Inclusion as a stretch goal

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can we do better?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Experiments in changing our behaviour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

When idealism and reality clash

Introduction

When I started this blog, I was driven by the question of why Disability Inclusion was so hard. I was a founding member of my department’s Disability Employee Network in July 2010 and when I became its chair in November 2016 membership had dwindled because not a lot of progress had been made. Members were frustrated. It seemed everyone agreed that our cause was just, but change had been moving at glacial pace [though this seems like a vulnerable metaphor these days]. There was also no doubting the goodwill and good intent of most of our colleagues.

This post follows on from the last one because it seems evident that reading in evolutionary anthropology and psychology and the biology of the roots of our behaviour is offering me more insight into why Disability Inclusion hard to do effectively than sources on organisational psychology and DEI.

There is a common message these days that staff in organisations are under increasing time pressure, so volunteers leading inclusion ERGs are struggling to find the time they need to do the work they want. The question I have framed is, “What is the most effective way of utilising the time available toward achieving the inclusion outcomes desired?”

Below I want to further refine earlier arguments.

What we need to figure out

The aspiration for inclusion in an organisation must begin with getting as many people involved in achieving this goal onto the same page. Critically this means that the following people should agree that they are stakeholders in common:

  1. The ERG’s leadership.
  2. The organisation’s Executive Leadership Team.
  3. The organisation’s HR branch, especially its DEI team.
  4. The ERG’s executive sponsors and Champions.

Organisations seek to achieve shared visions via policies and strategies. But agreement between all stakeholders tends to be implicit and hierarchical rather than explicit and in common. This work well enough with BAU, but the inclusion challenges that ERGs engage in isn’t BAU. ERGs and their mission are novel developments. They are not fully integrated into an organisation’s functions simply because volunteers aren’t normally used to solve organisational problems. They are more like social or sports clubs. Only in this case they are not.

So, a critically important question is, “What is the organisation’s problem that an ERG is a response to?” The answer will be something like – The organisation has a duty, responsibility or need to foster inclusion. The shape of the answer will depend on the nature of the organisation – public service, for profit or not for profit.

The next question is – Why does the organisation need an ERG as part of the solution? The question that naturally follows on is – How can an ERG be a highly effective partner in achieving the objective?

Asking and answering these questions will generate some uncomfortable insights. These are unavoidable, but their value will be diluted if the stakeholders do not share the process of asking and answering. One great problem with a hierarchical approach to doing this is what the least powerful members of a hierarchy say is modified in its transmission to the most powerful. Stakeholders on equal footing get to share unfiltered insights. This is critical in laying the foundation for a shared understanding.

Organisations have the right and power to withdraw their sanctioning of an ERG’s existence, or to fully embrace it as a partner in solving the problem. Between such options is a tepid shadow land that can border on being unintentionally abusive to ERGs and its volunteer leads.

The goal of inclusion has a long arc

Western English-speaking communities have been successful in incorporating people from diverse ethnicities and cultures over the past 75 years. As well, they have progressed the inclusion and equity of groups previously significantly disadvantaged. I am not suggesting this progress is sufficient, only that relative to the past few thousand years it is significant. I can’t comment on other cultures because I don’t have intimate knowledge of them.

We have inclusion ERGs now precisely because there is widespread understanding that this is a path we should continue to follow. This is aided by legislation and commitment to a range of UN conventions. We have been doing hard inclusion work for decades as a culture or a community – and steady success has been achieved. The general widespread goodwill to embrace diversity is well-attested to.

So, what’s the problem now?

There’s a bottleneck. Our capacity to adapt has run up hard against hardwired reflexes. It’s not that we can’t readily adjust our behaviour without considerable cognitive effort – just that we often under-estimate the effort required and the complexities in making desired change happen. 

We have a mismatch between what our reflexes are finely attuned to and what our environment is. As I have noted previously our stone-age minds are not suited to space-age reality. Two factors drive this mismatch. One is the relative novelty of our increasingly pervasive large complex, diverse, and pluralistic communities full of people who would have readily triggered exclusion reflexes previously [and may still do so now]. The second is the existence of large organisations who are expected to reflect the composition of the communities in which they operate or which they represent.

These organisations are expected to comply with legislation that prohibits exclusion and discrimination. And in the case of public service organisations there is the additional policy demand to be representative of the community. This is a novel scenario. It is an experiment that we are still tinkering with and fine tuning.

All this places organisational workplaces under novel pressure to respond to imperatives to go against our personal reflexes to exclude and discriminate. For many, adapting to this demand conforms with personal values, but that doesn’t necessarily mean such adaptation will be easy or swift. Others will preserve their reflexes for personal or cultural [including religious] reasons. 

Not everyone agrees that inclusion in general is a good thing. They may agree that some should be included, but not all. How that is managed within an organisational culture varies. And among those readily disposed to be inclusive their responses will be on a spectrum – from highly motivated to weakly motivated – as well as widely inclusive to narrowly inclusive. This spectrum reflects the degree of effort [cognitive, intellectual and emotional] individuals must expend to behave in ways that meet the objectives of inclusion stakeholders. It also reflects the personal, cultural, and religious values that sustain individuals in their families and communities.

While we are moving towards greater inclusiveness as a culture that change arises from many factors – demands for equity and inclusion at a cultural level, legislation, policies and their strategies, attitudes expressed in workplaces, the influence of senior organisational leaders, and ERGs. These combine messily but positively.

Conclusion

Evolutionary psychology and anthropology tell us something important. Reflexes to be biased or exclusive live in all of us because they were once [and still are] vital for our survival and wellbeing. They are the foundations of our behaviour. But the reality in which we must survive and thrive has changed hugely and rapidly over the past few centuries, and like any environmental change demands, we must adapt our behaviour to match. 

Workplaces are where we are under additional pressure to consciously manage when we are free to go with our reflexes on a personal level and we have an obligation to modify them, so our behaviour is appropriate to our work-related context. It’s not a case of whether an act of bias or exclusion is good or bad, but whether it is appropriate in the context of the expectations and obligations of our workplaces.

The fact that we have legislation and policies to guide inclusion is a significant environmental change – and something we are expected to adapt to. That means there will be an ongoing uneven response to that adaptive pressure – from resistance to struggling with the cognitive effort – to enthusiastic embrace. ERGs, DEI staff and other advocates and supporters of inclusion reflect one extreme of the spectrum of response – the most enthusiastic. They will be most effective when they interpret the unevenness of the response from others with insight and respond with kindness and patience. 

Organisations will be more effective in fostering a culture of inclusion in their workforce when the key stakeholders have a shared understanding of the challenge and an agreed approach to achieving the goals of collaborative action.

Inclusion as an aspirational goal

Introduction

I am finding Our Tribal Future by David R. Samson an immensely useful read. Having a theory about exclusion/inclusion is essential if we want to perform well as change agents in the Diversity Equity & Inclusion [DEI] space. And whether that theory is based upon our beliefs or upon the best science and thinking we can find matters a great deal.

I started reading intensively in DEI in July 2021 after I quit fulltime work. I wanted to catch up on what I hadn’t time for in the past 5 years. I was initially excited, and then progressively disappointed as I read more about what wasn’t working. At the back of my mind, I had a lingering sense of the frustration I felt about the resistance I had encountered as a disability ERG lead.

I was in fact very successful, but that was down to me listening to Kate Nash, the founder and CEO of PurpleSpace. She was the keynote speaker at the 2018 Australian Network on Disability Annual National Conference and introduced me to the idea of Networkology. Kate radically transformed my performance as an ERG lead. There was a discipline to running a network. It was informed by data and critical knowledge. It was a professional skillset.

But the more I researched the more it was apparent that there was more data and knowledge that could inform our understanding of the dynamics of how workplaces change or evolve. This is critical knowledge for a professional change agent.

ERGs are operated by volunteers who have a passion for their cause, but its rare that what they do is understood as a professional level role. This is an unfortunate legacy which persists in devaluing the challenges ERGs undertake.

