Introduction
Being inclusive of people with disability is something we generally aspire to as a community. This is part of a wider willingness to be inclusive across a spectrum of ‘diversity’ groups. But we live in a community that is as diverse in behaviors as it is in attributes.
Stimulating movement toward a common goal of inclusion by admonition is akin to herding cats. If you want cats to go in one direction at roughly the same time you put a reward in the direction of the desired destination.
My point about the herding cats metaphor is that it’s what you do when you don’t understand how cats behave. People are more like cats than we imagine. They are not inclined to be herded either.
I have been listening to an audiobook of Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst which explores the biology of human behaviour. It is essential that we do not mistake biological triggers for behaviour for moral ones. A resistance to changing behaviour may be more often grounded in our biology than our morality. If we understand this then we can appreciate that ‘good people’ often behave in ‘bad ways’ simply because our biology trumps our morality more often than we care to confess. Think of all the times your good intentions have been derailed by impulses and reflexes you haven’t had control over – get more exercise, have a better diet etc.
I have noted previously that efforts at Disability Inclusion at a communal level have been going on for over 60 years. Various tactics were employed – including militancy to crack through the hard shell of the in-group/out-group divide. For a long time, disability was concealed from the wider community.
So many organizations that support people with disability have evolved from coalitions of families who had come together to insist that their family members with disability were entitled to equal opportunity to live the best life they could.
This resonates with me because in the early 1970s I worked in a huge sprawling psychiatric hospital on wards populated with people with profound levels of disability. We delivered ‘care’ and control in a deeply impersonal way. There was very little love or affection. In fact, exhibiting such feelings was forbidden. These days people with similar levels of disability are at home or in group homes with individual needs catered to.
In the broader community we are progressively making the physical environment more accessible and amenable to people with disability. I am a member of my local government’s Access Advisory Committee, and I have witnessed an impressive and genuine commitment to making our public spaces more accessible to people with disability of all ages.
As a community we are moving forward, although unevenly and perhaps more slowly than many think fair. In terms of meeting ideals and catering to the just impatience of those who feel excluded we can do better. But what we are doing is good – just not good enough.
How can we do better?
I was reading recently that children who are praised for being smart do less well than children who are praised for trying hard. Since we are more likely to repeat behaviors, we are praised for we can imagine here that there’s an opportunity for growth and a response cul-de-sac. Where can you grow if you are praised for being smart? Only your ego can grow.
With punishment we have a similar problem. Mostly it doesn’t work and creates negative emotions. If you punish a person for not being inclusive you are excluding them from your set of ‘good people’ and you are not making them feel more kindly toward the people you want them to be inclusive of.
Punishment is also a poor response because it is rarely thought through well and almost never addresses the reason for the lack of desired response. It also assumes that non-compliance with inclusion is a willed act, rather than an unconscious reflex.
Accountability for one’s actions is an essential value for all of us. But the idea that this means punishment is the best response is inconsistent with our best understanding of human psychology.
With the proviso that there will be a few people who will be poorly disposed toward being Disability Inclusive for deeply pathological reasons there are some general assumptions we can safely make about people in general
- We are mostly well-meaning and kind.
- We have a natural potential to be very inclusive.
- The extent to which we are inclusive is influenced by our experience of disability within our in-group (family, friends etc – we have multiple in-groups)
- If we are becoming more Disability Inclusive a lot will depend on what we need to do – the effort required to adapt our behaviors and the extent of competing demands on our emotional and cognitive capacity.
These 4 assumptions will instantly tell us that in any given group of people there will a spectrum of responses to the proposition that they might be more Disability Inclusive.
Such a group might develop a culture of inclusivity which will stimulate its members to become mutually supportive. In-groups are more likely to support members who don’t adapt as fast as others.
As our culture trends toward greater inclusivity individuals will also trend toward being more inclusive. If we are held to account for our degree and rate of adaptation the question is ‘What is the nature of that accountability?’
I would want to be praised for the effort I have applied and supported to be more so.
A few years ago, I read of managers in the US who said they were supportive of Disability Inclusion, but they were fearful of asking about disability (of which they were ignorant) lest they give offence.
My immediate response was to be disappointed that the advocates of Disability Inclusion had contributed to such an atmosphere of anxiety. But I knew from my own experience that this was not unusual. When I became chair of a disability ERG in 2016, I realised that members were frustrated and impatient and some were understandably angry. But othering those who seemed to block our aspirations wasn’t the way to go.
