Category: Uncategorized

Introduction

The fallout from reactions against the extremes of DEI advocacy is forcing a long overdue rethink on DEI roles and values. 

We risk missing the information in all the noise. 

DEI is an outcome not a cause

I was dimly aware of DEI in 2010. I had a strong sense of disability inclusion because that was the field I worked in. I had a strong sense of equity and rights but not that there was a profession created to further them in workplaces. 

Since July 2010 I became aware of my employer (a NSW department) being actively involved in advancing the rights of staff with disability. This was something I fostered when I became lead of the department’s Disability ERG in late 2016. 

The relationship between the department’s leadership, the DEI team and the Disability ERG was the most critical element of the success that was generated. 

The present passions are about DEI losing its way and becoming dominated by political activists whose positions are not representative of all interested parties. 

While I agree that these activists must be held accountable for impolitic extremes, organizations must be held accountable for failing to establish and retain control of DEI practice – on an intellectual, moral and operational level. 

In Australia DEI teams were created in an organization to help it meet its obligations under state and commonwealth legislation.  This reflected a societal change in valuing individuals as employees. They had rights and were entitled to expectations about how they should be treated. But this has never become part of core business – and this is the heart of the problem we now face. 

If we understand DEI as an effect and not a cause, we can go looking for the real cause – an incomplete realization by organizations of their responsibility to ensure that the rights and dignities of staff are protected and fostered. 

Who is responsible?

Historically humans have been seen as disposable components of a rational system of governance or business. They have been replaced by technologies routinely. The recognition of their fully human status began when legislation started to be enacted to address work health and safety and inclusion rights. It has been a struggle that goes back to the beginnings of trade unions – in the early 19^th century in Australia.

The rights movements of the 1960 and 1970s led to anti-discrimination legislation being enacted from the 1980s. Since then, there has been a steady change in how we, as individuals, are valued – in our communities and our workplaces.

A contemporary workplace has clear obligations concerning a staff member’s wellbeing. Those obligations are met to varying degrees. But the extent to which they are met depends on the organization’s leadership culture and the resources made available. 

DEI teams and ERGs have been created as part of a requirement to meet legal obligations. However, even with a sincere sense of goodwill this response has been flawed. It led to the unfortunate assumptions that DEI teams and ERGs knew what they were doing. They didn’t and mostly still don’t. 

DEI and BS

When I quit full-time paid employment in June 2021, I finally had the time to read up on a burning problem. Why was disability inclusion so hard? This blog has been a record of my effort to answer that question. 

I read a bunch of books and listened to a lot of podcasts by people who styled themselves as experts. Some had useful tips and insights. But I came to understand that what I was looking at was an industry built on guesswork and assumption rather than genuine knowledge and insight. 

This was familiar to me. Our natural inclination is to assume we know about other people, so we engage with our best intent. We succeed sometimes and fail other times. We rarely engage with knowledge and skill at a professional level. DEI isn’t seen as an actual profession requiring deep knowledge of psychology and organizational behaviour. It mostly operates on myths and BS about how we learn and how we change our behaviour.  

The upshot is that DEI is wildly erratic in its achievements. Generally speaking, employees tend to be people of goodwill who have a positive response to efforts to foster inclusion. The hard bits arise when there are cultural, structural and individually unconscious impediments to effective inclusion and equity. And efforts to overcome these impediments either fail routinely or are not made at all. 

I have noticed over a decade that the DEI team I once relied on as an effective ally has been steadily depleted of resources because the return on investment hasn’t been seen as warranting its maintenance. Once failure is anticipated there’s nothing stopping perceived ineffectual responses from becoming the norm. And when this happens real talent flees.

Abandoning accountability 

DEI was an appropriate response to the opportunity created by the arrival of legal responsibility – as a first step. The take up by enthusiastic advocates reflected more a moral response than a commitment to effectiveness because, typical of such an opportunity, success with ‘low hanging fruit’ convinces early advocates that more of the same was the way to go. 

This is when, in an ideal world, organizational leaders and DEI practitioners and leaders could have sat down and tried to figure out how to go after the higher fruit. This didn’t happen, of course. 

All this has been over a span of 40 years – which is no time at all in the scheme of things. I am not trying to assign blame here. What happened is normal and to be expected. Accountability is always a problem for us – as individuals and groups – but especially as organizations. There remains an opportunity to uplift DEI as a genuine methodology for responding to the real needs of staff for equity and inclusion – as a professional approach to help an organization meet its responsibilities towards its staff members. 

Beyond the political

A good deal of the problems faced by DEI now arise from the presumption that it is political in essence. It isn’t. It is legal. 

A DEI team that has been created in response to legislation it is a very different thing to one that thinks it has a mission to foster behavioural and cultural change for political reasons. The issue isn’t the merit of the cause, but what the guiding imperative for the team’s activity is. 

I am not saying that DEI should not be political, just that it is an entirely different function relative to meeting an organization’s legal obligation to address discrimination. That legal obligation will also have a moral tone to it as well – a hangover from the political passions that created it. But in so many areas of concern for human welfare we have turned good intent into skilled, knowledge-based, endeavors – but DEI has missed out on this.

I saw in my former employer how this inability to distinguish between the legal and the political led to confusion. It had created 6 ERGs of which only 3 had distinct legal/policy concerns – what I described as ‘problem-solving’.  The other 3 seemed to me to have a focus on ‘celebrating’ diversity. All 6 were treated as the same value to the organization, and the same function. 

I can’t speak for private organizations, but I do not believe that a public sector organization should be engaging in internal political activity under the guise of DEI. This is especially the case with the current passions in identity politics. I have noted previously that this isn’t part of the scope of my writing. My focus is entirely on ‘problem-solving’. Neither am I saying that staff in an organization should be forbidden participation in political activity – just not under any organizational auspice and not whilst on duty. 

There is no automatic entry

I am old enough to have campaigned for the rights now accepted via legislation. The current identity politics passions seem to me to be insisting on acceptance because they seem to be part of DEI. But the case hasn’t yet been won. This is why I come back to the distinction between what is a legal obligation (compliance with legislation) and what is a moral claim expressed through political action. The distinction is critical in the context of the obligations owed by organizations to their staff. 

There may be some delicate matters that must be addressed internally. The one that comes immediately to mind to me is in instances where a person who identifies as having a disability seeks access to adjustments. As an advocate of universal design, I favour universal access to adjustments that are necessary to ensure wellbeing. But I also recognise that this could be a problem area if the claim to disability is entirely self-asserted. 

My sense is that risks associated with such a scenario would be greatly reduced if the organization has a clear sense of the function of its DEI team as being legally based. This is not to say this might be the only basis for a response, but it must be grounded in that responsibility. 

Conclusion

Forty to fifty years ago workplaces were very different – in terms of what a staff member might expect and seek. But they are not so different in terms of attitudes and practices by executives and managers. Of course, there is some difference – it just doesn’t match the difference between what an employee could expect or seek between then and now. 

Organizational leadership is playing catch up still. The demands upon the individuals in these roles have increased to an absurd degree. In fact, in many organizations (private and public), demands on staff members seems to have been growing relentlessly – and this worse for managers and executives. 

Some private sector organizations are talking about dismantling DEI teams. Other organizations are just quietly depleting them – as if they are the problem. It may be true that some have become a problem. But they are not The Problem. 

That is that we don’t have a theory of DEI. We have notions and sentiments but no theory. I have argued in earlier posts that we don’t have a theory of ERGs and this has been disastrous.

Responsibility for DEI (or whatever we end up calling it) lies with organizational leadership, not with enthusiasts driven by sincere passions. It must be plainly seen in the context of an organization’s legal responsibility to its staff before it is anything else. 

It must also be understood as a high skill, high knowledge, function whose practitioners must be specialists. This is a very unpopular message. It means more hard work to upskill and redeployment of staff not suited to the role. 

It is possible to ignore this message and stay with the low skill, low knowledge and high BS that dominates now. But that will lead to a well-merited demise as ineffectuality and confusion persist. The people who really need the kind of help and support intended to be provided by effective DEI will continue to miss out. 

Here’s a final interesting thought. If you don’t know that within your organization there will be staff members who endure actual physical and psychological distress because of the way they are treated, in contravention of clear legal responsibilities, you really don’t understand what DEI is intended to address. 

There are wider conversations to be had about equity and inclusion, but these will be futile and counter-productive if the need for them is misunderstood. The need arises because of our natural psychological reflexes, not moral failings. If we want to achieve our ideals the conversations must be guided by our understanding of our legal accountability, not contention about political and moral beliefs. Taking a political perspective is attractive because it justifies failure, tolerates intellectual laziness and excuses a lack of genuine accountability.

Introduction

Effective advocacy is difficult. It requires subtle skills that few disability inclusion advocates possess. Effective advocacy is about getting enduring positive outcomes for a person with disability, not just getting an audience with a decision maker who may or may not act in response to the case put to them. 

Below I want to reflect on the advocacy challenges that shaped my approach to disability inclusion. 

The no advocacy rule

When I became chair of my department’s disability ERG there were terms of reference that prohibited advocacy on behalf of members who had notified that they were having issues with the department on an inclusion matter. I immediately thought this was an absurd constraint. We couldn’t act in support of our members? 

I changed that. The department had policies and systems in place to address inclusion issues. But if they were not working there was no constraint against identifying them and then working with the department to discover what wasn’t working and fixing it. I worked with the Manager Inclusion & Diversity (M I&D) to identify and implement remedies to a range of policy and system failures. I also spoke with Executive Directors, Deputy Secretaries and the Secretary to address other instances of policy and process failures. I was mostly successful. There was one persistent failure which illustrated the entrenched problem of managers and executives who were not only not empathic but also stubbornly cruel. 