Organisational change

There are very well-paid professionals who help organisations adapt to the constantly changing world they operate in. My stepdaughter is one. There are many books on that theme and there are courses as well. Adapting to changing markets, technologies, and cultural expectations is a complex and difficult challenge. There’s a lot of research devoted to the theme, and some of it embraces DEI.

But it is also fair to say that making workplace cultures less biased and more inclusive is rarely treated as having the same level of complexity and difficulty as other change themes. Having volunteer ERGs reinforces that illusion. If the theme is really that important why have untrained volunteers playing a leading role?

We have become comfortable with the familiar idea that equity and inclusion efforts frequently fail or make progress very slowly. I participated in activist events for women’s, gay and Aboriginal rights in the late 1960s. That was 50 years ago. Around the same time multi-culturalism became a thing. Disability rights movements also kicked off around that – but that wasn’t something I was aware off.

My point is that we see that desired change started 50 years ago, and it’s still not done. So, either of two things must be true. We don’t know how to make change happen faster or its not change that our culture wants. I think it’s the first option – we don’t know how to make change happen faster.

This is, I believe, because this is a novel challenge. We are not good at rapid change to reduce bias and increase inclusion and equity because we haven’t needed to do so for most of our human history. 

It isn’t that we don’t want to be inclusive so much as we don’t know how in the contemporary context. 

Contemporary organisations are novel in the span of human history. They are where we experiment with novel aspirations, try to get it right – and fail routinely. Anybody with a substantial history of working for an organisation will be aware of the constant fiddling with how business is conducted and how staff are treated. Organisations are often the Petrie dishes of cultural change. This is evolution playing out in the lives of staff. How do we intentionally stimulate the evolution of workplace cultures effectively?

Things are mostly going in the right direction – albeit slower than many desire. The question is, “Can we make the desired change happen at a faster rate?” I think we can, provided we accepted some truths. The most important truth is that the desired changes are difficult to attain [as the past 50 years have made plain] and will require the acquisition of new skills and knowledge if we want to influence the rate of change.

Why is it so hard?

We evolved to be highly cooperative in small groups of people we know and identify with. But we are now asked to cooperate with strangers who may also have indications that they are not like us. We don’t reflexively see them as potentially members of our in-group. We must learn that behaviour.

The value of that fundamental small group seems overrun by the social environments we live in. But it’s still there in work teams, sporting teams, groups of friends, and in gangs. At least the psychological reflex is still there. But this often means we favour in-group members and exclude members of perceived out-groups. While this is ‘natural’ it is also maladaptive in the context of social values. 

The situation is complicated by the focus on the individual and the large organisations we often work in. On the one hand our focus on the individual can seem to isolate inherently social people, leading to anxiety. This can be self-induced. On the other hand large workforces are full of strangers [people not like us] and this can make it difficult to build inclusive in-groups. It can also make it easy to see co-workers as members of an out-group. This is especially the case if we bring culturally and religiously conditioned reflexes to exclude people who are not like us with us into the workplace.

Even unintended exclusion can push individuals into feeling a sense of isolation and this can cause significant emotional pain because it denies their deep instinct for belonging. Exclusion, isolation and loneliness are related because they trigger the same adverse reaction. We can harm others with no ill intent if we rely on our ancient reflexes to guide our behaviour. Do we want to do that?

Citing the work of John Cacioppo, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, David Samson notes that “loneliness was highly correlated with cortisol levels; so much so, the experiment found, that acute loneliness was about as stressful as a physically violent encounter.”

Exclusion isn’t necessarily the same thing as loneliness, but the accumulated impact of exclusion has the same consequence. We can quibble about language or focus on the very real adverse consequence of being denied belonging. Cacioppo observed that: ”The people who had been triggered to feel lonely became radically more depressed, and the people who had been triggered to feel connected became radically less depressed.” Samson goes on to say that “Isolated people felt less secure and thus more vulnerable to threats and succumbed to hypervigilant states to compensate. The consequences are profound, as this creates a type of negative feedback loop, where loneliness begets depression and anxiety, behaviors that end up driving people away, in turn pouring more fuel on the loneliness fire.”

The experience of workplace isolation, rejection, and denial of membership of a group or community isn’t openly discussed, but it is real. One thing I tried to tackle as a disability ERG lead was the stigma of mental illness. People living with anxiety or depression dared not ask for any accommodation because of the fear of being targeted as incapable of doing their job and expelled from their sense of belonging in a work team. It remains an uncompleted aspiration. 

The problem is that we can have multiple competing impulses. Our own reflexes don’t necessarily mesh with organisational expectations. These expectations are essentially aspirational but expressed as if compliance is easy. It isn’t. We are naturally inclusive and exclusive. Samson makes the point that our natural reflexes haven’t caught up with the reality we live in. We can feel we are being unjustly blamed for something we don’t understand. Or we can see our situation as an opportunity to stretch ourselves.

The aspiration toward inclusion to ensure harmony and equity in the novel [in an evolutionary sense] communities and organisation we have created is vital for our shared future wellbeing. But how we transform aspiration into actuality isn’t well understood.

Using volunteer ERGs to achieve this aspirational goal makes perfect sense because they are best placed to influence workplace cultures. But let’s not under-estimate the complexity and difficulty of the task.

Conclusion

There are 3 important points I want you to take from the above:

  1. Our reflexes do not match our cultural aspirations for inclusion. 
  2. Adapting those reflexes to meet our aspirations for inclusion requires conscious intentional effort. 
  3. Not everyone is committed to making the effort. Indeed, even those who are committed, may struggle. Personal and work-related stress can reduce our capacity to change our behaviour, no matter how well-intentioned or idealistic we are. 

The challenge for ERGs is figuring out how they can best work with their organization’s DEI team and the executive leadership to foster aspirational cultural change within the workplace. This is about crafting evolutionary change rather than addressing deficits. It is important that we understand that driving inclusion is aspirational rather than corrective. 

The strategic question is “How do we grow the sense of the in-group – and scale it up to embrace a whole workforce?” Working positively within the workplace culture to do this is the critical function of an ERG. This includes working with groups and individuals across the organization. 

Importantly it is skilled work. I think ERGs leads are more effective if they are already well down the path to being intentionally inclusive. This applies to executive sponsors and champions as well. 

From my reading in evolutionary anthropology and psychology it seems there is the potential for a new skillset to emerge – intentionally evolving workplaces towards greater inclusion. This is a whole-of-organization challenge – DEI teams, executive leadership and ERGs.

For anyone interested in deeper reading on the foundational insights of our inheritedI can recommend a few other resources as well as Our Tribal Future. These are:

Michael Patterson 

14 January 2025

On getting exclusion

Introduction

I recently came across Our Tribal Future by David R. Samson. I was alerted to the book via an episode of CBC’s Ideas [podcast – Political tribalism is an existential threat to humanity: evolutionary anthropologist]

This has been a theme I have been pursuing for some time now. We must understand why we exclude if we are going to be effective in crafting strategies to foster inclusion.

This is especially important in times when the staff who lead Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) and those who support them are time poor. It makes sense to ensure that maximum benefit is had from the time and effort directed at making workplaces more inclusive.

The Trust Paradox

Samson opens his book with “For all social species, one of the most intract-

able problems is whom to trust. I call this the Trust Paradox.” Whom to trust is a fundamental question at every level of community – from family upwards. Samson says the next level up from family is friendship, and then there’s the tribe.

Tribalism served human communities well as an answer to the Trust Paradox: “If your signal is not received as honest, you gain no entrance into the social inner sanctum. But if others recognize your signals as honest, you pass the test and are treated with a positive bias and, buttressed by your shared identity protective cognition, given tribal privileges.”

However: “Humanity had a new way to promote cooperation… but at a terrible, horrific cost. Once in-groups exist, by definition, so too do out-groups. It was both feature and bug, curse and blessing.”

Samson here introduced the idea of evolutionary mismatch. We adapt to what was rather than what is. In a sense the speed at which we adapt means we are playing catch up. That wasn’t a huge problem when things didn’t radically change. There was a chance to catch up. That’s no longer the case. Population growth and greater urbanisation are taxing our tribalism’s virtues and exposing its limitations.