Over the next 3 years I worked to create an openness that enabled a frank two-way exchange of thoughts, a relentless spirit of civility and positivity, and an approach that was strictly professional. It has been generally acknowledged that we achieved a lot during that time.
But even so, I left my role still without understanding why there was resistance to Disability Inclusion.
Experiments in changing our behaviour
I quit full-time work in June 2021 and undertook an inquiry into how to do Disability Inclusion better. I wanted to understand why there was resistance from people who were sympathetic to the cause and who were also helpful. What were the limits to goodwill?
What became an obvious danger was too narrow a focus on Disability Inclusion. On advice from a former colleague and Manager Inclusion & Diversity I read Iris Bohnet’s What Works: Gender Equality by Design. This was an exploration of why the promise of gender equity wasn’t being realised. So, the problem wasn’t disability alone but inclusion in general. We were dealing with something fundamental to the human psyche, something hardwired in our behaviour.
Over the past 4 decades I have been reading in management theories – how to manage workforce members to get the best performance from them in service of organizational goals. There is a tremendous amount of research on management and leadership. There are university business schools and businesses devoted to crafting better people managers and leaders.
In recent years in the US there seems to be a growing backlash against DEI. From the various comments I hear and read it is apparent that DEI has become profoundly misunderstood and misrepresented. That suggests to me that at the very least this is down to the advocates. If we can’t get it right, if we don’t understand what we are doing it isn’t reasonable to assume supporters, let alone the skeptics and opponents (regardless of their motivation), are going to shift their positions in the direction we desire.
I can think of no human environment that has been subject to as much scrutiny and analysis as the workplace. Organizations continue to be experiments in collective endeavors in service or for profit.
I have worked in 4 federal and 5 state departments spanning 5 decades (I started young) and over that time the public sector work environment has been utterly transformed. The environment I started in and the one I left in have one thing in common – each (and all in between) reflected the culture of the day. What has transformed the most has been attitudes toward staff – especially their safety and welfare. Even so staff are still exposed to ongoing situations where their wellbeing is at risk.
One of the most important developments in management and leadership practice has been the degree to which these roles have become so much more demanding of a manager/leader in terms of their emotional intelligence and maturity. There’s an interpersonal moral imperative imposed upon individuals that wasn’t there a few decades ago. These roles require personal growth in ways they never used to. They have become (in the literature at least) personal stretch roles. This isn’t playing out widely in practice because the insights from experimentation and research are applied very unevenly. The demands on managers/leaders aren’t matched by enabling support.
What has this to do with advocates of Disability Inclusion? Managers and leaders are charged with changing organizations and workforces, and Disability Inclusion advocates and activists work with the same cloth, but with a fraction of the insight and skill demand.
Contemporary organizations are experiments in evolving human behaviour to be more productive and keep staff safe at the same time. That’s stretching our collective ability to work well together.
Inclusion (disability and all the rest of the diversity groups) is an additional stretch factor. We are asking a lot of people of goodwill, and we are not doing as well as we hope.
There is an option for any diversity advocate to become better skilled in, and more knowledgeable about, fostering more inclusive behaviour in workforces.
Conclusion
As a community we are engaged in a shared stretch exercise as we move beyond ancient prejudices and biases toward a harmonious diverse and pluralistic shared reality (present adverse currents notwithstanding).
Certainly, for the past quarter century our workplaces have been Petrie dishes in which organizations have experimented with ways to turn moral imperatives like inclusion and equity into shared valued experiences. But the efforts have often been haphazard – with more expectation from on high than realistic support.
We are still entranced by the cognitive silver bullet delusion that insists that information and injunction alone are sufficient to generate change. This has never been true. We can’t behave that way. We are not reliably good at changing our own behaviours in line with even urgent personal needs. Changing any behaviour is hard if we misattribute the cause of the need and misdiagnose the problem.
It is precisely because we are inherently disposed to be more inclusive that we have the problem we now have – things aren’t moving fast enough. This is more like a traffic jam than a breakdown. We are all going in the same direction but for different reasons and with different destinations (an excellent image of diversity) – and in doing so we inadvertently impede others in their efforts to get to where they want to be.
Changing our behaviour to make inclusion work in a more fluid way takes effort that will be better rewarded if it is guided by insight and patience.