Of parking and toilets

One ERG member with a significant mobility disability reported that the few accessible parking spots available to them were taken up by managers with no disability but a sense of hierarchical entitlement to more convenient parking or by visitors directed to the parking spots by staff who viewed them as fair game for visitors in need of a place to park. 

I spoke with the relevant Executive Director who was not happy about the culture that had developed. I was invited to a subsequent meeting of 3 managers and the Executive Director. I was only a witness. The facts of the matter had been shared in writing. The meeting re-affirmed that accessible parking spots were for staff who needed them – and nobody else. The managers were put on notice that they must ensure the policy remained active. The problem went away. 

But the same staff member had another issue that the subsequent Executive Director had little motive to address. The one accessible toilet was routinely used by staff with no need for its accessible features. It was just closer. People disappeared into it for 20-30 minutes (with their phones). The ERG member was not able to use a normal toilet stall. One day, in desperation, after waiting over 20 minutes, they banged on the accessible toilet door and pleaded for access. The staff member who emerged had no evident disability and they complained to their manager that they had been ‘harassed’ while in the toilet. The ERG member was strongly chastised by their manager for ‘harassment’. 

In this instance the Executive Director declined to take any action, declaring that this was a local matter that could be sorted out within the team. But how?

Rescued from an oppressive management culture

A staff member with a physical disability had been subject to persistent discrimination by their business area’s management team to the extent that significant psychological distress was evident. Approaching the relevant Executive Director was not an option. They had a reputation for being supportive of the management team. An approach was made instead to the then Deputy Secretary with the result that the ERG member was transferred on an interim basis to another division. This was subsequently made a permanent move. 

Working from home

An ERG member with a degenerative disease found it increasingly difficult to work in an air-conditioned office. The work they were doing could be done remotely with no problems, so they asked to be allowed to work from home. Their manager declined the request instantly. 

After I had a conversation with M I&D the decision was reversed subject to review. On the day of the review the ERG member was in hospital. Sick leave had been applied for and approved but, because they had not directly told their manager they would not be able to attend the review meeting the work from home approval was withdrawn with no right to review. After a few ‘back channel’ conversations that determination was overturned and the right to work from home was approved at senior executive level. 

A moral problem gone wrong

An ERG member advised me they were being subject to disciplinary action they thought unjust. I was asked to be a support person. I agreed. Their management team approached me to discuss the situation ahead of a meeting. This was unusual.

The ERG member was seeking redeployment because of a moral concern about their current role. This was a personal issue rather than a genuine moral concern that alleged the department was acting unethically. It wasn’t. 

There was an evident psychological health concern that the department couldn’t ignore and its perceived threat to dismiss the ERG member for non-compliance was problematic. 

I discussed the situation with the ERG member, and they agreed that finding alternative employment might be the best option. Within a few weeks they found a role in a NGO where they stayed for over 5 years. They were able to resign from the department with no adverse record being made. 

Good will and openness made it possible to escalate a situation and find an outcome that satisfied all. 

This was only the second time that I interacted directly with an ERG member’s management team directly and it came about only because they requested it. My chief contribution was to identify a psychological health concern they hadn’t been aware of. I asked only for time to talk with the ERG member about the implications of the position they had taken. 

One day in a week

An ERG member contacted me. They were off work with a serious health condition and as part of their recovery they were working one day a week. For their manager this was an issue because they didn’t have access to the other 4 days a week and they needed those hours. They were talking medical retirement. The ERG member was distressed. 

I spoke with the Deputy Secretary. That one day a week was important for the ERG member’s sense of wellbeing – and it was unlikely to be more than that, given the nature of the condition. The Deputy Secretary spoke with the ERG member who agreed that their role would become part-time thus releasing the 4 days a week to be used. The part-time role would be reviewed regularly and restored to full-time when possible. 

The solution was compassionate. An ERG member with a serious medical condition was able to continue working without the additional stress of the threat of forced medical retirement and the department recovered 4 days a week it could then use. 

The failed advocacy 

An ERG member with a significant sensory disability was persistently subject to discriminatory conduct by their manager and director. This had been going on for years, long before I became ERG lead. Both the Executive Director and Deputy Secretary were unresponsive. The M I&D was unable to make any enduring progress in reducing what seemed to be entrenched and persistent discrimination. 

There was some success, however. Through the influence of a senior executive disability champion the ERG member was able to have their workplace changed as a permanent adjustment. This significantly reduced travel stress and safety risks.

What’s going on?

The stories above are necessarily short and non-specific but they convey two vital themes. One is the persistence of harmful attitudes toward staff with disabilities that tend to be most exhibited in managers – and not addressed by executives. The other is the potential for sensitive and compassionate responses by decision-makers. 

In any workplace community a proportion will lack empathy and even be cruel. Another small proportion will be actively responsive to the needs of colleagues with disabilities. The rest will generally have good will but may not be highly responsive. They won’t engage in intentional acts of discrimination but neither will they go out of their way to challenge discriminatory acts. 

People who behave in cruel and discriminatory ways will continue to do so until obliged to desist – and even then, they may continue in surreptitious ways. And, if these people are in leadership roles, they have the advantage of having a disproportionate level of influence upon senior leaders, plus the ‘in-group’ pass. 

Without an effective advocate a staff member with disability has little chance of ensuring that policies and procedures designed to protect them will work out without effective advocacy. 

In most organizations that advocacy role does not exist. 

I agree that ERGs should never directly engage with a member’s immediate line management. The responsibility for ensuring that it acts consistent with law and policy lies with executives. An ERG has a duty to its members in advising executive leaders that violations of policy and legal responsibility are known, and to support the organization to address the concerns raised. 

This isn’t mimicking a union because an ERG is a partner with an organization in assuring policy and legal compliance concerns are effectively addressed. Unions exist independently from the organization. An ERG is reliant on the organization – it is a part of the organization. Hence its advocacy function is a critical feedback function.

Conclusion

In September 2009 I returned to work after 18 months. I was experiencing residual problems in the aftermath of contracting GBS. Getting back to work was a challenge. My colleagues were fantastic. My team leader and managers not so much. They weren’t intentionally awful. They just didn’t know what to do and chose hard options most of the time. But one manager was so discriminatory and offensive I had to lodge a formal complaint and ask to be assigned to a different team. 

I felt comfortable advocating for myself. I had endured 10 months in hospital. The last 7 months was in a rehab ward so badly run it was at times totally Pythonesque. I survived because I insisted on getting adequate physiotherapy. My future depended upon it – so it wasn’t negotiable. Even so, my hands remain permanently impaired because that was one area I had zero ability to influence. 

Having a disability can be disempowering in hierarchical organizations where there is no active commitment to advocacy for the most vulnerable. Advocacy works well when it is understood as a critical part of a culture of accountability. Senior leaders want to ensure that vulnerable staff are neither abused nor excluded, and they welcome feedback.

Unfortunately, such advocacy isn’t inherently popular. It takes a certain culture to favour it – and that’s far rarer than we should be okay with. 

Effective advocacy is a skilled art because it isn’t adversarial or about assigning blame. It is about helping an organizational culture evolve in line with its most beneficent spirit and intent. 

There’s a saying that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. It is true to say that the cost of inclusion, compassion and fairness is the enduring capacity for effective advocacy.

Introduction

This year began with DEI being dumped on with some passion. I tried to formulate a defense over the subsequent months, but I found myself agreeing that DEI was in dire need of being rethought. It just wasn’t professional enough. This applies especially to disability inclusion. 

Disability inclusion has become more of a cultural movement with a focus on identity. That’s not a space I want to play in. I spent a good deal of the year getting clarity on my position. I just don’t share any passion for disability as an identity. I don’t have any issue about those who do, but it is essential that advocacy in the workplace be clearly delineated between those things that are the legal responsibility of an employer and those which are not – and may be subject to negotiation. 

My context is specifically the NSW public sector. This is important because legal responsibility for ensuring staff with disability have their rights honoured will vary from state to state or country to country. 

This distinction between responsibility to uphold rights and any other activity surprised me when I came to realise it. It hadn’t ever been explicitly raised since the time I joined a disability ERG in July 2010. 

There has been a singular level of confusion about the nature and role of a disability ERG – among ERG members and among the leaders of organizations that host them. 

Getting clarity on this has been my biggest achievement of 2025 and I want to reflect on that below. 

The impact of the absence of clarity. 

Legal responsibility for ensuring staff with disability have access, are included and are treated fairly is a novel situation, relatively speaking.  NSW’s Disability Inclusion Act was enacted in 2014, though federal legislation has been around much longer. Organizations have acknowledged their responsibility but not articulated it in a clear and consistent manner. Disability ERGs were created to participate in an organization’s efforts to meet this novel responsibility – and then things became very unclear. How much energy should be put into it?

Failure to make a great deal of progress became the norm. Driving disability inclusion in the workplace wasn’t seen as urgent. It was enough that change was underway. Slow resistance-ridden change became accepted.

Legal responsibility lurked in the background, largely unacknowledged and certainly unspoken. Organizations that are stretched in terms of staffing and resources will not bring the subject up and maybe hope it isn’t mentioned too loudly. Disability ERGs, accustomed to inertia, and generally with no enduring cultural memory, lack clarity on their primary role. 