As I noted in my last post, we are space-age people with still stone-age minds. We need to re-imagination how we trust and how we expand our sense of in-group.

The importance of getting our ideas right

Not being inclusive is often seen as a failure. We have legislation and policies that require inclusivity. There is an expectation by some that this means compliance is required, and non-compliance is a failure.

The problem with this perspective is that it fails to account for something fundamental in our psyches. We don’t adapt our behaviour to edicts unless strong self-interest is activated. The Neuroleadership Institute observes that behaviour change can be stimulated by moving away from danger [a strong impulse] or toward reward [the preferred]. This is more sophisticated than the reward/punishment duality.

The mere presence of inclusive legislation and policies will stimulate a minority to adapt their behaviour, but for the majority compliance isn’t triggered strongly. Our tribalism impulse, which is valid in so many ways, will continue to exert its dominance.

Changing attitudes and behaviour takes significant emotional and cognitive effort. There must be a strong need to adapt and move from an adverse situation to move toward a rewarding one.

Not everyone is highly motivated to conform to new attitudes and behaviours. If we understand this as a spectrum, we will see a minority with little motivation and a minority with high motivation and in between a range of degrees of motivation which might be responsive to canny persuasion.

We must understand what modifies levels of motivation. At one extreme inclusivity may be dampened by cultural or religious influences, or personal psychological circumstances. Others who may be inclined toward inclusivity might not feel able to give the emotional and cognitive effort needed to integrate inclusive attitudes and behaviours into their personal repertoire because of other life demands. These can be carer responsibilities, adverse personal relationships, health challenges, financial or other woes, and adverse work circumstances. 

Aside from a minority who are resistant, and a minority who are highly motivated, the majority might be seen as responsive, but passive to varying degrees.

Quite simply, intentional change to attitudes and behaviours, even when very desirable, can be very hard to do.

The risk of inclusion champions becoming excluders

There is nothing that necessarily makes a member of a diversity group a paragon of inclusion. And the worst risk is of creating an inclusive in-group muttering about a non-inclusive out-group. 

Samson’s vital insight about trust is important here. An inclusion champion must earn the trust of people they want to influence. This is to say that changing attitudes and behaviours is often about doing things on other people’s terms rather than your own.

Militant inclusion champions are not unknown. Their passion might be comprehensible, but their behaviour just triggers hardwired tribalism reflexes.

Tribalism is everywhere

The stone-age mind is everywhere, in everyone. The extent to which it exerts influence differs from person to person. Groups in a workplace can become in-groups with no awareness of exclusion.

Whether executives and managers like it or not they will form in-groups that relegate subordinates into an out-group. And non-management staff can equally see organisational leaders as an out-group.

Likewise frontline staff can see members of the public [customers or service users] as the out-group.

As individuals we can be members of multiple in-groups [and out-groups in other people’s eyes] and have a sense of multiple out-groups – at work and in the community.

Now this isn’t always a bad thing. In large complex communities this is inevitable. Our natural sense of tribal grouping is reckoned to be around 1500. In urban settings with populations in excess of 1 million it is clear that our communal sense is beyond its natural limit.

Being aware

Anti bias training has been shown to have outcomes contrary to intent. You can’t train a person to not be biased. You can help them become aware that bias is natural but not appropriate in every circumstance – and to know the difference.

Being aware of bias doesn’t make you inclusive. You can be aware of your bias but still go with it. For example, you might be recruiting and decide not to offer the role to a clearly superior candidate whose ‘diversity’ attributes you calculate won’t be a good fit for your team. That’s activating in-group privilege. It makes sense, and your superiors may even be sympathetic. But its counter to the ideals of inclusion.

Being aware of how your stone-age mind influences you is the first step.

Principles and ideals

The fact that our ability to adapt to novel social and communal settings is slow means that we must see legislation and policies mandating inclusion as ideals to be attained rather than mandates to be enforced.

The stone-age mind’s tribal reflex renders accountability in enforcing compliance with legislation and policy profoundly problematic. Organisational leadership will invoke the in-group privilege of being more forgiving of its members. This creates a problem since this in-group is the one charged with enforcing compliance with legislation and policy.

Often members of the leadership’s out-group are more likely to be held to account for non-compliance – with resultant angst or anger.

Principles to be adhered to and ideals to be aspired to should be guiding principles in any community. But how this guidance is expressed is another matter.

Effective leadership – at ERG or organisational levels requires self-awareness and knowledge. The challenge is to open up our stone-age mind’s reflexes to reflective awareness in the context of our space-age world. That way we can identify when they don’t fit a contemporary workplace situation, and a canny approach to adhering to principles and ideals can be developed.

But for that to happen there must be buy in on acquiring and applying the knowledge. There are many strategies that can reduce risk and build trust that can then be developed.

Conclusion

In our space-age reality exclusion is something we all do out of necessity. But, because we don’t live in a stone-age reality, we need to modify our behavioural reflexes to ensure that we can manage to be exclusive when its okay to do so, and inclusive when we have a duty to be so. 

The word discrimination used to refer only to choice. Decades ago, being a discriminating person was a good thing. Now, because we have the idea of anti-discrimination, it is no longer a good thing. Its short for inappropriate choice – because we have created a principle and an ideal which say we must not make choices about people because of certain attributes and in certain settings.

It would be nice to argue for universal inclusion regardless of setting – and that might flow from effectively growing inclusion in workplaces – but that’s a bigger challenge than I can explore here.

Workplaces, because of legislation and policies, are remarkable petri dishes where we are learning to better adapt our stone-age minds to space-age world. We are building Tribalism 2.0 – how well can we do that?

Michael Patterson 

6 January 2025

A reflection on bias and inclusion

Introduction

Over the 2024 Christmas/New Year season I have been getting an introduction to cognitive science and a bit of a refresh on evolutionary psychology. Yeah, that’s my idea of fun. I wanted to start off 2025 with some fresh insights.

Below I will reflect on a few ideas I have developed in previous posts. You might think that I am drawing a long bow at times, but bear with me.

Thinking in the right scale

Anatomically modern humans have been around about 200,000 years. What we call civilisation is around 6,000 years old. That suggests that our ancestors had something like 194,000 years living in tribes or villages. You’d expect that’s plenty of time for we humans to have developed deeply ingrained behaviours and attitudes ideally suited to groups of around 150 people.

By comparison 6,000 isn’t very long to adapt those behaviours and attitudes to larger more complex communities. This is especially so when we remember that small rural communities were still a thing for most of those 6,000 years.

Our concerns about bias and inclusion maybe began a few centuries ago but became a major theme only in the 1960s – in the midst of the technological, economic, and social changes that were triggered after World War 2. That’s a scant 60 years ago.

Reflex and aspiration

The conditions under which we live now [physically, technologically, and socially] are nothing like our ancestors knew or could have imagined. The momentum of change seems to be relentless.

I have been reading Thriving with Stone-Age Minds by Justin L. Barret & Pamela Ebstyne King. As a text on evolutionary psychology, I found it immensely useful, and while I do commend it, I should caution the reader that it does have a religious context which may be challenging to some. 

The premise of the book is that we have ‘stone-age’ minds, but we mostly live in settings utterly unlike where those minds/brains were developed. How do you thrive in a contemporary metropolis with psychological tools created for jungles, forests and savannas?

Our reflexes are stone-age, but our aspirations are space-age.

As we evolve our understanding of our psychology, we must surrender mistaken ideas and myths about our nature and behaviour. There are times when information is sufficient to activate changes in behaviour, and there are times when it is not. A sign saying that a bridge is out is usually sufficient to induce a person not to drive across it. But a message saying ‘be inclusive of people with disability’ is not. This is because very different reflexes are involved in the response to the different messages.

We need to understand what reflexes are triggered in what situation and set our expectations and methods of communication accordingly.

When virtues become vices

Our stone-age tribal reflexes still serve us well in many settings – in small communities, in families, in teams for instance. We favour in-group members. We are more tolerant of them, we grant them indulgences and preferences, we may also take risks or make sacrifices for them.

