chooses to pay. The other is that it doesn’t. The latter is more common. There is a fundamental distinction between organisations run by highly skilled professionals and one run by well-meaning amateurs. Most public sector agencies fall into the latter category. There are some gifted amateurs, of course.

So, here’s the thing. If you are running an ERG as an inspired, passionate, and maybe even gifted amateur and you are in an organisation run by well-meaning, and well-paid, amateurs, how do you expect to be effective? Other than by serious good fortune your chances are poor.

When I led a disability ERG, I was extraordinarily lucky. I had gifted senior leaders supporting me, a developmental experience that transformed how I operated, and I had some key foundational attributes that I brought to the role. One of those attributes was a passion for doing research.

I don’t expect other ERG leads to have the same attributes. What we do with our personal time is our own affair. I just happen to be a nerd. Because I have disabilities that impede my ability to do anything other than very slowly, I have a lot of time to listen to audiobooks and podcasts. This suits me just fine.

I make this point because I want to say something that I do not want to be taken as a criticism. If we want to be successful in changing how people behave and become more inclusive of people with disabilities there’s stuff that we need to know and do – and a lot of that is hard work.  There isn’t an option. If we put in the effort to become more skilled at what we do, we will get better results.

Why we resist change that is good for us and others

The fact that we are innately change-resistant isn’t news. But it is glossed over by the frequent celebration of the changes we do embrace. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 heralded the touchphone revolution which hasn’t slowed down. New fashions in clothing, new cars, new this and new that suggest we are change hungry.

It makes sense that an innovation that improves our survival odds will be accepted. We have adapted to labour-saving devices with a passion. In fact, the whole Industrial Revolution was about labour-saving – but from a cost, rather than a convenience perspective. AI is continuing this tradition by threatening to get rid of more jobs in the name of efficiency and cost saving. Some change is thrust upon us, and some we lap up happily. But we also resist a lot.

There are varying dates accepted on the date of emergence of early modern humans – 300,000 years ago is widely accepted. Civilization is said to have started around 3,000 BCE. The Industrial Revolution started in 1760 and ended in 1839 (according to a source Siri found me on the intranet).

All this is by way of noting that most of human history has been about a very low-key level of change. That’s built into our biology and our brains. We prefer things not to change.

Further evidence of this can be found in what we humans have done to influence our collective resistance to change. We invented religions, education systems, politics, advertising and influencers – to mention but a few. Pretty much everything that civilisation is about comes down trying to make us change how we feel, think and behave – and our collective acquiescence or resistance to those influences.

We are always being subjected to efforts to change us ‘for our own good’ or for somebody else’s benefit – and this we resist with reflexive ease most of the time.

All that said, we are mostly good, kind, caring and inclusive people – just not to everybody. And  we can be downright picky about who we are willing to embrace into our ‘circle of care’. This is entirely natural and good. This is baked into who we are.

So, what’s the problem?

Our social and cultural environments have changed at a far faster rate than our attitudes, beliefs and behaviours have. The imposed pace of some change has created cognitive pressures that make it a threat from which we sensibly want to retreat.

Those who champion certain changes in our culture mostly do so from an intellectual and moral sense of certainty that they are right. And maybe they are. But their passion for changes in our collective attitudes, beliefs and behaviours have not been informed by psychological insight. This matters a great deal because without such insight we assume other people to be as we imagine them to be, not as they are.

If you can’t encounter people as they are, you can’t have inclusion. If you want people to change their attitudes, beliefs and behaviours to conform with the new values and insights you are championing you must engage in skilled efforts to encourage them to change. Resistance to your efforts is not for want of intellectual or moral competence. It is simply inherent in their psychological make up.

For some people, response to new insights and values might be positive and quick. They are disposed, by so many personal life factors to respond that way. Others might have a combination of personal experience, history and culture that leads them to simply disagreeing on intellectual and moral grounds or rejecting what is proposed on what we might call dogmatic grounds. Others might resist change they agree with because the current demands on their cognitive and emotional capability makes anything else feel like a threat.

Advocating for changes in how we collectively feel, believe and behave can seem to us like a no-brainer on intellectual and moral grounds that we have accepted and believe in. But rejecting those changes may seem equally valid to others.

Here we have the options of conflict, coercion, compromise or conversation. When we are possessed of moral certainty the first two are the easy options. Compromise becomes the unhappy art of the possible, always with a preference to activate the first two options. Conversation means more than debate. It means actually discovering the reality and validity of the other person’s situation.

We are psychologically change-resistant because change requires cognitive effort and that’s usually about a threat. If we are loaded up on the demands to survive and support our families, maintain our relationships and endure workplace demands we may not be excited to be more inclusive – even if the cause genuinely activates our sympathy.

Just because something is a morally just cause doesn’t mean we have the cognitive capacity to engage with it – because we may have higher priorities within our personal sphere of responsibility.

The problem is that change agent activists are driven by moral and emotional energy and do not take the effort to remember that inclusion means including those who don’t agree. And they can assume that those not agreeing signifies a want of moral character or intellectual capacity – and are hence moved into the conflict or coercion group.

Inclusion must include those who disagree as well as those who agree but just don’t have the cognitive bandwidth to be actively engaged. That means working harder and smarter to evolve whatever culture you are trying to influence. Kindness is always better than moral passion.

Failure is routine

Efforts at change in organisations fail regularly. Such efforts are rarely predicated on science – psychology or neuroscience. ERGs are regular failures – to the extent that I have been unable to find any studies on them, but they are seen to be ineffectual. There’s a lot of glossy advice on-line about how to set up and run an ERG. Some of it is useful and a lot of it depends on whether the host organisation is super supportive.