That role is to engage with their organization to work collaboratively on helping it meet its legal obligations to staff with disability. This must be done respectfully but persistently. 

Disability ERGs may, of course, engage in other activities, but never at the cost of carrying out their primary function. This distinction is critical because it then means that a disability ERG can negotiate for the resources it needs to meet its objectives. Negotiations without clear objectives never succeed. 

It would be nice if an organization had a clear mission about meeting its legal obligations to staff with disability but the messy reality of today’s workplaces is that there are so many other things competing for attention and resources that having the cognitive bandwidth to keep a focus on a theme like disability inclusion is near impossible without allies and confederates. 

It is little wonder that disability as culture and identity has become popular. It looks like progress. It can feel emotionally rewarding and create good feelings. But the hard work of keeping one’s organization attending to its legal obligations gets lost. 

That loss is about memory. In July 2010 our newly formed disability ERG was lavished with attention and resources. The ERG was mandated by our then CEO. He left. The original HR staff who were genuinely enthusiastic supporters moved on. Most of the original ERG members departed in a radical restructuring. By the time I became ERG lead 6 years later I was the only original member left, and there were only 2 people in HR who were at that first meeting.

There was almost nobody to ferry the memories and stories to those who would be needing them.

The power of having goals and a strategy

In June 2023 I was given the opportunity to act as a consultant and coach to my former employer’s ERGs. I had left the department in June 2021. This opportunity stretched over 2 years on a casual basis. It put me in a fascinating position. I had to examine my time as a disability ERG lead to understand why I had been successful. That was quite a journey and took me way longer than I expected. I was good at what I did, but I was also very very lucky. 

My goal was to end the suffering of staff with disability. I talked with members who told me horror stories of discrimination, bullying and abuse. I developed a strategy after hearing Kate Nash’s keynote speech at the 2018 Australian Network on Disability Annual National Conference in Sydney. Kate was founder and CEO of PurpleSpace. My colleagues and friends are fed up with me talking about Kate, but her presentation was my road to Damascus moment – and I won’t downplay how transformative it was.

She introduced me to 2 vital ideas – a methodology that she called Networkology and the truth that disability inclusion was always on. In 2019 the ERG was funded to run a 2-day planning workshop. We knew what we wanted, and we created a plan. It was ambitious, almost wildly so. It was endorsed by the department executive board later that year. 

We had something to aim for, a means of gauging our success or failure and what amounted to a contract with the department. These were critical ingredients in our ability to drive change. Our organization was receptive to our efforts. We had an accountable agreement, and we had to be up to the job. That meant being committed, disciplined and professional. If we were going to dare hold our organization to account, we needed to mirror the behaviour we wanted to see. 

The vital importance of relationships

I quickly learned, as a consultant, that only one of the ERGs had strong relationships with senior leaders. That was the disability ERG. It was as if what the other ERGs did didn’t really concern the organization in any serious way. 

Part of the problem was that ERG leads were elected and mostly came from the lower echelons of the organization’s hierarchy. There are 6 grades below executives – 1/2, 3/4, 5/6, 7/8, 9/10 and 11/12. The 11/12s are usually managers. The 9/10s are senior project or policy staff and may also be team leaders. The lower grades rarely have a high level of autonomy or regular contact with executives. But ERG leads were often 5/6s or 7/8s, sometimes even a 3/4. 

The issue here isn’t about the capability of the leads but their habits and reflexes when comes to interacting with executives – deference was common. 

I was a 9/10 but I had a lot of experience interacting with executives over the years – sometimes positive but often contentious. I also had a substantial background engaging with business and NGO heads. I was completely comfortable developing strong relationships with senior organizational leaders. That made a huge difference in how I went about building alliances. I had no interest in becoming a manager or an executive. I enjoyed ‘hands on’ work. But it meant that I also had to ‘sell’ ideas to decision-makers. So, it matters a great deal who gets to be an ERG lead. An ERG must have a sense of the impact it wants to create and then ensure that people in key roles can deliver. 

My background was unusual. It included contract management and license compliance visits to services and businesses. By the time I became a founding member of the disability ERG I had been restructured into an office-based role after 17 years in frontline field-based roles. 

In a sense I was the right person at the right time. No ERG or organization can rely on luck. It is critical to have a clear strategy about how to position the ERG to be most beneficial to the organization and its staff. There must be no gap between those interests. A disability ERG’s members have rights that an organization is legally obliged to ensure are honoured. The ERG is thus perfectly aligned to meet the needs of both. But it needs the capability to do its job well and the support and engagement of the organization to ensure it benefits from what the ERG does. 

Stripping things down to the bare essentials

The consultancy taught me one critical thing. Nobody had a clear theory of what an ERG is – nor its role. This finally struck me as weirdly irrational. Think about it. A disability ERG is created because its members have unmet needs – to which they are entitled under law.  Neither the ERG nor the organization sees this as a reason to collaborate in a disciplined, strategic and skilled way to address those needs. 

The ERG brings a unique perspective – lived experience of inaccessibility, discrimination, unfairness, bias, bullying and so on. It can also report on what works and what does not, and identify choke points – systems, processes, policies, cultures or individuals. 

That should be gold to an organization seeking to meet its obligations. 

The ERG must be represented by confident, insightful, mature people who have a high level of credibility within the organization, and amongst its members. 

Nothing above is obscure, esoteric or weird. Yet it is rarely found. This is because it is rarely sought – by the ERG or the organization. 

In the NSW public sector, the reason for this is that thinking about ERGs ended quite quickly after an initial flurry of seemingly sensible guidelines were created. The key idea seemed to be that an ERG is a staff association – like a social club – not a critical collaborator in assisting an agency to meet its legal and moral obligations.

The consultancy taught me the importance of reviewing habituated behaviour and thought – of going back to basics and challenging foundational assumptions. I think I got more benefit from the experience than those who paid me. 

There’s an understandable resistance to learning. We innately avoid cognitive effort unless we feel under threat. Jobs are often about maintaining rather than chucking out all your assumptions and rethinking what you thought you knew. I have done that over the past few years because I had to so I could deliver the service I had been engaged to provide to the standard I demand of myself. The receptive got that benefit.

Conclusion

I have been reading on organizational behaviour, management and leadership theories since 1987 – not in any structured way. I just wanted to try to understand why managers and executives behave the way they do. I have Masters and Masters Honors degrees in Social Ecology.

I acknowledge that my curiosity isn’t shared by all ERG leads. I am not trying to pressure anybody into nerdy behaviour. But there’s a simple compelling truth that is unavoidable. It is that a disability ERG can be a vehicle for collaborating in bringing about vital change that will end the suffering of its members. Or it can be a ‘feel good social club’. 

I say ‘suffering’ intentionally and with no hint of dramatic inflation. Some readers will know instantly what I mean. Others may not. In 2019 I took 6 disability ERG members to a presentation before our organization’s board. They were chosen because they had ‘horror stories’ to tell. They told of discrimination, abuse and harassment that should not be real in a contemporary human services organization. The board was stunned. It didn’t know. That event set in train actions that are still echoing through the organization. 

There have been remarkable changes for the better in that time. But there are still cruelties being perpetrated. This is the nature of who we are – as individuals and in organizations. 

One day we may get to the stage when nobody is being abused, and everyone is held to account – by themselves and the culture they work in.

But you have to have a passion for that. What’s yours?

Personal accountability has been the persistent theme in management and leadership texts over the past decade or so, but until that translates to an organization’s cultural value backed by action it will stay a good idea that somebody else should make real.

A disability ERG, living up to its potential can contribute to bringing that reality about. 

For 2026 I hope the smoke and dust from the assaults on DEI settle and we understand that business as usual is not an option. Strong change is needed – informed by clear thinking and data and inspired by some inspirational and insightful thinking. Be a part of that.

Introduction

I seethed through the CBC’s 2025 Massey Lectures. They were on human rights. The speaker talked about the “promise” of human rights. But it’s not a promise.  The lectures are a stark and sobering reminder of the degree to which the hoped for uptake of human rights has failed to match that hope and intent. But is this about ‘broken promises’ or unrealized potential?

The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, are huge steps forward for all of us. But they are not magical incantations. They are sets of values that can be used to guide our conduct toward others – if we commit to them. 

Many of us do so to a large degree because we are innately disposed to be kind. But it is unlikely we can recite either body of rights. We all know they are there, but they are not central to our thinking.

Our governments may act to confirm that these rights are endorsed on behalf of the nation. But acts of ratification do not ‘trickle down’ to individuals as guidance for conduct. 

We like to talk about what we have a right to when it serves us to do so. But it’s not like the UDHR is taught in schools to ensure it is the foundation of our civil culture. We use the term ‘rights’ in our everyday language, thanks to the UDHR, but it’s mostly in a self-serving sense. Way back in circa 1992 I walked into my workplace’s staff room. Somebody had put up a poster asking for support for a campaign to assert the rights of children to have pocket money paid from the public purse. I tore it down. Nobody complained. Neither was there any discussion about whether such a right might be granted. It was simply asserted – as if that was sufficient to make it real.

The existence of a statement of rights is an invaluable foundation, but what exactly is my responsibility in relation to it? 

As a person with a disability that places me in need of adjustments and accommodations I feel somewhat supported by the knowledge that I have rights that are asserted on my behalf and framed in legislation and policy. But how does that work for me? 

Below I want to reflect on how realistic it is to expect that a declared right has any actual value, and what we can do to strengthen it. 