In a tribe or village those reflexes would never be questioned. And when they include exclusion, it is usually in response to a threat of some kind – an enemy or competitor, or someone very strange.

In larger communities, exclusion may be activated simply because we are psychologically stretched beyond that 150 mark. We must be selective about who is counted in that belonging-to group. We prefer people like us. Bias is a cognitively efficient tool to express that preference.

It has been argued that it is our strong sense of community or need to belong to a group that has made being human distinct, and not our capacity for tool making. Our ability to develop tools and refine them exists as it does only because of the group – or tribe – or village. Dedicating the time to refine tools is safer in a community.

But in civilisations those reflexes which were fundamental to the survival and flourishing of tribes and villages become problematic, and in some settings impediments to collective well-being. In fact, these reflexes can also become the basis for abusive or criminal conduct.

We don’t have civilisation specific reflexes yet. Consequently, there is a constant tension between what we aspire to and what we deliver.

Adaptive evolution is hard

We are constantly adapting and evolving our physical and social environment, and as a result, we also evolve. But we are talking evolution and not transformation. The core of a thing remains. The first car is still recognisable in our contemporary cars. The first plane is still recognisable in contemporary planes. The stone-age mind is still recognisable in the space-age citizen.

Cores are refined, not transformed. They adapt – provided intent and effort are applied. Any evolutionary process is difficult and requires skill. Our ancestors went from using found rocks to creating sometimes exquisitely formed tools from flint. Then we transformed our tool making when we developed the ability to work with metal.

Our stone-age minds are evolving at a slow but steady pace. There is no transformation yet on the horizon, so we are going to have to stay with our inherited psychological technology and continue to refine it. To do so effectively we must first understand it, discard wrong ideas, develop strategies that work with, not against, it, and implement them with empathy and respect.

Conclusion

Contemporary organisations [whether businesses, government agencies, or NGOs] are novel iterations of old forms. They operate in an unprecedented cultural environment. They are ‘space-age’ entities operated by people who often allow their ‘stone-age’ minds more latitude than serves the common good.

Its not that anybody is doing anything wrong. Its more that we don’t yet have adaptive strategies that work as well as they could.

Its hard enough for staff to flourish in many contemporary operating environments as it is without adding the extra demand to be less biased and more inclusive in a non-insightful way. What we need are strategies that trigger actions that are sufficiently rewarding so people will put in the extra cognitive effort to change their behaviour. This will require deep self-reflection by those who want to be effective change agents.

Let’s ensure there will be opportunities in 2025 to re-imagine how to evolve more inclusive workplaces and communities.

Michael Patterson

31 December 2024

A reflection on the celebration of diversity



Introduction
MY time as a disability ERG lead was dominated by addressing the multiple concerns raised by members. We had a lot of work to do with limited resources. I left celebration of diversity up to my successor. I focused on inclusion in a very practical problem-solving way. 

Over the past near 18 months of working with ERG leads from a range of diversity areas I have been rethinking my hyper focus on practical problem solving. 

Celebration of diversity is an inclusion strategy. It has a goal of bringing about positive cultural change in the workforce. It should be part of a balanced approach by an ERG. 

ERGs are created to address a perceived need – so their primary focus is on generating change – of perceptions, attitudes and behaviours. On an organisational level this includes policies, procedures and practices. On a workplace level this includes activity that allows a workforce’s culture to evolve into a more aware, responsive, inclusive, and kinder community. 

One of us
Contemporary research affirms that our natural behaviour is to privilege members of our own group rather than specifically exclude members of other groups. 

In the book Tribal Michael Morris argues that we have misunderstood this reflex as primarily exclusive when in fact it is the opposite. This doesn’t mean that we aren’t also brutally exclusive at times – just that it’s not our primary nature. The problem is that our in-group can be too narrowly defined, too exclusive. The challenge is to make our in-group bigger. We can expand from a small team or group all the way up to the ideal that we are all fellow humans – and maybe beyond that if we are so inclined.

In between there is a realisable goal – we are all members of the same workplace community equally deserving of kindness and empathy – and (the benefit of privileging in-group members) the extra effort to respond to individual situations and needs. 

We are naturally social creatures. In fact, some are reimagining that what made it possible for humans to evolve the way we have isn’t our way with fire or tool making. It is that we are more potently social than the other primates. 

In-groups are cool with diversity, and with accommodating (privileging) individual needs within the group. We have a natural response to be inclusive and supportive of our own. The challenge is how we can expand our in-group – how we embrace others as one of us

Celebrating diversity as if people really matter

I didn’t want to initiate celebrations of the diversity of people with disability while members were still being excluded through inaccessible physical spaces, technologies, and practices. Being included in principle but not in practice isn’t a welcome experience – and for way too many people with disability that has been a persistent reality in workplaces and in the community.

But among ‘diversity groups’ people with disability are unique in that others do not face the same physical and practical needs for accommodations. Some diversity groups do require changes to policies and procedures, while for others the need is for changes to attitudes and behaviours.

We exclude unintentionally when we do not see how we respond to difference unconsciously, triggered by cultural or circumstantial conditioning that says, ‘They are not one of us.’

Research undertaken in the US a few years ago showed that managers, while sympathetic to the cause of Disability Inclusion, were not comfortable talking to staff with disability in case their ignorance of their disability gave offence.

I had a similar experience in 2019 when an office fire warden admitted they had not approached a blind staff member with a guide dog about their emergency response needs out of fear of being thought offensive.

So, while there maybe be an inclusive sentiment that wants to embrace a person as ‘one of us’, unresolved anxieties can create a barrier and push that person into an out-group.

We often use the term diversity not to denote subtle differences we all have, but to denote large differences that place another person into a separate group – whether they want that or not. Members of diversity groups want inclusion because the distinctions we make about them are unkind and inappropriate. So, if we label them as members of a ‘diversity group’ we have created a classification that not only excludes them through an act we imagine as inclusive, but it can impose upon them a primary identity they do not want.

Our tribal instincts are not at fault, but they do induce us to think and behave in terms of groups and membership of groups at an unconscious level – even when it creates out-groups we do not intend to make. We have the ability and the power, as well as an obligation, to make our sense of tribal identity far larger.

This last point is important because by their very nature, an organisation’s workforce constitutes a group to which all staff belong. It has the potential to be a vital in-group for all staff members. This is often explicit as an obligation in codes of conduct.

The fact is that we are all diverse, and we can all be divided into sub-groups that could become grounds for exclusion – where we live, which sport we follow [and which team], music tastes, hair colour, and so. Indeed, there have been times when such groupings have been grounds for exclusion, and sometimes violence. 

Our culture has evolved to a point where a residual stubbornly persistent insistence on putting some people into out-groups remains. Our community has steadily evolved into a rich array of diverse individual expressions as the demand for conformity to determined and imposed identities has declined. Individuals are asserting self-determined identities over those culturally asserted. This is a novel development.

Our next step is to affirm diversity as an individual attribute of every member of our evolving in-group. We are who we say we are, not who we are said to be.

Conclusion

The evolution of our shared community over the past several centuries has been remarkable. However, there are persistent culturally embedded habits of exclusion by the legacy of rigidly defined in-groups that will continue to decline slowly, probably via generational change. 

In the meantime, our efforts to advance that process of change include celebrating the diversity inherent in our community members we identify by their ‘diversity group’ labels. There is a risk that we will accidentally contribute to the persistence of these exclusionary group ideas if we start seeing individual group members as inherently identified with the group.

I don’t want to be known as Michael with a disability. Disability is part of my identity – an obvious part – but I could offer up another 100 things that make me who I am. It’s not all of who I am. Its not even most of who I am.

Celebrating diversity is important, but let’s remember that it is diversity within a group. The question is whether that group is our in-group and the people whose diversity we celebrate are one of us.

This is an intentional choice on our part – and it is what will make the positive difference that should be the goal of every ERG.

Michael Patterson

12 December 2024

Are identified roles for people with disability a good idea?



Introduction
Generally speaking I am reluctant to favour such an idea, were it not for the fact that bias in recruitment persists. If we can address the bias issue effectively, that might improve things. 