There is not, however, much guidance for ERGs who struggle or fail. This has been a passion for me because I became the leader of a failing disability ERG and transformed it. There’s not a lot of use in discovering how to succeed if you don’t also know how and why failure happens.

We fail routinely at change because we have mostly strategies for success based on what we imagine or assume to be so. Now there is no excuse for taking this approach.

Conclusion

Learning why we fail at change is critical, but we must take reflection to a sufficient depth. A useful way of getting to that depth is asking the ‘7 Whys’. This is also called Root Cause Analysis. You can search either term to find an abundance of content. The Wikipedia description might be a useful starting point.

If we don’t think of change as the complex and difficult art it is, we will become accustomed to failure and blame those who ‘failed’ to change rather than taking a square look at our lack of skill and knowledge. There is an abundance of research converted into accessible books, podcasts and articles to guide our efforts at gaining deeper skills, insights and knowledge.

Fifty years ago, social change was driven by morally infused guess work. Back then we got somethings right and a lot of things wrong. But it was enough to make encouraging progress. It was all very hit or miss.

Changing organisation’s culture became imperative to ensure organisations adapted to the world they operate in. This is especially compelling for for-profit entities who live or die by their bottom line. As a result, there has been a lot of research undertaken, and a lot of books and podcasts published. The Harvard Business School not only produces the Harvard Business Review but an array of podcasts. 

One of my favourite sources is The Neuroleadership Institute because it is research and data driven. Its motto is: Change in weeks, not years. A recent show from their Your Brain at Work podcast explores how this might be possible – https://your-brain-at-work.simplecast.com/episodes/the-stuff-of-thought-critical-thinking-in-the-age-of-ai

Here’s a quote from the podcast: “There’s a really really big gap between what people think they do and what they actually do. We call it intent versus impact.”

Running an effective ERG is a professional skill set and this is no better epitomised than in PurpleSpace. It is telling that it describes itself as The world’s only professional development hub for disability network leaders.

This is the contemporary reality. Effective change is needed to help us adapt our deeply ingrained habits of behaviour to the novel social and organisational realities that only seem to accumulate. DEI was intended to be one of the ways of doing that, but it seems to have lost its way. ERGs should be playing a far more effective role than they are doing.

We have gone beyond the simple energy of moral certainty to a far more complex challenge for more self-aware and strategic action. We can’t drive change on our terms, only on its terms. We have transited from activism to implementation – from wanting to making. But we haven’t caught up and brought our mindsets into tune with our environment. We have become resistant to the very changes we want.

Introduction

I have done a few posts on bias as my understanding of it has grown, so please don’t assume this is just a case of me saying the same thing in different ways. Getting your head around bias is critical if you are committed to be fair and inclusive – so reinforcing familiar knowledge helps a great deal, especially if new insights are included.

I recently listened to a podcast Your Brain at Work -2 May 2025, S12, E16 – The Neuroscience of Cognitive Bias. The podcast is produced by the Neuroleadership Institute (NLI). I am a great fan of their work because it is data driven.

Dr David Rock, NLI’s CEO and co-founder, admitted that it took 4 years of research to understand bias and concluded that you can’t really teach anybody to eliminate bias in their perception. The NLI website says. “Despite decades of effort and major investment dedicated to reducing bias in organizational settings, it persists.”  NLI’s solution is to offer the SEEDS model (Similarity, Expedience, Experience, Distance and Safety) as an effective framework for mitigating bias in decision making.

NLI has the most well-developed approach to addressing bias risks in recruitment and other critical decision areas that I have come across. Just to be clear, I have no relationship with NLI and get no benefit from promoting their work. I am simply a huge fan of science-based and data-driven work.

Below I want to reflect on a few insight gems that David Rock dropped during the podcast.

We equate cognitive effort with threat

This makes sense when we reflect that it is highly likely that during our evolution what most encouraged us to think was how to survive. We are naturally disposed to operate on a kind of autopilot. We like to get good at doing things so that we don’t have to think things through every time we act. We have gotten breathing down pat, so we can do it without needing to be conscious of doing so. 

I remember recovering from GBS in hospital and the hard conscious effort to make my hands work well enough to pick up cutlery, get food onto fork or spoon and get it in my mouth. Even after I was discharged, I struggled to dice an onion. It took me 40 minutes of concentrated effort. I was deeply motivated by the danger of becoming permanently incapable and being in need of external care and support. Now I can dice an onion in 5 minutes – still not quick, but it’s no longer a super conscious task and I have escaped the threat of being consigned to a nursing home.

It is so good to do things that don’t require conscious intentional effort. I put the effort in to get to that state because I was under a very serious threat. As a consequence, I am disposed to look upon bias in a kindly manner – when it is appropriate to the situation.

Bias is even more present when you’re rushing

Of course. When we rush, we take short cuts when they are available to reduce cognitive demand. We don’t have the luxury to linger over a proposition and tease out any complexities or ethical implications. We want solutions to problems and not reasons to pay more attention.

I can’t move quickly post GBS, so I don’t have any stories of fast action and bias. But I do notice that when I want to shift my attention from something I am into to something else in response to a time pressure I am more prone to make keyboard errors. Because of my grip disability I type with one finger and when I hurry it’s more ‘near enough is good enough’ than the usual careful placement of the finger. The ‘near enough is good enough’ bias doesn’t work on a compact keyboard. I err frequently.