The limits of influence

When I was with my former employer- a NSW government department – I signed a Code of Conduct. In one sense it was a contract. But in 19.5 years I never came across an instance of any one being held to account for breaches of the code, despite numerous instances of misconduct being known. The Code of Conduct was essentially an undertaking to honour the rights of fellow staff members and community members as well as responsibilities to the government as a public sector employee. The government has put a lot of effort into developing a model Code of Conduct as a document. But very little is done to promote it as a guide to conduct. For example, the NSW government has an annual survey of its public sector employees – the People Matter Employee Survey (PMES). It nowhere mentions the Code of Conduct. 

The whole sector data on the 2025 PMES is instructive. A key metric is “Action on survey results”. The rating is 35%, the lowest across the 22 key topics surveyed. The point of the survey is to identify areas where staff see a need for improvement. That’s not an encouraging response. But 81% staff rate ‘Ethics and Values’ positively. This is the highest score of the 22 key topics.

There are ways of interpreting these results. I will suggest one way in the context of my argument. A score of 81% looks impressive, but that’s 19%, nearly one in 5, who aren’t impressed – and they are more likely to be the more thoughtful and discerning staff members – to whom ethics and values matter a lot. And the fact that 65% don’t rate the chances of anything changing because of the survey is compelling.

My point is that when a sophisticated contemporary workforce in an ‘advanced’ country is this sceptical about whether fundamental values, rights and dignities are honoured, I’d say we have a problem. Despite all the principles and ideals espoused, despite ratification of UN generated rights statements, despite legislation and policy affirming a commitment to ensuring essential rights are honoured these scores tell us something isn’t working.

This isn’t a criticism of the NSW public sector. It isn’t doing anything wrong. In fact, it is doing a lot of things right. This reflects human nature. There are innate limits to how we behave without very specific actions to modify our behaviour. This is a way more complex situation than we generally appreciate. We want to do better, but we make a mess of making that happen.

We are naturally inclusive and exclusive

The thing about asserted rights is that they contradict some of our instincts and affirm others. It has been acutely observed that we are functioning with Stone Age minds while living in the Space Age. We are still unconsciously obedient to reflexes and instincts that are perfectly suited to a tribal setting. But they cause problems in large, complex and pluralistic community environments. We are not aware that we are unconsciously including some folk while, equally unconsciously, excluding others – all based on baked-in biases – and not the perfectly good reasons we tell ourselves.

We have a natural psychological capacity to be personally concerned about the welfare of around 150 people. That’s about the ideal size of a tribe. Beyond that we just don’t have the emotional or cognitive capacity. This isn’t a new problem. The Christian Bible’s The Parable of the Good Samaritan demonstrates how old it is. The simple fact that it is a famous parable should remind us that we have an innate capacity to ignore those in need, or who have their rights violated.

Psychologists talk about in-groups and out-groups. We all have them. We privilege, and are biased toward, our in-group members. In extremis we can be quite cruel toward out-group members. There’s plenty of useful content on the internet about this idea. Here’s something from Psychology Today.

The point of the Good Samaritan story is that we must make a conscious effort to care for out-group members. The fact that they have rights declared in their favour, with which we agree (in principle), isn’t sufficient to overcome our adverse biases. We deal with this, in part, by not actively engaging with ideas that bring this tension between principles and biases to mind.

In the same way that a Code of Conduct should be the guiding principles that influence our conduct at work – but isn’t – declarations of human and disability rights should also be guiding principles – but aren’t. Neither Codes of Conduct nor declared rights are intentionally employed as guides for conduct at work, save, maybe, in a scant few instances. We do not teach the UN’s declarations on human or disability rights in schools – an unfortunate oversight, given the way our communities are evolving. Unless, of course, the omission is intentional, albeit unspoken, because actively promoting rights would cause cognitive stress and upset our comfortable habit of over-estimating how good we are at just about everything we do. That’s a handy conceit in a tribal setting because it means there’s always somebody willing to try to take down a mastodon. A dead mastodon is always worth a few dead heroes.

There is a naïve belief that the mere assertion of rights imparts ethical forces that are transmitted by some mysterious process of moral osmosis into our minds where they take up residence. They are expected to then radiate into the world and shape how we act. But if we are morally insufficient that radiation is blocked. The remedy is to repeat the attempted transmission. 

This may seem an unkind characterisation of a noble hope. But it is intended to demonstrate that the mere presence of a noble thought isn’t sufficient to transform our consciousness or conduct. We are better off seeing acknowledgement of a right as a good seed that we can nurture into a behaviour. But that act of nurturing can’t be an unconscious performance. It must be deliberate and conscious. We have no choice, if we want to honour rights, but to do so consciously and intentionally.

Rights on demand?

On the Australian Disability Pride website there’s a passage about “demanding inclusion”. This adds another dimension to our understanding of rights. Can we demand them? Maybe, if they are enshrined in legislation and an organization has a clear duty to affirm and protect those rights.

But individual citizens are a different matter. We are under obligation to respect the law, but do we want to live in a culture where we might be prosecuted or sued because we are perceived to have violated a human or disability right?

This is an interesting dilemma. Do we enforce honouring rights we collectively agree on? Even though our governments may ratify rights assertions do we have the right, as individuals, to dissent? Do we have a right to simply not honour a right because a person is a member of one of our-groups? There a clue in the language used in the UDHR.

In preamble to the UDHR we can read the following – The General Assembly, “Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.”

In Article 1 we find “…should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” In Article 2 we find “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms…” 

There is no basis for demanding inclusion or anything else. The rights are a standard to which we should strive.

Conclusion

I am a member of my local council’s Access Reference Group. I am constantly impressed by the council’s commitment to disability inclusion. I am reminded that while that commitment is unyielding the means to respond to need isn’t sufficient to meet all the access needs. That just isn’t going to happen quickly, or even in the foreseeable future. It is an ongoing commitment that requires considerable effort to assess needs, identify priorities, plan, obtain funds and execute projects. That it’s happening at all is good. It is the best we can expect – and I am grateful.

A right is a stated principle. It is not a magical incantation. It is something we value as an ideal and then aspire to realize, through willed purposeful actions. To get from where we are now to where we want to go will take shared intentional effort in building our own self-awareness about how and why we include or exclude, and act kindly or coldly. Can we bring ourselves to be Good Samaritans all the time?

I will close with a quote from a friend who has been subject to violation of his rights more frequently than should be tolerable. They wrote, “A belief or practice in standing up for one’s rights, or for the rights of community, the public, comes at a cost. Such actions can lead to being viewed as a threat, a risk, particularly by those in management who do not have that same personal or professional values.”

This is the perspective of a public sector employee. This raises the question about whether they work in a rights honouring culture – and if not, what went wrong?

There is little point in celebrating declarations of rights if we do not affirm them in demonstrable ways in our home, in our workplaces and in our relationships. Violation of rights is routine within our spheres of influence. But how often do we take a stand? How hard are we prepared to work to overcome our inherited reflexes and biases?

Rights are not a “promise”. They are a hope that we must work at to make real.

Introduction

DEI is taking a hammering and people are asking questions about the role and value of ERGs. Should they be discarded? I think they have a critical role to play provided that certain conditions are met. Below I will discuss why I think this and what those conditions are.

I am a former New South Wales public servant. I have worked in 4 departments, the last one for 19.5 years in roles related to disability to June 2021. In 2008 I contracted GBS and acquired a major mobility disability and a lesser manual disability. In July 2010 I became a founding member of my department’s Disability Employee Network (DEN). In November 2016 I became DEN Chair, a position I held for 3.25 years. In late 2016 the DEN’s membership was severely depleted because of a restructure, and the remaining members were frustrated and dispirited. I took the DEN in a radically different, and highly successful, direction.

On the strength of that success, in June 2023, I was invited to support the leads of the other ERGs in my former department. Over the next 2 years I had to figure out why I had been successful, what ERGs were about, and what they could achieve. I was useful to some ERG leads and of no use to others. 

You really don’t know why you are good at something until you try to help others to get good at doing the same thing. You can’t replicate your success in another person. Success isn’t just about one person. It has multiple elements that must come together. And how that happens is way more complex than is imagined.

An effective ERG can be invaluable as a part of an organisational ecosystem. But for it to become that there must be an agreement on what an ERG’s purpose is and how it is going to deliver on it. As a rule, organizations do not understand what ERGs are or what they can do.

Below I offer a theory of an effective ERG based on my experience with my department’s DEN, my subsequent work with some of the department’s ERGs and four years of research into DEI, ERGs and why disability inclusion is so hard to make happen to the extent we desire. This research took me into evolutionary anthropology and psychology, social psychology, organisational behaviour, leadership & theories and neuroscience.

Essential context

My experience of ERGs is confined to the New South Wales public sector. Hence what I say isn’t to be read as being descriptive of a universal situation. However, I do think that the principles and issues I discuss here will be familiar.

My focus is entirely on problem-solving. During my term I neglected celebratory events until the IDPWD in 2019. I had to manage my time and influence, and there were enough unmet needs to keep my attention.

I am aware some ERGs are primarily about celebratory and promotional activities. The same principles I discuss here are relevant to them. 

Some essential personal background

This is important because being an effective ERG lead requires a person to be aware of their strengths as well as areas where support or mentoring are necessary.

My lived experience of disability has had an impact on how I see disability inclusion. I have listened to speakers who say they are comfortable living with their disability. I envy that. I acquired my disabilities as a mature adult. They are a pain in the arse. I spent 15 months doing physiotherapy after 3 months in an ICU paralysed from the neck down. That was a sobering time that forced me to face how much my life had changed. I know what I have surrendered. There are so many things that I could no longer do. Hence, I have a focus on problem solving and getting outcomes. 