However, bias is baked into the very processes of recruitment – not just in terms of obvious disability but also diversity factors like neurodiversity (which isn’t inherently a disability) and forms of anxiety that might be triggered by the selection process. Non-conformity with an assumed norm activates our instinct to be biased. Bias isn’t a sin, just a reflex out of place.

And then there’s the occasional matter of roles that directly concern disability. We might assume that targeted recruitment makes clear sense – only it doesn’t, unless we are subtle in our approach.

Recruitment method reform is a complex topic, so I will leave that for last as I reflect on these themes. 

Thinking about disability specific roles
Disability specific roles aren’t all that common so it’s easy to miss that they are not infrequently just a component of, for example, a DEI role. Do you then privilege disability over any other diversity attribute? I think so, for the following reasons. 

Disability is singular among the spectrum of diversity groups in that it requires the addressing of accessibility needs that may be physical, sensory, or behavioural. This may require specialist knowledge and insights.

Not all disabilities require such accommodations and not all people with a particular disability have insight into other disabilities. So, we can’t assume that recruiting a person who has a disability is going to be as useful as we might imagine.

A potential area for targeted recruitment is disability-related policy, procedure and practice where remedies against bias and exclusion are developed. 

This can be a problematic area because what seems like a good idea can be ineffectual. A classic example of this was the NSW Public Service Commission’s Age of Inclusion campaign which had offensive descriptions of people with disability that I had removed from its website after over a year of lobbying, and content which remained that lacked any real practical value in my view. 

The offensive comments included an assertion that people with disability were adept at problem solving because having a disability means you have to meet accessibility challenges caused by one’s disability. And there was an observation that people with disability might be preferred because they change jobs less often and are hence more stable. You can safely bet there was very little informed input from people with disability in what was claimed to have been a $1m campaign.

Some of these impediments might be overcome if an organisation engages its disability ERG as a consultative body – provided it isn’t persuaded to use this option to duck hiring a suitable person with disability. But here we have the problem of tokenism. People with disability are ‘consulted’, but they are not often part of the decision-making process. They have ‘a voice’ but no power.

A singular problem in this area is that well-intentioned people without lived experience of disability may imagine that their sense of sympathy for people with disability is sufficient to guide them to make good decisions. But sympathy doesn’t generate empathy or insight, and empathic insight is what gives us good policy, procedure and practice. 

There can be a temptation also to assume that ‘lived experience of disability is inherently sufficient.  But, like having a disability is not assurance of being universally aware of the spectrum of disability. Having exposure to disability in some meaningful fashion isn’t an assurance of anything beyond, perhaps, sincere empathy. This doesn’t mean such a person may not suit a role, just that it can’t be assumed. Empathy and insight trump sympathy and asserted knowledge.

When I became DCJ DEN Chair I had experience of living with mobility and grip disabilities. I had some insight into other disabilities but not enough to be useful. In 2018 I created a Guidance and Action Team (GAT) of 15 members with a wide array of disabilities. The GAT promptly set about schooling me on how different disabilities impacted the work experience. The DEN’s subsequent success was down to the GAT.

Having a disability doesn’t magically confer universal insight or activate empathy and compassion. People with acquired disabilities may have ongoing emotional challenges in processing the grief that comes with catastrophic loss of aspects of one’s life capabilities. That’s something too little acknowledged or explored. Disability doesn’t necessarily make you a hero or a saint. It can make you distressed and angry, traumatised in fact.

Many of us live with the after affects of trauma. It can stimulate passion but also impair empathy and impede the development of insight.

So, there no simple solution to the question of whether employing a person with disability is the best option. It is preferable if the right person is selected – but this opens a vigorous can of worms about recruitment methods. How do you know you have found ‘the right person’?

On doing a better job of selecting the best person for the job

I recently had an experience which drove home to me just how fundamentally exclusionary standard public sector recruitment practices can be. I will do a separate piece on that shortly. What starkly struck me was that the role I applied for was specifically for people with disability and yet the recruitment methodology worked against people with anxiety and people who are neurodiverse. I will repeat my assertion that not everyone who experiences anxiety, or who is neurodiverse has a disability, in their view. But the recruitment methodology would have adversely impacted some people who don’t identify as having a disability, as well as those who do.

People with disability question recruitment methods while people who have diverse needs feel they have no right to seek equity simply because they are ‘different’. Disability inclusion advocacy reaches far beyond people we recognise as having a disability to embrace those with diverse needs and those with circumstantial or situational disability – all of whom may be adversely affected by insensitive recruitment approaches.

The clear impression I got was that while the recruitment exercise was specifically to recruit people with disability, it was controlled by people without lived experience of disability of a nature that could sensitively inform the recruitment process.

A major feature of the recruitment exercise was the provision of interview question 30 minutes ahead of the interview. However, because the interview was conducted remotely via MS Teams there was a sensible requirement to activate the Teams link 10 minutes ahead of the interview to avoid any last-minute problems – thereby effectively reducing the preparation time to 20 minutes. For a variety of reasons even 30 minutes preparation time can stress people with cognitive, emotional, sensory, and motor disabilities and lead to poor interview performance.

The same can also have adverse impacts on people with no declared disability or who have a ‘situational’ disability arising from a variety of ‘normal’ life events that may trigger stress, anxiety, or other cognitive impairment (e.g. lack of sleep – which a new parent might experience).

There is, so far as I know, no rational informed reason why interview questions may not be provided several days ahead of the interview. The whole logic of what interview questions are supposed to demonstrate is in need of serious review. I am aware that Aboriginal recruitment specialists are more inclined toward an opportunity for a yarn that can bring out a candidate’s personal attributes in a more relaxed atmosphere. This could be a way of enabling a recruitment process to be psychologically safe so that ‘non-normal’ attributes can be expressed.

Let me balance this with the observation that we have become accustomed to assume that what we have now works well, despite overwhelming evidence it does not. We are still recruiting managers with low psychological intelligence, low empathy, an aversion to innovation, and a disinclination to engage in ongoing professional development – precisely what sound research tells us we must avoid. I argue that regular recruitment practices favour the less sensitive, less empathic, and less diverse candidates. 

There is a larger reason for this – entrenched cultures prefer those who conform to their in-group model. Hence, we are less likely to see a neurodiverse person being recruited to a management role than a person who is psychologically ill-suited to contemporary management challenges.

There are other critical issues about interview questions which adversely impact candidates with some disabilities. Questions can be unclear or may be ‘doubled-barrelled’ – making one question effectively 2 with no extra time to prepare or respond. This can mess up a neurodiverse person regardless of whether they identify as having a disability.

Recruitment practices should aim to be inclusive and not rely on candidates self-identifying as a person with disability and hence entitled to an adjustment. The mere act of asking for an adjustment may be sufficient to trigger bias in the recruitment panel.

But if a workplace culture favours the ‘normal’ there is little incentive to take the extra effort to embrace the diverse and unfamiliar. Organisational leaders must champion the development of recruitment practices which favour capability and diversity over conformity to a comparatively insensitive norm.

To add to the challenge, recruitment panel bias is potentially a huge issue when staff who constitute the panel are not recruitment specialists. Anti bias training doesn’t work well enough to assure a candidate the panel they are about to front is not disposed to bias. In fact, some researchers argue anti bias training makes matters worse because participants wrongly believe that the fact that they have undertaken the training was all that was needed. Bias will, I think, realistically remain a problem for a long time, but which can be ameliorated to a degree by two approaches:

  1. Ensure all candidates get interview questions at least 3 days ahead of the interview.
  2. Ensure all panels have a genuine independent. I have argued for certified independents who having standing in their organisation to hold the panel convenor to account in instances of perceived bias (I have detailed some thoughts on this matter elsewhere).

Conclusion

No recruitment process will ever be perfect. We can engage in harm reduction by steadily evolving how we recruit through intentional actions. I spent 4 years in recruitment, and I have been in the public sector long enough to know how often poor choices are made. We don’t routinely get it right because our assumptions about how to recruit well haven’t been updated for decades. Knowledge about how to recruit better is available, but it requires a genuine commitment of effort to shift from insensitive to sensitive recruitment practices. We must progress beyond defending the insensitive norm.