But, because those errors matter to me, I correct them. It is easy to imagine situations where ‘near enough is good enough’ is just fine. This is especially true if you have a lot of confidence in your ability to make good choices. Does it really matter if your decision is biased if your choice still works?

Bias is an outcome of our limited capacity to think well

Okay. This can seem confronting. I might reframe it as our limited capacity to ‘think precisely’. This matters in an array of technical fields in ways that are usually very clear. But there are other times when we skip steps – like not confirming that something we assume to be true actually is true because we trust our assumption. We default to bias because it feels okay.

I once prepared a briefing note with a conclusion that relied on information provided to me. The information was wrong, and my manger knew it. Why didn’t I verify such critical data? I had no good excuse. I let a bias that said it was probably true silence a caution that said, “Verify it!”

Our poor ability to understand people – social cognition

This wasn’t a precise quote. The comment was way more complex. The observation was that we don’t really have a great ability to accurately understand other people and the consequences of getting things wrong leads us to prefer our biases. We reflexively default to bias because we assume our bias is more accurate – or at least safer.

I think I developed a cannier ability to assess people in professional settings, probably because having an acquired disability stimulated a need to be strategic in assessing how other people saw me. I lost any sense of an automatic right to be included unconditionally. 

The importance of shared decision making

David Rock affirmed the value of making decisions in a group or team. If there’s no assurance that we can make unbiased decisions alone, we still can’t be assured that sharing decision making with people who are ‘one of us’ will improve the odds.

The benefit of genuine diversity is that we can dilute that risk markedly. I have argued that bar professional recruiters, an organization should have a panel of accredited independents who participate on selection panels. The panel members might be drawn from ERG members and have an assured independent status.

By genuine diversity I mean avoiding the potential for tokenism without status or power. We can create illusions of diversity because of appearance, but not thought. We can engineer situations where ‘diverse’ people have no standing to give a diverse perspective genuine impact.

Conclusion

Bias in the workplace has been a persistent concern that has not been ameliorated by efforts to address it for as long as we have tried. The problem has been that we have misdiagnosed the problem. Bias is natural and firmly hardwired into our psyches. It isn’t a flaw. Its just not appropriate in certain settings.

It can be addressed in the workplace by creating situations where it is less likely to prevail. The key insight from research is that decisions made on behalf of an organization should not be made by one person but by a team of genuinely diverse people who have the standing to speak with impact.

I will add three other factors.  The first is that decision makers really should have an informed appreciation of what bias is. The second is that there must be a genuine determination not to be guided by bias. The third is that the organization must have a culture which is committed to engaging with bias as an accountable factor in how it operates.

David Rock made a critical observation. We tend to focus on bias in relation to recruitment, but it influences decision making in general. It is, in fact, an inherent risk in all management and leadership decisions.

I’ll add a final insight. Bias influences our decisions in every aspect of our lives. We are thinking about it here in the context of workplaces because when we go from the personal to the professional, we are expected to operate to a different standard – one that has ethical and legal implications.

Bias in our private lives is our business. But it is useful to be aware that among the consequences of exercising our personal liberty to decide as we will is that we can be manipulated to make choices that are not in our interests. Bias can be weaponized against us. Understanding what it is has personal as well as professional implications.

Bias has played a vital function in our evolution because it saved us critical cognitive effort at times when we needed to pay attention to other things. But any strength can be manipulated, and no more so than now – in times when our assent is sought with such sophisticated skill.

I am quite content that I am biased, but I am immensely grateful that I now know I am. Because I can be aware of my capacity for bias I can also reality check my belief that I am being impartial in my decisions. There is always an option to run a decision by colleagues who might challenge what I have preferred. 

It’s always a choice. Do you want to be right in your own eyes? Do you want to be fair in others’ eyes?

Introduction

A fact sheet from the NSW Public Service Commission (PSC) says that, “An ERG is a voluntary, employee-led group that connects members based on a shared lived experience or identity. They foster inclusion in the workplace and offer support, connection and/or advocacy opportunities.”

The word voluntary has several widely accepted meanings:

1. Done or undertaken of one’s own free will. 
2. Acting or done willingly and without constraint or expectation of reward. 
3. Normally controlled by or subject to individual volition.

The word volunteer also has widely accepted meaning:

1. A person who performs or offers to perform a service voluntarily. 
2. A person who works without pay or assumes an obligation to which he or she is not a party or otherwise interested.

A voluntary member of an ERG isn’t signing on to be a volunteer in the 2^nd sense above, but that’s not necessarily what they, or their organisation, might assume.

Here’s a quote from a consultancy’s website:

Time, Energy, and Resources. These groups have tremendous potential, but much of that depends on how you structure them. Affinity groups aren’t a one way street. Individuals put in a lot of energy and effort into these groups, and increasingly, there is discussion about how orgs can better support these groups and the individual. The idea of these groups as free labor benefitting the company is a contentious one, and so discussions of additional compensation are becoming more prevalent. Especially since many groups represent marginalized (and often minority) identities, putting an extra burden on staff with no extra pay can actually be a regressive policy.

Below I want to explore the politics of the voluntary.

Taking the time

I noticed that the NSW PSC fact sheet also says, “Depending on your role in the

network, you may be spending a minimum of 2 hours per week on the network.” There is no mention of what the upper range of time might be, and that’s unfortunate because it gives no opening for thinking about what the time burden might be.