I know others have had way more catastrophic events that have left them with a greater level of disability. How people respond to such life events varies. In the 10 months I was in hospital nobody asked me how I was coping. Rehabilitation didn’t include consideration of my psychological state. So, I came to the DEN lead role with little tolerance for half baked responses and not caring about how DEN members were suffering physically and psychologically.

My work history includes times of intense engagement with disability – in psychiatric hospitals, in Veterans’ Affairs and as an employment officer. My other roles were mostly about engaging with external stakeholders in the private, public and community sectors as a service provider and working in compliance monitoring and contract management. This background developed my skills in negotiation, conflict resolution and relationship building.

I had some experience in management and as a team leader, but I didn’t like it and preferred frontline roles. I liked the challenges of making good stuff happen for people. This turned out to be a critical part of my development as the DEN lead. DEN members were suffering abuse, bullying, discrimination and neglect and I was focused on delivering outcomes that ameliorated their situation. 

What an ERG is not

In the NSW public sector ERGs are modelled on staff associations or social clubs. They were assumed to be separate amateur bodies run by volunteers. 

The DEN I joined met quarterly for full day meetings. Members from out of town had travel and accommodation costs met. The meetings were well catered as well. 

HR provided an excellent secretariat service and HR staff attended the meetings with genuine interest. All the members had to do was elect a chair for the meetings every couple of years, come to the meetings and participate in occasional consultations and research. Disability inclusion was finally on the agenda and stuff was happening, albeit slowly. This was where things went bad from the perspective of DEN members.

There were several problem areas:

• Even though there was a significant backlog of unmet access, inclusion and equity needs, disability inclusion was now competing with other priorities for a share of a constrained resource pie.
• There was no mechanism through which a staff member with disability could seek redress for discriminatory or abusive behaviour against them and there was an unwillingness for such a mechanism to be set up. The DEN terms of reference specifically prohibited agitating on behalf of a member.
• Even though staff with disability experience actual physical and psychological injury because of inaccessible workplaces, dangerous or unsuited working conditions or behaviours (mostly by team leaders, managers or directors) against them that cause distress and stress, issues were not treated as work health and safety concerns.

Promises of inclusion were not delivered because the culture had not changed to any significant degree and the initial prioritization of disability had backed off after 3 years as it became just another theme to add to a wish list.

The early DEN was a passive advisory body and was effective in that capacity. But nobody knew how to evolve it into a useful body representing the interests of its members.

A DEN isn’t like a social club where volunteer amateurs donate their time doing things in favour of staff with disability. The present chair of my former department’s DEN struggles to get the time away from their formal role to attend to DEN related tasks.

What an ERG is

I was leading the DEN in the old ineffectual way, although I was making some progress because I had a Deputy Secretary as the DEN Champion who was committed to disability. As well, I had the department’s Secretary’s full and active support. In May 2018 I attended the Australian Network on Disability’s (AND) annual national conference where the keynote speaker was Kate Nash, founder and CEO of PurpleSpace. Kate ran a workshop on Networkology the next day.

To say that I walked away from that experience radicalised feels mild. I took away two lessons. Disability inclusion isn’t just 4 times a year, and there’s a methodology, a theory. At the same time, I had been transferred to the DEN Champion’s division where I was left free to put as much time into redeveloping the DEN as I needed. This was up to 3 days a week. This extraordinary opportunity lasted 19 months.

In September 2018 I called for volunteers to join the Guidance and Action Team (GAT) – an idea I had just come up with. Things were happening quickly and I needed help and lived experience insights. I got 15 responses from metro and regional offices. Together they represented a spectrum of disabilities, and they were uniformly very unhappy with how they were treated as employees. I required GAT members to be strictly professional. In fact, I said we were a quasi-business unit whose role was to consult with the department on the needs of staff with disabilities and to collaborate on having those needs met.

At the end of February 2019, I presented to the board with 6 colleagues from the GAT with the worst stories of discrimination and abuse. The board was shocked. The GAT speakers felt heard for the first time. Things then really started happening. 

In August the GAT was funded to run a 2-day facilitated planning workshop. The resultant plan was put on a spreadsheet and presented to the Board in November, along with good news stories about staff whose work lives had been transformed in the meantime, and a selection of problem areas that needed executive attention.

At the end of 2019 I was invited to join the Disability Inclusion Team and given responsibility for the department’s Disability Inclusion Action Plan (DIAP) and the department’s participation in AND’s Access & Inclusion Index (A&I Index). Neither of these two activities had a single person actively engaged in working on them. I ensured the DEN was embedded in both the DIAP and the A&I Index, so we had an integrated strategy to evolve policies, systems, practices and culture.

My successor DEN chair was offered this role as a full-time role in September 2020, and after I quit the Department in June 2021 they took up responsibility for the DIAP and the A&I Index.

That’s a great story and I am proud of what I achieved. But more importantly we can see the essential elements of an effective ERG:

• An engagement with senior leadership earning their trust and support as a partner.
• A team of subject matter experts acting in a professional manner.
• A clear contract with the organisation and an accountable plan of action.

The things that made this a successful approach are critical:

• The government had a policy of ensuring that the composition of all agencies’ staff reflected the community they served.
• The department had legal and policy obligations to ensure staff with disability had assured access to what they needed to perform their roles, and to ensure they were free from discrimination, bullying and abuse.
• Responsibility for disability inclusion sat wholly with the department. It could not pass it on to amateur volunteers, but it could work with staff with disability prepared to offer additional professional subject matter expertise while juggling their primary role responsibilities.
• Senior leadership wanted to honour those obligations and was prepared to be adventurous and innovative to make it happen.
• The DEN and senior leadership had a strong, open, honest and trusting relationship. They worked together.

The DEN had only one function – to support the department in meeting its legal obligations to its members. It did this through professional and collaborative action.

On the matter of not intervening in individual issues I developed a strategy of identifying system, procedural and responsibility failures which I drew to the attention of the organisation’s leadership, using an individual’s situation as an instance. I could then work with key managers and executives to sort the situation. This worked very well. There was one instance when the secretary rang a recalcitrant line manager and ‘had a chat’.

Employee leadership

ERGs are described as ‘employee led’ and this has created major problems. It suggests that the interests that the employees have are not in tune with their employers. But if we see that the interest is in ensuring the employer has capacity to meet its legal obligations this puts a very different light on the matter. 

I was a union delegate many years back. The union and my employer had a relationship that was mutually antagonistic, reflexively so. I went to a union training session on negotiation techniques, and it actually taught escalation to conflict as a first step – as if the only option was to threaten. This was nuts. I started reading the Harvard Business Review from the department’s library to get a better understanding of management. I wasn’t aspiring – just trying to understand. The union’s approach was ignorant, reprehensible and incompetent. I quit being a delegate. I also later quit my membership of the NSW public sector union for similar reasons. 

In 2025 employee leadership isn’t about challenging or threatening hierarchical management but about taking the lead on addressing concerns an employer may not be aware of and may not have been able to act quickly on. Managers and executives often misrepresent realities under their responsibility. As a result, the most senior levels of organisational leadership have not a clue about what goes on – especially when it comes to discrimination and abuse. Staff who are subject to such misconduct have nowhere to turn and if they lodge formal complaints, they are frequently victimised and punished. The more determined resort to legal action – and suddenly the organisation pays a lot of attention – but this time to defend the perpetrators. This is in-group bias at its worst.

I have heard remarks that some organisations, disappointed with what’s happened with DEI and ERGs, want to do away with both and leave it up to the organisation’s staff to ‘do the right thing’. In most cases that is either naïve, intellectually lazy or morally repellent. Going back to how things were is no answer. DEI must be fixed and ERGs must be rethought.

In the context of Disability ERGs, the nature of disability must be reviewed and rethought. My personal view is that I deal only with disabilities that are relevant to the workplace and which are actual disabilities requiring adjustments and accommodations. In the current climate of identity politics there are questions around ND that must be resolved on the basis of clear and credible evidence and not popular political passion. This is the organisation’s responsibility and not something a disability ERG has any business getting involved in. The ERG’s function is in assisting an organisation to meet its legal obligations, not to define them.

Two areas where Disability ERGs go astray

Leadership

There is a myth that an ERG lead must have a disability. Obviously, it would be preferable, but what is the sense of sacrificing capability for a lived experience that can represent only a small number of people.

As the DEN lead I got an education about the lived experience in the workplace of staff members who were deaf, blind, autistic, had degenerative diseases and wheelchair users. Having a disability myself meant I could resonate with stories of existential loss and concern, but not the specifics of lived experience – which I needed to know. People who were sensitive, empathic and compassionate could represent the needs of people better if they also possessed the capabilities I discuss below. Among the disability leads I know these capabilities are scarcely encountered. Before I acquired my disabilities, I had worked in 4 roles that gave me frontline connection with people with disabilities. I was good at defending their needs and rights then. Disability is so complex that no one person with a disability can ‘represent’ all.

It is by far preferable to have a disability ERG lead who has the requisite capabilities, and possessing those capabilities must be not negotiable – unless a candidate for a leadership role is assessed as capable of developing them under a genuine mentoring program.

A constant problem in the public sector is that ERGs are elected, and this commonly results in junior staff with none of the critical capabilities and a reflexive deference to senior officers becoming leads. These elections are a legacy of thinking an ERG is like a social club. Usually there is no capability requirement, and no selection criteria. Candidates write pitches to members and members vote with no critical sense of who they are preferring. I was surprised to discover how few ERG members vote – often less than 10%.