Considerations that make recruitment fairer for people with disability and those who simply diverge from the ‘normal’ will benefit more people than will be disadvantaged. A genuine commitment to diversity means that the bog standard one-size-fits-all approach which is insensitive (and favours less sensitive people) can’t remain the business-as-usual model.

There are superior alternatives, but it will take a willingness to surrender habituated practice, and it will take an articulated demand for change in the spirit of equity and inclusion that goes way beyond the theme of disability and genuinely embraces the ideals of true diversity.

Inclusive change leadership and why it matters

Introduction
Generally speaking the [Australian] culture I live in is pretty inclusive. Of course, biases are present and there acts of intentional exclusion. 

When I was DCJ DEN Chair [11/2016. to 3/2020] I made a point to the then Secretary that there was an abundance of good will in the department, and we should aim to tap it. It wasn’t that people were not responsive to disability inclusion as much as not being habituated to thinking inclusively. I was committed to engaging with that goodwill.

There’s a trend toward greater inclusivity, but, as ever, demand exceeds supply. Those in need are justly impatient. But that impatience must not become cranky. There are smarter ways of making good change happen. Blaming people for not ‘getting it’ doesn’t work. Having a sense that one is on the right side of the moral fence – and there are others who appear morally defective – is destructive.

Contemporary workplace data tells us that staff members are under pressure just dealing with business as usual. Many also have private life demands and dramas that decrease the cognitive and emotional bandwidth they have to process changes in perception and behaviour that foster greater inclusion – even if they want to.

We all want to be as good as we imagine we could be, but we have only so much capacity to modify our behaviour in the blizzard of demands upon us.

Inclusion advocates must work smarter. They can work harder too, but if they are not working smarter that will be energy wasted.

We are always better off reinforcing positive behaviour than punishing bad behaviour. This is a fundamental insight. Being nice and being kind gets better results than being cranky – even if there is apparent justification.

This post has been inspired by Michael Morris’ Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together. Studies in evolutionary, cultural, and social psychology are helping us re-imagine what we thought we knew about making good change happen.

Today there’s an ever-growing wealth of insights for leaders of positive inclusive change efforts to tap into. It’s a constantly evolving area of inquiry. Below I want to reflect on some of the challenges leaders face.

An historical perspective

Depending on your age, your sense of how fast things are changing will have a different perspective.

The Australian community has been evolving toward greater inclusivity since the period after WW2 which saw refugees from war-ravaged Europe come here up to the present. Things have been helped along by movements and campaigns, and by generational change. This is as well as legislation and policies. It has been a multi-faceted and collective effort. 

I marched or protested for the rights of women, gays [it was called Gay Rights back then], and Aboriginal people in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Because I grew up in a community full of post WW2 migrants I didn’t have any problems with multiculturalism. My parents did. They were immigrants from the UK, as was I. They didn’t eat foreign food. At my 2ndwedding my mother eyed a plate of French vegetables suspiciously. She earnestly, in a whisper, asked me whether they were “safe to eat.”

My serious interest in disability developed in the early 1990s when I started working with the NSW Department of Community Services [DOCS]. I had been involved with people with disability since back in the early 1970s when I worked in psychiatric hospitals and in several roles after. But DOCS introduced me to the political dimension.

Over that time, I have seen the introduction of legislation, and the development of policies, designed to reduce discrimination. In the 1980s I was working in the Commonwealth Employment Service when legislation against discrimination in employment came into force – and we had to introduce our business owner clients to it. That was a fun thing to do in a rural community already fed up with ‘hippies’.

When you have a perspective spanning 6 decades you have a sense of definite change rolling out slowly. That’s evolution for you.

Some cultures and communities have remained steadfastly determined to perpetuate divisive and discriminatory values and practices. But they are in the minority. Recent trends suggest a backlash has been manifesting. While that’s true to some extent, we need to reflect on whether the ‘good guys’ are not part of the reason.

I think we have been working harder, but not smarter. We have been relying on ‘truths’ that no longer stand up to contemporary evidence. We need new truths. Scholarship has provided what we need. But we need to take the time to discover it.

Change leadership

Whether one is an ERG lead or a member of a business unit’s leadership team, or an executive leader change is a constant theme. There are always external factors necessitating internal adaptation. And there are always internal factors demanding further adaption.

One of those factors is social change as values and expectations evolve. The welfare of staff isn’t just a WHS concern. It can determine who stays, and who seeks to join the organisation – ultimately influencing its culture and its ability to perform in conformity with its mission. In the private sector this can be a matter of life or death in the marketplace.

The public sector is very different. This is something we don’t reflect on deeply enough. Departments don’t go bust, and there’s always a steady stream of candidates for vacant positions. The organisational mission is the public good delivered to an acceptable degree. Instead of profit, strong principles and high standards of thought and behaviour are intended. That’s on a macro level.

On the micro level of individual self-interest, for many staff members the reality is that their job is just that – a job. Their focus is on meeting the requirements of their role so they can keep their job, pay their bills, realise their ambitions/dreams, and sustain their families to the best of their ability. 

This places leaders in an interesting position. They have the same imperatives as other staff plus a need to navigate the complexities generated by the forces of change. For-profit businesses have an imperative to invest in supporting internal leaders to be effective change leaders. This isn’t uniformly the case in the public sector for a variety of reasons that I won’t explore here.

I want to focus the reader’s attention on two key ideas:

  1. Any role having to do with leading change is complex and challenging.
  2. The resources and support to perform in the role well may not necessarily be offered or available.

ERGs are about change

It is worthwhile reminding the reader that ERG is Employee Resource Group. Let’s focus on resource – for what? If it has anything to do with BAU that’s paid work. ERGs are substantially voluntary – so to do what?

Its to change something in the organisation that the organisation can’t do without voluntary assistance – and that change is to the benefit of the staff [especially ERG members]. What could be that difficult?

Let’s establish the insight that an organisation needs its staff to volunteer to deliver change that is necessary and desirable. That must be complex and/or difficult. It is also a clear admission that the organisation knows it can’t achieve its objective with its own ‘professional’ resources.

I want to appear to digress for a moment. There is legislation, with related policies, that require changes to the way organisations behave. However, governments do not resource agencies to comply with these requirements at a paid professional capacity. Why would you need volunteers otherwise?

I think there are two reasons for this. The first is governments are still operating on the ‘cognitive silver bullet’ theory which assumes that humans are ‘rational actors’ who adapt their behaviours to information. This has never been true outside the fantasy of hardline reason fanboys. The second is that government agencies have not developed a cogent argument against this position because [a] they believe the same theory, and [b] they haven’t taken the opportunity to become deeply informed on what the reality is.

The response is to hope that a body of motivated and self-interested but not necessarily well-informed staff might have the solution. What they can do is articulate what their needs are. But if that was the nub of the problem a few consultations and a couple of surveys would be ‘job done’. Plainly that’s not the case.  Maybe these volunteer staff could offer insights into what the real problem is?

So, let’s be clear. Driving necessary organisational behavioural and cultural change to create a reality that inclusion and diversity ideals are manifest across an organisation is a hugely difficult and complex challenge. And of course, a bunch of enthusiastic volunteers are going to provide the solution. No?

This is hard work – but it must be done

I quit fulltime work on 10 June 2021. I had quit the DEN Chair role in March the year before and had devoted my time to working on my department’s Disability Inclusion Action Plan [DIAP]. My unexpected elevation to DEN Chair in November 2018 made me a member of the DIAP implementation committee. That was a firsthand exposure to how complex the whole Disability Inclusion business is. That experience profoundly influenced how I operated as DEN Chair.

For 18 months after I left fulltime work, I researched Disability Inclusion in particular, and Inclusion in general for 18 months – putting in at least 4 hours a day, sometimes 7 days a week. I finally had the time to catch up on stuff I wished I had known earlier.

It was obvious that Disability Inclusion was more complex than a DEI team could manage, but why was this the case? Changing human behaviour has always been problematic. One of the reasons we invented religion was to do that. That’s worked a bit, it also generated more unforeseen problems that we are still arguing over.