A minimum of 2 hours a week averages out at 24 minutes a day, which isn’t much, except that you can’t chunk your time that way. Notice that this is a minimum in ‘some’ roles. Are you expected to factor that time into your daily routine? It is instructive that some public sector agencies figure that only 2 hours a month can be taken out of paid time. The rest must be on your own time. This is a problematic position to adopt.

ERGs must have a clear understanding of the time demands on members performing certain roles, and whether those time demands will be addressed in paid hours.

What problem is an ERG solving?

ERGs have a range of things they can do. They can have a primary focus on celebrating diversity, or they can focus on addressing discrimination, inequity and abuse in a more direct and strategic way. But regardless of what their focus is, we need to be very clear on whether the activity undertaken is part of a legal or moral responsibility of the organisation. If it is, there can be no expectation that an ERG’s activities should be in unpaid time.

The idea that ERG members should put in unpaid hours to assist an organisation to meet its legal and moral duties should be thought outrageous. But it isn’t. Meeting these obligations is often not seen as a core business activity, but a good thing to be able to do – if we could afford it – which we can’t. So, ERG members must step up on their own time to get it done.

It can seem entirely rational that because a person becomes an ERG member voluntarily this means they should volunteer their labour to assist their organisation to meet its legal and moral obligations – because the organisation’s failure to do so injures the people the ERG was created to represent and support.

The problem the ERG is solving can be seen as: The organisation is not meeting its legal and moral obligations to ensure members are not subject to discrimination in any form. So to help it get on that track ERG members must contribute unpaid hours of effort. But that’s misunderstanding the nature of the problem. That’s a governance problem and the resolution is to get competent governance.

In environments where time is at a premium, refusing ERG members the opportunity to participate in ERG activities can seem like a fair management choice of handling competing priorities. This may not force the ERG to schedule activities outside core business hours or outside paid hours. But it can limit participation and restrict the impact of the ERG’s work.

If the ERG’s focus is celebrating diversity and promoting inclusion the impact of such activities can be weakened. If the focus is on problem solving – addressing equity, access and discrimination concerns – weakening an ERG’s capacity to function by denying access to activities on ‘operational’ grounds raises an important question.

Is the organisation arguing that business as usual takes precedence over the welfare, safety and rights of staff members subject to forms of exclusion, inequity or abuse?

Often it is, albeit in an unintentional and unconscious way. Organisations exist to further a particular purpose and thinking about the well-being of staff is a comparatively novel development. ERGs are part of the process of integrating the welfare of staff into organisational business as usual – or at least they should. This is a complex thing to attempt. And it requires professional grade skills.

Machines and buildings are maintained in good working order as part of core business. Maintaining staff in good working order is similar, but also very different. That responsibility is divided between the organisation and the individual. When it comes to what ERGs are about, we enter the complex business of changing social values and how organisations reflect them. Organisations may make independent choices about diversity and inclusion, respond to legislation or comply with government policy. All these options may be carried out with varying degrees of enthusiasm by leaders. Individuals are free to make choices, including whether they will comply with expectations to be more inclusive and less biased.

ERGs represent the perspective of staff with certain lived experiences generated by personal attributes or identities. They are a critical partner with an organisation’s key business areas to ensure that policies and practices conform to agreed principles and standards – and that things are working out as intended.

An ERG with a celebratory focus will have a different operational model and skill set to one with a focus on addressing equity, inclusion and justice needs in a more direct and strategic manner.

The real power of ERGs

I am not arguing that all ERG work must be in paid time. Running a highly effective ERG takes professional level skill, so there’s a lot of professional development that is necessary. And with that, there’s a lot of thinking and talking to be done. Anyone passionately involved in a cause will understand this.

Besides, a lot of ERG activities take place in paid hours, and those that don’t are the more abstract or governance functions like planning and organising, administration and skill development.

To be effective, an ERG must have a shared understanding with its organisation about what its focus is and what the scope of activities is. This will then make it possible to agree on what work must be done, and when. It is important to understand an ERG’s activities are work – intentional, purpose driven and accountable.

I made the Disability ERG I led into a de facto business unit. We were professional and accountable because we were committed to getting results. The welfare of our members was our priority. We had what our department didn’t. We had lived experience of disability in the workplace consolidated into a trusted representative voice. Plus, we were ‘politely impatient’. We kept disability inclusion on the agenda and defended it against competing priorities. 

Disability ERGs have the potential to have significant impact if they have clarity on their roles and they have the means to deliver. While having the time to do the work that must be done is crucial, without clarity about what the ERG is doing it will be impossible to negotiate access to that time in an appropriate and fair way. Time is a resource that is often scarce, so it must be managed and allocated. An ERG must honour its responsibility here. Getting enough time is one thing and how it is used is another.

The need for clarity

Being an ERG member is voluntary, and members volunteer their time, taking on additional demands. If the ERG is professional in how it operates, participating in its activities can be genuinely a valuable exercise in career development. This might merit use of personal time in the same way enrolling in a course can be personally rewarding. For that to be a realistic prospect there must be widely acknowledged recognition that work done in the ERG counts as ‘real work’ and it has an honoured place on one’s CV.

Volunteers are often seen as amateurs with no skills. This might justly offend rural firefighters and emergency service workers. Part of the problem is that ERGs are seen as employee-led associations – like a social club. The NSW PSC fact sheets take this approach. It’s out of date. It was the go-to model when ERGs were mooted as a good idea ages ago. They were employee-led, ergo they are like social clubs.