When I became DEN chair it was because the incumbent chair had quit the department and I was the deputy chair. The first time I sought election I didn’t get anywhere at all. I am not having a gripe – just making a point. But, to be fair, back then being DEN Chair wasn’t much more than chairing a meeting 4 times a year.

A few years back I watched a webinar featuring ERG representatives from the HSBC Bank in Australia. They described how the ERG lead roles were subject to competitive recruitment. The webinar was disappointing in that the host, who had no evident ERG experience, didn’t draw out critical insights. But we did learn that the lead roles were high status and that the ERGs were well resourced. Evidently the bank’s leadership took the groups seriously and they delivered benefits to staff members and the bank.

I think that who leads an ERG matters hugely to members and the organisation. So, leadership roles must be filled by a competitive recruitment process in which decisions are made by an equal number of ERG and organisational representatives. Of course, this means that being an ERG lead is seen as a high-status role that contributes to career progression. This might entice executives with disability out from behind their camouflage.  

Being an ERG lead is a very hard job, and the better you are at it the more skilled you will be. So, if you want a very effective ERG, you need a skilled and sophisticated operator.

What is critical here is that the organisation is as invested in the effectiveness of the ERG as its members are. And this is a problem for both the ERG and the organisation. This was a weakness in my situation. I had strong relations with the Secretary, 2 Deputy Secretaries and a key Executive Director. But we were in an innovation phase, and we didn’t get the opportunity to lock in an understanding of what we had created. In fact, it took me several years after leaving the department to make sense of what we had achieved and why the advances we made were vulnerable to the decline that followed on.

What we had created wasn’t a system, process or an assured part of the culture. While the benefits persist to this day, the methodology has not. It is only over the past 12 months that this has become apparent to me.

What we failed to do was develop a theory of the ERG’s relationship to the organisation’s legal responsibilities, how the ERG worked with the organisation and how it should function. We had all this in our heads; we just didn’t formalise it.

Structure of the ERGs

An effective ERG is a novel thing – an innovation. So those involved in leadership must be capable of stepping outside the business-as-usual frame. And here I mean not just ERG members but organization’s executive leaders as well. 

The old idea of a staff association or social club supposes that being ‘employee led’ means that the organization is hands off. But if an ERG is understood as a de facto business unit which collaborates with the organisation in meeting its legal obligations, there is an implicit ‘leadership’ relationship. I don’t mean in a command-and-control sense.

Here my use of the term ‘de facto business unit’ might cause some confusion. As DEN lead I created a relationship with the department that had a professional connection with other business units. We weren’t a business unit in any formal sense, but we behaved as if we were. That gave us credibility and accountability. We had a mission the board signed off on, and our job was to deliver on it in collaboration with other business units.

Since then, I think a more formal set-up is preferable. What we had been doing was experimenting. What we did worked very nicely. But there were vulnerabilities in the model. Innovations must become established. That has risks as well. Repetition dulls the innovative spirit. This is why the spirit of an employee-led ERG must be retained. The ERG must retain the capacity to call out the organization whenever it tries to dilute or duck its obligations – which is inevitable. That’s just how organisations are.

I was recently talking with a friend who was preparing to defend his PhD thesis on whether a quality management system can improve public sector agencies. He introduced me to the quality management system ISO9000 which has 49 quality activities. One is “empower people to determine constraints to performance and to take initiatives without fear”. This is precisely what an effective ERG must reflect.

My preferred Disability ERG model is what I call peer-to-peer. It is a voluntary relationship between ERG members and organizational leaders in which the ERG members are subject matter experts in terms of lived experience of disability in the workplace and the organizational leaders bring expertise in organizational operations and governance. Together they collaborate on helping the organization meet its legal obligations toward staff with disability.

This model requires a clear shared understanding of the organization’s legal responsibilities and the creation of an accountable agreement to work toward ensuring these obligations are met. 

It should also include mutual mentoring obligations. This is critical because there is way too often an inclination to engage in entirely transactional engagements and not establish relations that develop insight and empathy.

The model is, however, primarily focused on problem solving.  The problems to be solved include:

• How to get the best insight to support effective design/redesign of policies, procedures or systems.
• How to get feedback on whether what is in place is working.
• How to identify and address unmet needs.
• How to identify and address non-compliance with established obligations, policies or procedures.
• How to effectively deliver awareness of disability inclusion obligations, policies and procedures to staff with disability, their team leaders and key decision-makers.
• How to deal with discriminatory and abusive arseholes. They are in every organisation and if they are in leadership ranks, they reliably get the in-group pass. That has to stop. 

The ERG’s leadership team might comprise 4 persons who have agreed attributes. Below are the 5 attributes I would look for in at least 2 of the members. I don’t say all 4 because this is an opportunity to develop ERG member with leadership potential:

• Negotiation and persuasion skills backed by political nous.
• Strategic analysis, planning and project management skills.
• Relationship building skills backed by effective emotional intelligence.
• Overall credible standing in the organization and a capacity to engage with junior and senior staff.
• An empathic connection with ERG members and a commitment to ensuring unmet equity, access and inclusion needs are addressed.

An essential consideration is that this leadership team must be taken seriously by the organization by recognizing it as a high-status career development role and membership of the leadership team is only via a competitive recruitment process.            

Conclusion

During my consultancy I was astonished to learn that there was no agreed vision of what the ERGs were about. Most were unable to articulate a value proposition. None could give an ‘elevator pitch’ on their value to members or the organization. And yet the leads all wanted more time. Even so, when they were asked for a strategic plan not all delivered.

What was clear was that the model the ERGs were based on was flawed, those who put their hands up be leads didn’t have the skills/experience to ‘hit the ground running’, and that there was no deep relationship between the ERGs and the organization. There was no agreed contract.

It would be unkind to put the onus for this situation on the ERGs. The department was very hands off. It didn’t have a sense of the value of ERGs to begin with. They seemed like a good thing as part of the general trend. The DEN was the prototype DEI ERG, and the other ERGs were modelled on it, but without a detailed analysis of why it had the success it did.

ERGs succeed or fail depending on the people involved. If neither the ERG leads nor the organization had an actual theory of what an ERG is, what it should do or what service it should provide, success will really be down to the random chance of the right people being in the right roles at the right time. 

When I quit the department, my focus was on the wider question of why disability inclusion was so darned hard. I had only dimly reflected on why I had been so successful – until this became an urgent need during the consultancy. I needed to know what the underpinning principles of my success were. Were they replicable?

I had been doing a lot of reading on leadership. Loretta Malandro’s Fearless Leadership was a huge inspiration. Looking back on my career I realised that I had a track record of leadership and innovation going back decades. It was modest stuff as things go for a front-line worker, but it was effective, though not always appreciated by my management.

And then I was in the right place at the right time at the 2018 AND conference. Kate Nash gave me a critical education and I ran with it. I was also blessed with having the support of the department’s Secretary, two deputy-secretaries and an executive director as well as support from the Manager Inclusion & Diversity.

When I say the 15 members of the GAT were the heart of the DEN, the responses I get suggest that I am just saying that because it’s the kind of thing one is supposed to say in a public performance of modesty. I am touched that people think this, but I do sincerely mean it. The GAT was a critical innovation, but as subsequent developments have shown, it must be employed in the right way.

I am conscious of the adverse feelings toward DEI and the wide belief that ERGs are of little or no use. The ones that do do good work are unlikely to be analyzed, but neither are the ineffectual ones. Because there is a widespread belief ERGs are ineffectual there hasn’t been any strong motive to research them. To be honest, that’s a fair assessment.

There is no theory of ERGs. When I went searching for one, I explored the NSW Public Service Commission’s pages on ERGs. The content was sensible enough but there was no guidance on context, nothing about the critical insights that are needed.

What is interesting to me is the level of resistance I meet to the idea that an ERG can be a professional and effective agent that partners with its organization to help it meet its legal obligations to its members. This resistance comes not just from organizations but also from disability ERGs. There is a lot of work involved, and a lot of skill required. 

If an organization is serious about ensuring equity, dignity and inclusion for its staff members with disability it must see that this is a complex and difficult task that requires competent professional input – from an ERG and the organization working together.

A competent ERG may be the only way an organization can meet its legal obligations.

Finally, DEI seems to me to be way more complex than many practitioners understand. The business of addressing real equity, dignity and inclusion challenges needs to be upgraded from well-intended sentiment to seriously skilled work.

A few years ago I developed the idea of a one year course – a Masters of inclusion – that could lay out the critical knowledge and skills necessary to do DEI and ERG lead jobs to the necessary professional standard to be effective.

Introduction

I came across this podcast recently and felt so relieved that ‘sensible’ folks were having a conversation about the dire state that inclusion has fallen into. By ‘sensible’ I mean informed, calm, thoughtful, open and non-political. 

After the invective from the ‘right’ and the passion from the ‘left’ it was refreshing to encounter a conversation that was of a tone that communicated calm concern. 

I have said previously that my focus with disability is entirely functional. I have no interest in the politics as an advocate. But as an individual I do care that our efforts at inclusiveness are effective.

Just a few days ago I joined a meeting set up by my local council to report on progress on its Disability Inclusion Action Plan (DIAP). It was totally outcomes focused. Community consultation had identified priorities for greater disability inclusion. A plan to respond to these priorities had been developed and implemented. The people with disability who participated in the meeting acknowledged that the council was genuinely committed to inclusion. We are seeing the results of a real culture of inclusion. 