Changing behaviour in an organisational context in response to evolving cultural values and expectations adds new flavours to the challenge. This is especially so in the public sector where there an expectation that agencies funded by public money reflect and honour the evolving level of diversity in the communities they serve – and which fund them.

We have legislation, policies and programs but our culture prefers persuasion rather than enforcement. This is a kind and inclusive approach, but it just multiplies the level of difficulty beyond the scope well-intentioned amateurs.

I have elsewhere argued that member elections are not a reliable guide to getting the best leader, and here I want to affirm that ERG leadership roles are complex and demanding and require knowledge and skill. It would be a very good thing if those supporting the ERG were similarly knowledgeable and skilled. I should also reaffirm that this is collaborative work – ERG professional, DEI professional, and organisational leadership professional.

I think an intentional, planned, and supported approach to ERG leadership is essential if ERGs are to meet the potential that is implicit in their formation. 

ERG leaders must be supported to grow their skills in the same way as any other professional role. This is especially so because the job is implicitly beyond what the organisation can manage without volunteer support. And here’s the paradox – the hardest job is easily least supported.

Conclusion

Change is a constant challenge these days. Sometimes it is exhausting. Sometimes it seems pointless. But making our workplaces more inclusive and safer is an objective we cannot responsibly resile from.

The only reason an ERG exists is that it is assumed to play a vital role in attaining a goal that is beneficial to everyone involved. It is implicitly understood that getting to that goal is very difficult.  I was a founding member of what is now the DCJ DEN. Its inaugural meeting was in July 2010. That’s over 14 years ago now. And still not mission accomplished. The equal rights movements I participated in in the late 1960s and early 1970s can report the same thing – still not mission accomplished. 

Nevertheless, we have come a long way with Disability Inclusion – and all the other equal rights causes can say the same thing. We are getting there. But even [nice and kind] people of goodwill are slow to adapt. It isn’t intentional resistance, just the nature of who we are.

This is good work. We are making progress. But, like any field, we can do far better if we are skilled and knowledgeable.

Here’s my challenge to ERG Leads, Champions and Executive Sponsors – answer these questions quickly:

  • Why does the ERG exist – what lack in organisational capacity is it supposed to fill?
  • What exactly is the volunteer ERG meant to do that the organisation’s paid staff can’t?
  • What tangible outcomes from ERG activities are expected/desired from all stakeholders -and do they align?

I think ERGs play an essential role in driving very necessary positive changes to align organisational cultures with community values. The argument is compelling for private sector bodies when inclusion and diversity enhance their capacity to attract and retain staff who sustain or boost their bottom line. In the public sector it is a moral imperative. Taxpayers are shareholders in a sense – and there is an expectation that they have equal rights to employment in the organisations their taxes fund. That right to access employment includes a right to safety [physical and psychological] – and have the opportunity to flourish. 

Safe and inclusive work cultures provide more equitable and effective services – which is the mission of the public sector. Good leadership is essential. If ERGs are to perform as desired, then they must be supported. And we must begin with helping them find the best leaders they can and developing their potential.

Selecting your best ERG leads

Introduction

Earlier this year [2024] I watched an online discussion with two ERGs leads from an international bank. The discussion was hosted by a person with no evident ERG experience, and hence a lost opportunity to get to more subtle insights. However, what made me pay serious attention was the observation that ERG lead roles were filled via competitive interview.

I have been ruminating on this for a couple of months. What seems like a great idea at first blush may become less attractive after reflection.

I tried twice to become DEN Chair [DEN = Disability Employee Network]. The first time was a fail. The second time I got to be deputy chair – which was really a nothing role and essentially meant I’d become chair in the event the incumbent was unable to continue in the role – and this did happen when the incumbent left the department. 

I don’t think it is immodest of me to assert that I was the most consequential DEN Chair in the DEN’s 14-year history. I got that role by accident. Leadership selection wasn’t designed to pick the best leaders.

Consequential leaders aren’t as common as they could be. Neither elections nor other recruitment exercises are any reliable way of ensuring the best person for the job gets it.

In preparation for stepping down as DEN Chair in March 2020 I made it known who I wanted to follow me and what capabilities were necessary for a good Chair. That assessment was later challenged, and some good points were raised. I quit fulltime employment in June 2021 and in June 2023 I accepted a consultancy role with my former employer to mentor its ERG leads.

Below I want to reflect on my learnings about ERG leadership.

What makes a good leader?

I have a vexed relationship with leadership. I can count the leaders I admire on two hands but have fingers left over [and that’s a public sector career spanning 6 decades – but not every year of each decade – that’d be only 2]. That’s a low score for a very simple fact – leadership is hard to do well.

What that small number of leaders I admired had in common came down to 5 things:

  • They were open-minded, flexible and curious.
  • They were self-reflective and sensitive to how others felt.
  • They had a strong moral compass and a sense of idealism. They had courage.
  • They had good political [organisational] awareness and a strong strategic sense of how to get things done.
  • They took pride in the quality of work they did.

Here I am talking only about the public sector. The commitment to the idea of service had to be strong. Leadership in business or other fields will have distinct attributes associated with those fields. I am not suggesting what I admired is universal. Maybe come up with your own set of attributes.

Leadership must be goal and outcome oriented, but that’s not enough. It must be about how you enlist others to be committed to that goal or outcome and how you preserve and foster that commitment. 

Leadership is a skillset as well as a personal attribute. Innate talent always benefits from an education. This is true in the arts, in business, in cooking, and so on. The gifted amateur will be undone eventually without the opportunity to refine insights and skills. I have repeatedly asserted that Disability Inclusion is a skillset, so let me add that leading a Disability Inclusion ERG is more emphatically a skillset that must be acquired and refined.

Good leaders are motivated to refine their skills and insights because they are dedicated to achieving the best outcomes in their area of responsibility.

How do we select the best leaders available?

I will be blunt. The outcomes from the recruitment exercises that I have witnessed give me no confidence in current methods. So, while the idea of using competitive interviews appeals to me, I can’t see it as a universal solution without vital caveats.

The alternative of elections, a popular method, is so flawed as to be unacceptable in any situation. It’s a problematic method by which the highly motivated represent their capabilities to people who have little capacity to assess their claims. Those who imagine they are great leaders may be driven more by ego and ambition than by a commitment to service. And then there’s the problem of the response level from ERG members – which can be 10% or lower. Let’s rule out elections as a responsible option.

The question is: How do we make the recruitment process work to its optimal potential? Here are a few thoughts:

  • Develop a lucid understanding of how the ERG functions within the organisation.
  • Develop a clear set of selection criteria and necessary capabilities.
  • Establish a clear set of objectives – what it to be achieved within the term of office.
  • Ensure the assessment panel is sufficiently representative of stakeholders – ERG members, champions, allies and executive sponsors.

I will discuss each below.

Develop a lucid understanding of how the ERG functions within the organisation.

ERGs must have a clear contract with their organisation to ensure that there is agreement about the role and objectives of the ERG. This rarely happens. An ERG either has an adversarial or collaborative relationship with its organisation. An adversarial relationship is never productive, so a collaborative relationship must be negotiated.

That agreement can be seen as a contract which specifies performances on both sides. This gives a prospective leader a clear picture of what is expected of them, and the organisation an idea of what resources it should make available to honour its side of the contract.

Establish a clear set of objectives – what it to be achieved within the term of office.

ERGs exist to change some aspect of their organisation. This might be attitudes, behaviours, values, policies, procedures, or knowledge/understanding. The consequences of desired changes are enhanced employee wellbeing which may result in greater opportunity for career progression and enhanced retention rates, which make the organisation more attractive to prospective employee. 

An ERG must have a goal that is expressed in terms of actionable steps. This is a strategic necessity. There is no point in having just a noble goal of, say, making the organisation more inclusive and accessible without saying how it is going to get to that goal.

While some ERGs emphasise celebratory activities such activities still must have a change objective.

Develop a clear set of selection criteria and necessary capabilities.