But social clubs do not have the critical brief of working to address issues related to staff wellbeing and welfare where their organisation has a legal and moral responsibility to act. In fact, seeing ERGs as equivalent to a social club has been an unintentional misdirect that has squandered a lot of effort and opportunity.

A Disability ERG is a critical partner with its organisation in addressing concerns which the organisation is required to deal with. Responding to needs to address access, equity, inclusion, discrimination and abuse issues impacting staff with disability isn’t a job for amateurs, and most certainly not unpaid ones.

The lived experience perspective is vital. But without skilled, informed and professional advocates the benefits of that perspective will be lost. It is far better to see an ERG as a genuine stand-alone innovation rather than a reincarnation of what seems to be a scarce entity these days – the social club.

It would be far better to create an ERG as a genuine business unit. The fact that it is employee-led is hardly an issue since all business units are employee-led. The fact that it concerns staff welfare and wellbeing isn’t remarkable since there are other business units with the same focus. What’s awkward about an ERG being a voluntary staff-led business unit is that it must have a voice to ‘talk truth to power’. That disrupts the normal order of things and exposes an organisation to accountability that it might not be all that comfortable with. 

But we can’t camouflage a moral issue as a resource issue – despite the persistent intent to do so. The reality is that in some organisations Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is an exercise in compliance rather than a commitment to a social goal. That makes DEI a cost rather than investment.

So, the fact that an organisation has sanctioned the establishment of ERGs doesn’t mean it is prepared to accommodate them operating at their peak potential. It may not have a well-developed understanding of what an ERG is, or what the optimal relationship with an ERG might look like.

ERGs must not assume that any such understanding exists. Being able to negotiate what voluntary means is essential if there is any prospect of addressing the more complex problems. This must be clarified first because it’s the foundation of all ERG activities.

Conclusion

In May 2018 I attended the Australian Network on Disability’s Annual National Conference in Sydney. The keynote speaker was Kate Nash, founder and CEO of PurpleSpace, a UK based organisation dedicated to supporting staff with disability.  It describes itself as: The world’s only professional development hub for disability network leaders.

Kate’s speech set my imagination on fire. The following day I attended her workshop on Networkology. So, there was a science, a methodology, to running an ERG. How I operated as a Disability ERG lead was transformed, and I turned the ERG into a very effective body. How effective can be measured by the fact that my successor was offered a full-time role as ERG lead. This was a remarkable experiment. The ERG had made a compelling case to be treated seriously – as a professional partner in driving the change we all knew was needed and required.

There are sound grounds for asserting to an organisation that the work an ERG is doing is what the organisation is responsible for and that expecting unpaid labour to help it meet that responsibility is hardly fair or reasonable. That’s a good basis for a robust negotiation.

But you must have something to negotiate with. What is your value proposition? What insight do you offer? What is your accountability argument that makes you an invaluable partner? If you see yourself as an amateur volunteer body with no compelling professional perspective, you’ve got nothing.

Introduction

I had a reason to google the social model of disability and found the Wikipedia entry. It was an interesting read after close on a decade of not revisiting the concept.

Here’s a bit I found interesting: “The social model of disability is based on a distinction between the terms impairment and disability. In this model, the word impairment is used to refer to the actual attributes (or lack of

attributes) that affect a person, such as the inability to walk or breathe independently.”

I don’t like it because it attempts to break a personal reality into two elements – the lived experience and the environment in which that experienced is lived – and that environment is only ‘social’. It tries to divide the lived experience into neat rational domains. But when was the last time you heard a person with disability use the term ‘impairment’? Also, in the UK, where this concept originated the preferred terminology is ‘disabled person’ – as if the defining attribute of a person is how they are able to function in a social setting.

I want to react to this idea and ask whether it is now fit for purpose. I don’t deny that it may have served some good purpose in the past.

Why language matters

My ‘impairments’ are with me whether I am at home or out in the social world or in the natural world. I am quite aware that ‘social’ can embrace all three settings since, from a distinctly technical perspective, all can be covered by the term. I have Masters and Masters Honours degrees in Social Ecology – just so you know.

Any argument in support of such a wide embrace of ‘social’ doesn’t work because it is not in common usage – and hence it is meaningless in the context of defining disability in a general or public sense.

The idea that a lot of the extent of disability is down to features of the human-made or human-mediated environment is fair enough. Ableism has long dominated how we think because it reflects the majority situation and cultural aversions to disability in public have dominated consensus thinking for centuries. I have previously observed that despite wars where the veterans have been feted as heroes preserving freedom, we nevertheless continued to build public buildings and spaces which excluded ‘impaired’, veterans who became ‘disabled’ because of those design and construction choices.

The Wikipedia entry also says, “While physical, sensory, intellectual, or psychological variations may result in individual functional differences, these do not necessarily have to lead to disability unless society fails to take account of and include people intentionally with respect to their individual needs.” The intent is well-meaning but unbalanced.

This definition imposes upon “society” a ridiculous burden with no means of doing anything. Failing “to take account of and include people intentionally with respect to their individual needs” sounds good, but it functionally meaningless. It imposes a moral burden on us all without our assent. Intentional inclusion of all people with a disability is a huge ask if we are all expected to deliver on it. It’s a nice ideal but a hopeless expectation as it is.

This is my primary objection to the social model of disability – it isn’t workable. Also, there is no point in splitting terminology, at the level of a definition, into categories nobody will use.

I don’t use the term ‘disabled person’ because for me it’s not the person but their body that is disabled. I get that the social model assumes that the body and the social self are one and the same. I don’t agree. Having a model that rides roughshod over other people’s sense of meaning can’t be representative.