The This isn’t Working podcast is about workplace cultures and why they can be problematic, so I was interested in what it had to say from the perspective of a former employee of a large government department and as a rate payer and member of an advisory group to my local council. 

My role with my former employer of around 25,000 staff was unique. I had worked in disability related roles for over 19 years. I had acquired a significantly mobility disability and was a founding member of the department’s Disability Employee Network (DEN), which I subsequently led for 3.25 years – after 6 years of its operation. I designed and led the implementation of a 4-year DIAP, and I coordinated the conducting of an Access and Inclusion Index (A&I) assessment. I was able to integrate the DEN, the DIAP and the A&I assessment into a coherent strategy for positive change. 

Even so there were things I wasn’t able to do simply because the department’s culture was not uniform and individual divisions had strong and particular attributes – cultures and histories – that hadn’t fused into a single culture. 

The podcast begins with an observation about Elon Musk’s assertion that DEI must die. This is not because it is inherently problematic in its intent but because it has become an ‘industry’ – and industries become self-referential and self-preservative. 

The goal of DEI should be to cease to because its success has made it redundant. But it hasn’t succeeded and it has become despised – on either side of the political spectrum – though for different reasons. 

The thing about workplace cultures is that they are the sum of the individuals that constitute them. There will always be individuals whose influence is beneficent or malign but the culture, the community, exerts the definitive influence eventually. 

The original objective of DEI was to make workforces more equitable, and this has happened to various degrees – influenced by leadership on an individual level, and by the workforce as a whole. There are good reasons to doubt whether DEI has met its original mission objectives.

Changing behaviour is hard

What makes a workplace more equitable is the behaviour of staff members. It’s that simple. But influencing that behaviour is far from being a simple matter. 

The DEI industry seems to me to be built on a fallacy – that information and admonition is sufficient to influence behaviour in a desired direction. It isn’t. 

The social commentator Andrew Doyle recently observed that (and here I will paraphrase him) organizational leaders hire DEI ‘educators’ because they are responding to pressure to conform to DEI values but neither the organizational leaders nor the DEI ‘educators’ really care about the outcomes of this ‘education’.  I can see his point, but that’s not my direct experience. 

In my former employer both the leadership and the DEI staff cared a great deal. But the extent to which DEI efforts succeeded was limited. I think both recognised that achieving DEI objectives was difficult and so they settled into a habit of very incremental success, if not failure. 

I think this difficulty is what corrupted DEI from the outset. When I left full-time employment in June 2021, I had time to get into some serious research. Exactly why was Disability Inclusion so damned hard? The first thing I did was read a bunch of books by people who styled themselves as experts in diversity and inclusion training. What soon alarmed me was that none ever discussed evaluation of their efforts. And then I read Iris Bohnet’s What Works: Gender Equality by Design. She made some observations about how senior executives behaved – and that set me off on a quest to develop a deeper insight into individual and organizational behaviour. That was, and continues to be, an education. 

DEI practice tends to work marginally well or not at all – and when it works marginally well that’s probably just plucking the low hanging fruit. 

As I saw in my former department, there was an abundance of goodwill that could be activated – so long as it was treated with respect and sensitivity. 

One way not to do that is by ‘training’ people by information and admonition. 

On training 

I want to pause here for a quick digression triggered by something David Rock from the Neuroleadership Institute (NLI) said – you train for insight, not information. It’s insight that triggers behavioural change, not information. 

But more importantly what we call training isn’t anything of the sort. We really should stop using that term. Training is focused, intentional and repeated. You can’t train a person in anything in one session no matter how long it is. The best you can do is inform in a way that triggers insight which then leads to a desire for more information and insight. That’s what learning is. It is the stimulation of desire for knowledge, insight and experience. 

Some years ago, I did a training session on touch typing. It was a series of exercises which I quit doing out of a lack of discipline and impatience. I completed the exercises. But I can’t touch type of course. 

I also did training courses on using spreadsheets. I certainly remember doing 3 that were around an hour long each. But I had no need to use the knowledge I had imbibed and soon forgot. If you forget how to do something you haven’t been trained in it. 

You can’t ‘train’ people to become more inclusive. 

What can you do?

This is where I get to be unpopular. It takes intentional cognitive effort to be more inclusive. This must be self-motivated. 

I go back to something Ernesto Sirolli said decades ago. Ernesto is into enterprise development “as if people really mattered”. He said that we can’t motivate people, only inspire them. Of course this isn’t strictly true. We can threaten people and give them good reason to change their behaviour. At work you can be threatened with dismissal if you don’t perform. This works sometimes.

But when the relationship is voluntary that’s not going to work. This raises an important question about whether being inclusive is part of a contract – like a code of conduct – and the problems of enforcement. Managers are notoriously really bad at ‘difficult conversations’ and are also open to counterclaims of discrimination or bias. 

So essentially enforcement and compliance are not workable options when it comes to inclusion. This leaves encouragement and persuasion. And here we know that moral admonition doesn’t work. We also know that compulsory ‘training’ in DEI themes can lead to contrary outcomes and even make matters worse. 

So, we are left with triggering insight and inspiration. And this comes down to being able to set an example – in terms of what has sadly become something of a cliche – be the change you want to see. And this is in no way an easy thing to do. 

For example, you can’t effectively campaign for inclusion if you exclude the people who disagree with you. 

Leadership books talk of leading by example and of ‘servant leadership’. Inclusion advocates may say they are not leaders and see themselves as ‘warriors’ fighting discrimination and exclusion. But that’s just an act of discrimination and exclusion seasoned with self-serving moral fervor. It’s more about the ‘warrior’ and less about the person they say they are defending. This isn’t a moral argument. It is straight psychology. This will be an unpopular message to those who feel comfortable behind a bulwark of moral righteousness. 

Contemporary leadership thinking, based on copious research, confirms the value of self-awareness, emotional intelligence and personal accountability for effective leadership. 

There’s a distinction between hierarchical and situational leadership. One is position-dependent and the other is not. Regardless, the attributes of effective leadership are the same. 

In Disability Inclusion or DEI generally any practitioner whose goal is to influence behaviour puts themselves into a leadership role. And being an effective leader is hard work. It takes skill and at least some theory of leadership to be effective.

Conclusion

At the time of writing, I am on episode 8 of This Isn’t Working. I started binge listening about 24 hours ago. The podcast has thrown up a bunch of themes I would love to be able to discuss with people I have worked with. But these days that’s hard because too few of them take the time to listen to podcasts or read/listen to books.

I get that between work demands and personal life challenges the opportunity upgrade one’s professional knowledge can be a scant thing. I am an information junkie so there’s no way I judge others. But the fact is, nevertheless, anybody involved in DEI related work must be able to get up to date with current research. I have worked with ERG leads who struggle to get the time to lead their ERG, let alone find the time to upgrade their knowledge and skills. Running an ERG well is hard work. It should be a professional role, but its more often seen as a role undertaken by an amateur volunteer. That’s so wrong.

I have worked with DEI team members who feel they are awash in bullshit work that leaves them little time to do their ‘real jobs’ effectively. They aren’t going to spend their personal time doing professional development while working in organizations that don’t respect their roles, or them.

I was fortunate. As a disability ERG lead, I had ready access to my department’s secretary and two deputy secretaries as well as other key executives. My role was structured to enable me to spend 2-3 days a week on developing the ERG. Eventually that transformed into a role solely focused developing the organization’s capability to meet the inclusion needs of staff with disability. I was able to achieve a lot, but the job was a long way from being done when I left.

One of the advantages I had was a capability to discuss the challenges of disability inclusion with senior leaders in a frank and an informed way. I was taken seriously even though I wasn’t in the hierarchical leadership group. But I had been reading in organizational behaviour, management and leadership out of personal interest for a couple of decades. 

This Isn’t Working is the only podcast I know of that discusses real contemporary issues in an insightful way. If you are committed to Disability Inclusion, or DEI, get into the podcast and start from episode 1.

Introduction

My relatives and friends have been sending me stories about a disability advocate’s unhappy encounter with our federal Minister for Health and Ageing who is also Minister for Disability and the NDIS.

I don’t want to rehash the story in detail. In brief, the advocate in a wheelchair arrives at the minister’s electoral office. It’s an old building with nice steps. There’s a bell to be pressed for goods delivery and wheelchair access. But it doesn’t work. The advocate is annoyed, understandably. The minister then argues with the advocate about whether the bell works. He is wrong.

The story made the news, but for what I think are the wrong reasons. I entirely understand that the popular media are no place for a nuanced discussion of what is important here. Below I want to reflect on a few themes arising from this incident that I think are important.

An absence of malice

The founding chair of my former employer’s Disability ERG was a regional manager in the southwest of the state. He tells of how, soon after he took on this role, he had asked his staff to arrange a meeting in another regional town. When he arrived at the venue, he discovered it wasn’t wheelchair accessible and he couldn’t get in. 

It wasn’t that nobody knew he used a wheelchair, it was just that it hadn’t sunk in – and what was normal was what dominated choosing the venue. Telling the story demonstrated two things – a principle and good humour.

Around the same time that I heard this story, I had to go to the Sydney CBD to attend a day-long course. I got to the venue and discovered steps, which I decided to climb, using an overly thick and ornate handrail. But it ended with 4 steps to go. I descended with some difficulty. I rely on Canadian crutches to stay upright and walk.

I didn’t have the venue’s phone number, so I rang the L&D team who organised the course. It took around 35 minutes before somebody from the training venue guided me through an obscure door, along a dark corridor and up a lift. Nobody had thought to wonder whether the venue was accessible or where participants had access needs.