As noted above, leadership is a complex and challenging role. The ERG must tell a prospective leader what it expects. The organisation is also entitled to express its needs of an ERG leader as well.

Development of a role description which outlines the capabilities and

time commitments needed to perform the leadership role well is essential.

Ensure the assessment panel is sufficiently representative of stakeholders – ERG members, champions, allies and executive sponsors.

This is critical. All these people are legitimate stakeholders. The ERG is not just for ERG members

The assessment panel may have 2 steps. One to assess applications and cull applicants to those who best fit the criteria/capability requirements, and the other to interview. The second step may be ERG members only.

Conclusion

ERG leaders seeking to be effective quickly discover that being a leader is a job, albeit one that requires a lot of unpaid hours. ERGs live in a kind of twilight zone in an organisation because they don’t fit neatly into any formal structure. They have a unique potential to be immensely influential – but only if they are well-led and supported.

I stepped down as DEN Chair in March 2020 after 3 years and 4 months in the role. I think I had proven to my employers that the DEN had become an effective change agent. The next Chair was offered the opportunity to take on the role full-time. That was a bold and unexpected experiment.

The nature of ERGs is such that they must establish their capability before they can expect or demand greater levels of support from their organisation beyond an agreed essential level. Even in the public sector this makes them entrepreneurial – and hence should be able to attract talented aspiring leaders. This should make ERG leadership beneficial for everyone – the ERG leadership team which hones and refines its skills, the membership which benefits from improvements to their work experience, and the organisation which is better able to support its workforce.

Realising that potential depends on three things:

  1. A clear contract between the ERG and the organisation.
  2. A clear and agreed set of objectives and ways to achieve them.
  3. Attraction of the best leadership talent available to the ERG, plus creation of opportunities for the leaders to be supported and guided.

The international bank ERG leads observed that recruitment for ERG leadership roles was hotly contested. It was evident that the organisation invested significant resources in its ERGs, so there may have been attractions that weren’t discussed.

This post was inspired by my reflection on what conditions might need to apply to see public sector ERG leadership roles being attractive to talented staff.

Inclusive seating

Introduction

A couple of weeks ago I took my car up to an excellent local business to have an issue with its wipers addressed. I was offered a seat, and I declined because the two chairs were both very low. I was offered another seat, which I accepted, knowing there would be problems. That chair was higher than the others but had no arms. I needed two guys to help me up.

I am 185 cms [6+ foot]. Part of the spectrum of my disability’s impacts is a weakness in leg strength. Very low seats are a problem for me. I need help to get up from them. I am not disposed to be dependent, so I normally decline to put myself in a situation where I need help to get out of chair. Sometimes there isn’t an option.

At home I have several day chairs I bought from a disability aid supplier. The difference between my ‘clinical’ chairs and the lower seats is the opportunity to adjust the height. They are high to start with, and are entirely comfortable but don’t have that plush sense of ease.

To many, low chairs signify relaxation and ease. But that’s not true for a substantial portion of our community. Aside from people with disability there are those who are pregnant, obese, or injured for whom low seating can even be a hazard. 

Even public sector agencies, who have an obligation to be inclusive, haven’t twigged that super low chairs in lobbies and waiting areas are not accessible. A range of seating options ensures inclusivity.

In most settings all seating is at the same height

You are unlikely to find an adjustable dining chair or an adjustable dining table. Ergonomic considerations have made adjustable chairs and desks a thing because of a work health safety liability. But get away from office settings and cars and we are back to the ‘one size fits all’ world.

My lounge room seating at home is low and no longer accessible to me. Several years ago, I explored an electric lounge chair that lifted up, and tilted forward, so the user could get up. That was a few thousand dollars ($2,400). Instead of buying that, I spent $600 to get an adjustable height chair from a disability supplies store. That’s a ridiculous price for a ‘day chair’, but there really aren’t alternatives.

You can’t, as far as I know, get an accessible option for a lounge suite. Fair enough. There’s not the market for such.

As a member of my local council’s Access Advisory Committee, I have raised concerns about seating in streets and parks being too low and often without arm rests that can be used as an aid when rising. There may not be a happy medium which is an ideal height, so there may be a need to have different heights to cater to varied needs. The luxury of adjustable street and park seating is not on the horizon, so we must rethink what the ‘normal’ height might be.

A related concern is the potential for informal seating in landscaped settings. Retaining walls are often used as casual seating so in parks and along paths it is possible to creating variable height seating without the cost of a formal seat. Not everyone can walk any distance without needing a break, so by incorporating seating into landscape designs a park can become inherently more accessible. Informal seating incorporated in landscape design has become something of a soapbox for me.

I was chatting with a friend recently. She told me that she had finally applied for a Mobility Parking Scheme card. She met the requirement of not being able to walk 100 metres without distress. She described a time when she needed to walk around 500 metres because accessible parking close to her destination wasn’t available (in fact there was no parking). There were no seats on the route she took, and no informal opportunities to rest either. That meant that along this route in a dense urban setting there was nothing she saw that she could sit on. An inclusive urban landscape is a sittable landscape. It was a painful and unpleasant walk for her.

Sometimes I get the feeling that my fixation on seating isn’t welcome, but I do recall the latter days of my mother-in-law who was aged and frail. She loved outings. We could go to a park, but if there was nothing like a picnic table or seat within 30 metres that was a problem. We are living longer and with impaired mobility. Access to a seat within 30 metres of a carpark can have a huge impact on quality of life. It can be the difference between a picnic and lunch in the car.

Imagining inclusion

Inclusive thinking isn’t intuitive. We think by habit mostly. Before I acquired my mobility disability the notion that how high a seat might be never entered my head. Now, whether I can get up from a chair is a vital consideration, especially if there is nobody around. A few years ago, I fell in my hallway, and I had to drag myself along the floor to my bedroom (mercifully the door was open) so I could use my bed to get up. Now I must calculate risks in many settings and seating is one major risk area.

What prompted me to buy an adjustable height chair was discovering that I could not get out of a low soft and very comfortable lounge without assistance. I couldn’t even move myself onto the floor and follow my fall recovery method. Had I been alone and with no mobile phone close I could have died in that comfy chair.

Last year my bath seat slid, and I fell into the bath. The fact it slid was down to me being slack about checking it. I had assumed it was set-and-forget. It wasn’t. Mercifully I had my phone with me, so I was able to call for help. These days we have great strategies and technologies for detecting falls. These are important because getting up afterwards is simply not possible for so many people. 

We don’t imagine that sitting in a seat that is too low, or having the seat fail, is a fall, but it is in many ways because the lack of intent and control, and the consequences are the same. And our fall alarms don’t activate either.

When you are vulnerable to falls seating become a potential life saver. Walking with such a vulnerability can induce anxiety. It can be dangerous to walk. You become dependent on aids and assistance – and forward planning. There are times when the need to find a place to sit is imperative – but is it something you can rise from later?

People with disability can seriously depend upon help from others, without which their lives would be miserable. Long ago I worked for a time in a psychiatric hospital’s ‘hospital ward’. All of the residents required total care. That was a humbling experience.

But for many others the dignity of independence is precious – as it is for others with no disability. Imagine that the height of a seat can make such a difference. Imagine that we no longer assume there is a one size that fits all. We don’t imagine this is so with clothing, shoes, office furniture or car seats. Yet we think low soft seating is luxuriant to everyone. What is low means ease, and is good, what is high means work and isn’t so good. This isn’t universally true. 

Conclusion

Thinking inclusively isn’t easy. In fact, its darned hard work. I have a disability, but while I am more sympathetic to others with disability it doesn’t magically confer upon me insight into their needs and challenges. In fact, I am increasingly disappointed with disability tokenism. No one person can represent disability as a whole. You need at least 3 people with distinctly different disabilities in any representative setting – and that will still not be a universal point of view.

My seating soapbox has been crafted from personal experience as well as having some sense of design requirements. I wouldn’t imagine a wheelchair user, a blind person, or anybody else for whom seating is not a safety concern to identify it as an issue.

Who knew where and how we sit could be so fraught?