In short, the social model has been imposed, not assented to. I don’t know who came up with the social model, but I would not be surprised if it didn’t involve people living with a disability. Or, if it did, these people were angry (for good reason) and feeling militant.

But we won the moral argument way back. We can’t keep relitigating a case already won. We must move on to the next stage – how do we convert that success into meaningful action. The social model doesn’t help us answer that question.

What’s the alternative?

For starters, let’s be real. How can we have a definition of disability that is universal beyond the essential attributes of impairment of normal human functions? Some impairments reduce our capacity to participate in social activity. Others can exclude any participation at all without extraordinary levels of support – and sometimes not even then. 

I worked in psychiatric hospitals in the early 1970s and subsequently with private facilities that accommodated former psychiatric hospital inmates in the early 1990s and then again from early 2002 to mid 2006.

These people had profoundly impaired capabilities to function in unmanaged social settings. That’s why they were where they were. Yes, social rules defined who was or was not able to access normal social life – often unjustly so – but those rules reflected what a community believed it could accommodate – often unfairly. 

The point is that you can’t define a model of disability that imposes, without consent, expectations by the model designers, upon the community.

Let’s look at the sensible divisions of disability in a social context:

• Mobility disability – modify the physical environment to accommodate mobility needs. Can be done by setting design standards and modifying existing structures.
• Sensory disability – modify the physical environment with assistive technologies, modify communication technologies and practices. Can be done by establishing standards and practices.
• Psycho-social disabilities – modify policies and encourage more empathic, informed and sympathetic behaviours by co-workers and others. Unenforceable as a requirement.
• Undisclosed disabilities – people do not disclose disabilities for fear of adverse consequences from employer or co-workers. No formal action is possible.

What can we ask for?

Mobility disabilities have been at the forefront of the disability inclusion movement because such disabilities are unsubtle and not complex. The social model of disability was designed when this was the dominant consideration.

Modifications to physical settings in an organisational or community context are well underway. This isn’t uniform because there are considerable costs involved. I am a member of my local government’s disability reference group, and I can testify to the level of commitment – in some LGAs at least.

Designing and adapting physical environments is down to commitment and budgets. Expectations are directed by legislation and met by policy and pragmatism. Generally speaking, in my NSW context, we are doing a decent job.

Changing attitudes is an entirely different matter. Some behavioural change is technically mandated by legislation, but enforcement is very problematic. We can’t demand a person be more considerate or compassionate, only encourage them to be so. 

And here’s a problem. Encouragement can be done badly and even excite adverse responses. 

Real conceptions of disability 

I don’t think the social model works as a dominant idea. There are two major weaknesses.

1. The social context is far more complex than a purely physical model and,
2. There is no uniform means of seeking compliance across a community.

This suggests that the social model was primarily designed to influence policy makers – hence excluding the majority of people who might be expected to go along with it.

I live with mobility and manual dexterity disabilities that, since acquiring them in 2008, have radically reduced what I can do. I can’t garden as I used to do. Under the social model my disability would be neutralised by having somebody turn up to do my gardening. I can’t bushwalk as I used to. Accessible tracks would help somewhat but if I had a means of accessing rough tracks that would be even better.

While I deeply appreciate the efforts to make my social environment more accessible, I don’t want to be defined by what others do or are expected to do on my behalf.

Several years ago, I participated in an evaluation of a draft disability inclusion online training course. You couldn’t progress from one stage to the next until you completed a set of questions and got right answers. One section asserted that a person with a disability was limited in what they wanted to do because of their disability. The options were yes/no. I chose ‘No’. That was wrong.

I had a very long list of things I could not do because of my disability. There was no way I was going to hit ’yes’, and it offended me that participants were directed to choose nonsense to pass the course. I communicated my discontent and heard nothing back. I was chair of my department’s Disability Employee Network at the time. The resistance to my objections was a surprise, as was the fact the course had been progressed that far without consultation. Somebody assumed it was a good idea – maybe as a token response to pressure to ‘do something’. We could have had a conversation at the time the idea was raised, not near the end of the design project.

Disability is a 24-hour reality, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The only time I am not aware of my disabilities is when I am in bed. Yes, I am impaired in multiple respects, but the consequences of my impairments is an inability/disability to do many things that have nothing to do with my social setting because that includes private and intimate dimensions.

Impairment might be a technically accurate description, but it doesn’t work as a social statement. But then its more than a social description. People don’t describe themselves as ‘impaired persons’ or ‘persons with impairment’ because the language doesn’t do justice to lived experience. the word ‘impaired’ begs the question – to what to degree? Besides it sounds transient. Disability isn’t as negotiable. And it is permanent.

The notion of permanence isn’t readily acknowledged, but it’s a standard issue. Impairment might be a transient state that would not excite major work to cater to temporary needs – but it should. The nuances of meaning may be relevant in academic and bureaucratic settings, but they are meaningless in the real world.

Problems with the model

There’s a difference between being unable and being disabled. Both must be catered to in an empathic and compassionate community and there is an innate harmony between the two in many respects. So, what’s the difference?

Being unable to do something because of some external impediment is very different from being unable to do something because of a personal impairment. In the latter case one has a disability. In the former one is simply impeded by design and attitudes.

Disability is living with impairment, often to a radical degree, that will not end and which may deteriorate. It doesn’t matter whether the setting is social, private or intimate. It can dominate and even define one’s sense of identity. That sense of identity is determined by personal lived experience far more than a social experience.

