Author: mp2201

Introduction

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

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

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

The mistakes we make

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why we resist change that is good for us and others

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what’s the problem?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Failure is routine

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

We equate cognitive effort with threat

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

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

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

Bias is even more present when you’re rushing

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

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

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

Bias is an outcome of our limited capacity to think well

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

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

Our poor ability to understand people – social cognition

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

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

The importance of shared decision making

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

The word voluntary has several widely accepted meanings:

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

The word volunteer also has widely accepted meaning:

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

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

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

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

Below I want to explore the politics of the voluntary.

Taking the time

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

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

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

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

What problem is an ERG solving?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The real power of ERGs

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

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

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

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

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

The need for clarity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

Why language matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s the alternative?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can we ask for?

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

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

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

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

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

Real conceptions of disability 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Problems with the model

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

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

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

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

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

So, let’s talk about disability as:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope this has stimulated some fresh thinking.

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thinking about what bias is

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

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

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

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

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

Domains in which bias is active

The personal (self-interest)

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

Social

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

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

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

Organizational

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

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

The result is confusion about rights and responsibilities.

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

Inclusion is hard to do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The inverted pyramid of influence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The role of ERGs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding the difference between the moral and the evolutionary

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

Below are a few quick reflections

The power of curiosity

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

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

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

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

When we are uncertain

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

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

It’s not always about me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being certain isn’t always the best approach though

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

What is woke?

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

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

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

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

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

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

DEI isn’t political

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

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

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

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

So, is changing the name the solution?

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

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

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

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

How do we become kinder?

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

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

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

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

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

It’s complicated

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How should we respond?

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

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

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

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

Making accountability a person-centred thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why is it so hard?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

Issues of accountability arise in several key contexts:

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

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

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

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

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

Opening note

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

Introduction

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

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

Some background 

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

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

Disability support in Bali

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

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

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

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

Why supporting YPK is a smart thing

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

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

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

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

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

public purse.

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

funding environment. Linda assists YPK by chasing international grants of 

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

terms.

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

Disability solidarity 

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

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

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

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

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

How to help?

There are presently three important ways to help YPK.

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

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

There is a range of things we can do.

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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