I live with my disabilities 24/7. The only time I don’t feel their impact is when I am doing nothing (like lying in bed) or doing something passive (like watching a screen). My ability to function is impaired but those impairments are disabling in so many ways.

I am not impeded in my desire to tap dance. I just can’t do it at all. My tapdancing capability is disabled. My ankles don’t work well enough to make it a thing I can reasonably aspire to do.  I have seen a video of a guy in a wheelchair mountain climbing, but he had a group of volunteers who agreed to help him realise an outrageous ambition. There is no way I could get a group of people to help me tap-dance. Without his support group he has a disability, and I am merely impaired? Give me a break!

So, let’s talk about disability as:

• Personal existential experience (its crap living with a disability)
• Personal environment (making where you live as liveable as possible)
• Direct social environment (can I enjoy getting around my community?)
• Overall social environment (can I enjoy travelling farther afield?)
• Cultural environment (do I feel a sense of stigma or unwanted attention?)

Disability isn’t the simple binary of medical model vs social model. The impact of physical and sensory disabilities can be ameliorated by modifications of the physical environment in private and public domains. These modifications can be contracted or mandated.

Other disabilities may adversely impact a person’s ability to enjoy our shared social spaces because other people who use the same social space must collaborate with them for things to work. But that collaboration cannot be mandated, only contracted – unless given freely.

We cannot have a functional model of disability which relies upon engagement with people who have no obligation or duty to collaborate. To attempt to do so further disempowers people with disability who may already rightly feel disempowered. It also excuses failure by blaming people who have not agreed to be part of a model, and who may have no awareness of it.

I am not here arguing that other people in our social space ought not be kinder and more inclusive of people with disability, only that we can’t build a model on the expectation that they will. Addressing physical access needs by making or buying solutions isn’t even half the problem solved. It is a substantial chunk of the problem though, and those who benefit from these solutions are grateful. 

But that leaves a huge amount of unmet need that the social model cannot address. That unmet need is dependent upon other people’s beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. Their participation must be freely given. It can be a requirement in limited settings – like employment. But even so, compliance with a demand to be inclusive can’t realistically be enforced. If we tried, we’d get resentful performances of compliance that masked negative sentiments that are harmful to the people who we intend to help.

The other huge problem with the social model is that it imposes upon a broad community ethos a singular focus. We would all like a community to be kinder and more inclusive in general. Desiring such only for people with disability seems unfair and unreasonable. Inclusivity can’t be framed in terms of excluding others who also have a need inclusion.

In a recent Your Brain at Work podcast episode David Rock of the Neuroleadership Institute discussed the difference making an action compulsory and making it compelling. See From Mandatory to Compelling: The Science of Filling a Room (10 May 2025). How do we make voluntary inclusive behaviour compelling? Can we? I think we can – if we dare. 

Conclusion

The social model of disability is a lop-sided relic of times gone by. It doesn’t serve the needs of people with disability in general and may well be a disservice to them.

By including an expectation that others modify their behaviour without their assent it has created a passive hope of compliance that will not come. There is no doubt at all that a kinder, more inclusive, community would make life so much better for people with disability who may need consideration, gentleness and compassion to function well in social settings. But that’s not something to be attained by demanding it, or expecting it will happen because it’s in a model.

Here’s a test. Excise that expectation from the social model and what would be the impact? My expectation is that we’d find it has zero adverse consequences and maybe some strong positives. 

It might, for example, free us to better imagine how to create a kinder, more inclusive, community without the distraction of a single theme. In the same way physical accessibility isn’t only about ramps, social accessibility isn’t only about disability.

The Disability Employee Network I was a member of had a motto – Solve for one, extend to many. It was borrowed from inclusive design principles and was intended to say that what we were doing was universally applicable. When we advocated for inclusion, we meant everyone. Disability was just our focus area of expertise, not the limits of our concern.

Disability becomes part of our identity out of necessity, but it doesn’t define it or dominate it – unless we let it. That can happen with disability advocates – if that’s their mission in life. But they need to be mindful that not every person living with disability shares that need.

I don’t want my needs, as a person with disability, defined by a model crafted for a purpose that may no longer be relevant. I am not comfortable with people who do not live with disability believing that the social model of disability is the definitive way to think about disability. I am not cool with the notion that people living with disability think this is the model they should accept because that’s what they have been told by people who they trust. 

We need to review our beliefs and assumptions periodically to make sure they continue to align with current knowledge. The social model of disability was the way to think in 1983. That’s 42 years ago. A lot has changed since then. Do we still need a model of disability? I don’t think so, but I am happy to be shown to be wrong. We do need a more current understanding though.

I hope this has stimulated some fresh thinking.

Introduction

We must understand that bias is a natural element of our psyche and there is nothing inherently wrong with it. But it can get us into trouble in certain circumstances.

The idea that we should ‘fight bias’ is misleading. It is our natural tendency to surrender to biases that we may now need to struggle against. So, we are ‘fighting’ our impulse to not be aware of the need for intentional choice, not  bias itself. I will tell you a story.

In around 2003 I participated in a recruitment exercise for my department. My line manager (a man) convened our panel, and a woman was the independent. As the interviews progressed it was obvious that there were 2 stand-out candidates. One was a very attractive woman who used her attractiveness very effectively at the interview. On the face of things either candidate would have been suitable. It should have been an easy choice. Go for the very attractive one. 

It was clear that the candidate expected to be offered the role. Her style and manner oozed confidence. She intended to manipulate the panel by activating our bias toward attractive people. My manager and I engaged in a poorly coded debate. We were both clearly taken by the very attractive candidate. We were trying not to make our reaction obvious to the independent, who sat there watching us with a bemused expression.

We males were conscious of the influence we were under and were determined to resist it. We debated about why we shouldn’t offer her the role on the logic that if we couldn’t find a reason not to make the offer, we’d have to make it. We found a reason not to, once our instinctual fog had dissipated. 

This was an ethical struggle for us. We weren’t looking for a lover or a mate. We were recruiting on behalf of our department for a role for which sexual appeal was not a selection criterion. It wasn’t an easy choice because our male brains were drenched in hormones, and on a different mission to the one our public servant selves were on.

There’s nothing wrong with a bias toward very attractive people because there are many times when such attractiveness is beneficial. But we also know that such a bias can precipitate all kinds of strife.

Knowing when your biases are kicking in takes a fair degree of self-awareness because bias begins at an unconscious level and comes to the surface as feelings and beliefs that we are ready to justify and defend.

Some people talk of ‘unconscious bias’, but, for me, there isn’t any ‘conscious bias’ against which we can make a distinction. There can be, however, a conscious choice to abdicate personal responsibility and surrender to the urgings of our bias.

Thinking about what bias is

In essence bias is an energy efficient way of making choices. A bias is a set of givens created at a near instinctual level. We prefer those who are like us in as many ways as possible. This works well when we want mates or tribal members. But then we lay over those instincts a range of reflexes developed by cultural, religious or tribal identity.

Biases mean we don’t have to put time and energy into making choices about who is in our in-group and who is not. In large, complex and pluralistic communities being able to quickly rule people in or out of warranting our conscious consideration is necessary for our emotional health. Otherwise consciously processing so many choices would drain us. We have a psychological capacity for only so many people in our in-group. This is a bit like constant speed dating in nanoseconds. 

But here’s where it can get ugly. Our reflexes developed by culture, religion, history, family and personal experience can be expressions of fear and loathing of groups of people who are not inherently dangerous.

I was born in Northern Ireland. My father was a devoted Protestant who loathed Catholics. As I grew up in Australia, he tried to convince me to inherit his loathing of Catholics. That didn’t work. I ended up not liking Protestants. When you live in a small country town as a kid people who try to divide you are more of a threat than people who are different (and possibly interesting). I had Catholic friends I couldn’t invite home.

Sadly, for many people, their sense of identity is built on reflexes that exclude others as threats to their cultural, spiritual or physical wellbeing. Here the problem isn’t the unconscious bias mechanism but the conscious defences of the bias-based reflexes that build our sense of identity.

Domains in which bias is active

The personal (self-interest)

Bais inherently serves our self-interest at the level of personal physical and psychological survival. We choose people who will enhance our chances and avoid those who will not. However, this is true only to the extent that we are psychologically healthy – and this raises a range of considerations too complex to deal with here. Suffice to say that we can develop biases that are harmful to us.

Social

Who we live with is less and less a choice we get to make. There was a time when a village was a community of people like us. Some small country towns may be largely still this way. But our larger urban centres less and less so. And when we get to cities, they are like microcosms reflecting the whole planet.

Our biases help us reduce the number of people we want/need to deal with consciously. But this is where the identity reflexes kick in and we can exclude others out of fear and loathing because of inherited or acquired beliefs, attitudes and values.

On the social level we are free to associate with whom we wish – to include or exclude. But whether we do so for reasons that are fair or reasonable, or by actions that are kind or respectful is presently a matter of our personal determination. There are some laws that limit how we treat other members of our communities, and there are influences within these communities which seek to set a positive tone of mutual respect, acceptance and inclusion. There are, sadly, other influences set on division and separation.

Organizational

Here things get complicated. Organisations are bound by laws and sometimes policies that seek to foster inclusion and ensure their workforces reflect the community in which the organisation operates. Compliance with these laws and policies is generally a condition of employment. Hence not letting one’s biases and reflexes influence one’s choices and behaviours at work is an ethical responsibility.

This is also where things get messy. The function of DEI strategies should be to assist an organisation’s workforce to become more self-aware of how biases and reflexes can violate their legal and moral obligations to its workforce and the community it serves. However, the ethical responsibility of an employee to comply with an organisation’s obligation is scarcely articulated at all, let alone in an unambiguous manner.

The result is confusion about rights and responsibilities.

Conclusion

We misunderstand bias because we see its adverse consequences in settings where it causes harm in 2 ways. It violates the obligations upon the individual being biased and it injures the opportunities of the person subject to bias. Mostly we think in organisational terms where nobody has clearly articulated what obligations and rights are placed upon members of a workforce.

The upshot is a muddle of moral sentiments fuelled by well-intended passions but misguided by flawed understanding of what bias is. To make matters worse the question of accountability is left hanging in a fog of sentiments about moral imperatives rather than obligations.

In sum, bias is natural and normal and good. But in some circumstances, it can morph into toxic and harmful beliefs, attitudes and behaviours when the normal bias process creates identity reflexes. 

In an organisational context staff have two obligations. The first is to be sufficiently self-aware to ensure self-interest biases do not influence decisions made as a representative of the organisation. The second is to ensure that bias-based identity reflexes do not influence one’s conduct as a co-worker or as a representative of the organization.

Neither is an easy ask on a personal level. But both are ethical obligations as a member of a workforce. They are not ‘asks’ on a personal level.

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.