In the story about the minister’s office nobody had checked whether the bell worked. This was probably because it hadn’t been needed in years. The Disability Advocate observed that he was taken to the goods entrance which had a ramp that didn’t have grab rails and that at the top of the ramp there was a table which had to be moved. Inside there was no place for him to wait.

The likely reality is that he might have been the first person in a wheelchair to visit in ages, or ever. Staff would not be thinking about wheelchair access – unless doing so was the norm.

A few years ago, I dropped into a Mac Donalds off a freeway. I went to the accessible toilet and found it full of boxes, which I struggled to move out of the way. I later spoke to the manager who said nobody used the toilet and they needed storage space. Likewise, I went to an accessible toilet in a small office of a division in my department. It was being used as a storeroom and would have been inaccessible to anyone in a wheelchair. Again, the local manager said nobody had used the toilet in the time they had been there, and they needed the storage space.

We mustn’t mistake lack of awareness for disrespect – even if we might feel put out and inconvenienced. Sometimes it’s just about what is usual and normal – and hence what is in our consciousness.

Access

Building designed to ensure that people with mobility disabilities have access are now the standard. They weren’t 40 years ago. Some buildings can be retrofitted with ramps and accessible doors. Some can’t because of design integrity or heritage considerations – or cost. There are legally protected limits on what should be spent to make a building accessible.

Religious and cultural traditions have made disability shaming because we celebrated the ideal – the perfect – the unblemished. The blemished were unworthy of being sacrificed or celebrated. This heritage meant that those not capable of their own unimpeded mobility were not thought of as fit to be in public. The same was true of many forms of disability.

This wasn’t necessarily a conscious thought; it just baked into our sense of normal. We could honour disabled veterans while excluding them from public places and buildings by habituated thought. There was no malice in this exclusion – just habits of mind that began to shift in the 1960s in a general rejection of old exclusionary habits.

Angst

It is understandable that mobility disabilities that force reliance on aids like wheelchairs, rollators and crutches will lead some to frustration about the degree to which our world remains persistently inaccessible.

I do not like travelling because most of those hotels and motels which claim to be inaccessible are not. The toilets and showers are rarely accessible. My brother just yesterday told of how he arrived at a shopping centre in an outer Brisbane suburb and found no cutout so he could get his electric wheelchair from the street to the footpath. This could expand into a list many pages long and still not exhaust the supply of complaints.

Frustration of our wishes and desires for access and liberties is a shared human theme. There are many things we ‘should’ be allowed to do that we aren’t for reasons that come down to old habits of thought, old ways of doing things and traditional forms and structures.

People with mobility disabilities are not especially entitled. Our fellow citizens are not hyper alert idealists who design things based on the most inclusive set of options. Rather they design according to what is normal and usual – unless guided by standards required by law or an especially inclusive philosophy.

As a person with a significant disability who sometimes envies wheelchair users, I know the personal sense of frustration that comes when I do not have access to a place I’d like to get to. But I also know that mostly the lack of access isn’t down to malice or intransigence. It may be down to reluctance to accommodate my needs when doing so incurs a high cost or creates a significant disadvantage. 

For instance, when I was still in hospital recovering from GBS I went on an outing in a wheelchair. Among other things I wanted to buy a jacket. The only shop that was accessible was a large chain store. Inside the floor was carpeted and this made moving the wheelchair very difficult. The racks with the jackets were so close together that at wheelchair level it was like moving through dense bush. It was a difficult and unpleasant experience. The alternative was no carpet on the floor and a wider space between racks. The store might have objected that what suited me would have reduced available space to display goods and making the store’s floor wheelchair friendly would be an uneconomic cost.

There is resistance against inclusive design partly because current situations are in place and the cost of change is not insignificant. It’s also partly about perceived need. I regularly drive my housemate up to a shopping centre. I sit in the car while they head off. They are very slow, so I have time to sit in the car in an accessible parking spot and write, listen to audiobooks and watch. I am writing this at the end of October 2025. In the past 10 months I have seen maybe 6 users of accessible parking spots using mobility aids – and I am sitting there usually 4 days a week. That suggests to me that shoppers with mobility aids are scarce and that the ‘normal’ is that they hardly exist – and are certainly not worth designing a shopping experience around. Catering to their needs isn’t a reflexive option. The ‘normal’ rules dominate.

I can understand this reality while not agreeing with it. I am a fan of inclusive design – but there’s a difference between retrofitting and new works. There are some realities we just have to suck up and others we should engage with and demand different and better. Knowing the difference is very important.

The thing that struck me about the story about the disability advocate and the minister is the sense of personal affront I discerned from the advocate. While his issues were largely valid, he seemed to me to have assumed an entitlement to unimpeded access. He may have been the first ever wheelchair user to seek to enter the building. Of course it was not going to be set up for him.

He observed, on a current affairs show, that the sign on the building indicating the then dysfunctional bell mentioned deliveries before wheelchairs – suggesting that it showed that able-bodied delivery people were given precedence over people in wheelchairs. Might it be that there were simply way more people delivering stuff to the building and their health and safety needs were top of mind because they were more frequent? Hence the order on the sign signified what was top of mind of the sign maker, not any sense of priority of dignity for those who might need access. People carrying loads are at greater risk than a person in a wheelchair. 

The inaccessibility of our shared world has a personal impact. Things have changed since the 1960s and it’s now reasonable to expect accessibility in many more circumstances. But it is not a ‘right’ in itself. 

There are many instances where being denied dignified access may be an affront. When access is assured and then not delivered because of beliefs, attitudes or behaviours of people who ought to know better it might be a good reason to be cranky. 

But making matters personal can backfire. People react differently to being called to account on a perceived failing if the reaction is about the person rather than the principle. This is certainly the case if blame is assigned and personal fault is implied when the situation really calls for neither. Yes, sometimes ignorance and arrogance can be galling, but making yourself a victim distracts from the focal concern. 

It’s not how to do advocacy.

Advocacy

It is interesting to observe the number of people who style themselves as a disability advocate but who have a relatively facile understanding of disability, the world in which it is experienced and the people who are vital actors in the interests of people with disability.

A common ploy is to resort to a version of the moral theme that people with disability are victims of an uncaring world and that they are heroic. The most commonly seen ‘advocate’ is in a wheelchair. In fact, the international symbol for disability is a stylised image of a person in a wheelchair. Wheelchairs trigger empathy and sympathy for good reason. But that doesn’t magically transform the occupant into being knowledgeable and insightful. Having a disability just makes you a person with a disability.

Advocacy isn’t a performance signified by a recognised image. I want to be fair in the sense that disability is so complex that it is not reasonable that one person with the lived experience of disability can be expected to represent people with disability in general. So, a wheelchair user can be a great advocate for other wheelchair users.

Maybe the issue here is one of perception and language. If we think disability isn’t complex, we will expect that a single advocate may have universal insight. Similarly, those who style themselves as disability advocates may believe that their experience of disability qualifies them to be seen in that general capacity.

Before I acquired my disabilities in 2008, I have been involved with disability going back decades in various jobs. With my employer at the time, apart from the 18 months off work when I had to deal with my disability, at least 19 of the 19.5 years of service were related to disability (frontline and administrative). During that time, I was a founding member of a Disability ERG (2010) and its lead for 3.25 years (2011-2022). Since July 2021 I have been a member of my local government’s disability access advisory committee.

Even with that background I am cautious about being thought ‘expert’ on disability or disability inclusion. I have an informed perspective that may be of benefit to some.

Advocacy has many colours and textures, so it’s good to know who you are as an advocate, or if you are a person with disability, what the person asserting their role as an advocate is actually about – you or them?

Conclusion

Disability Inclusion is evolving as an aspiration. We now have rights that are supported by legislation and policies. The expectation of inclusion is now universal, although practice is yet to catch up. The lag is down to basic things like resources, cost, the limited power of compliance and attitudes uniformed by contemporary developments. 

We need to understand that legislation and policy have limited reach. All individuals in their private lives can ignore asserted and agreed rights. This applies in many other areas of rights as well. 

The moral argument has been won, but that doesn’t mean we can insist that all others comply – or agree. We can, of course, take action in the face of beaches of relevant laws. But that is often a distasteful, unpleasant and costly option, undertaken only as a last resort.

The better option is persuasion. An advocate is somebody who speaks, pleads or argues in favour of a cause. But an advocate doesn’t have to be skilled or even know much about the cause they are acting in favour of. Frequently they are neither skilled nor knowledgeable. This is, I believe, a chief reason that Disability Inclusion isn’t progressing as swiftly as it could.

Because of the crisis precipitated by the politicisation and commercialisation of DEI, Disability Inclusion risks becoming diminished as a genuine cause. Performative or politicised advocacy can deflect attention from the real issues of equity and dignity. Matters are made more problematic by the growth in the identity politics movement which embraces disability as a desired identity.

We must make our own choices about what we see as desirable attributes in a disability advocate. There isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ option realistically available. We can favour getting practical outcomes that make our lives better or outcomes that make us feel vindicated as a victim of other people’s attitudes. We won’t find both in one person.

Disability Inclusion is a deeply complex field. It is more than what most people want to know about. We want our needs met and the esoteric stuff can be left to academics. But we need to be clear about our needs well before we go looking for someone to speak on our behalf.   

Introduction

When I started this blog back in late 2021, I relished the opportunity to finally have time to catch up on a backlog of reading into Disability Inclusion and DEI generally. I was quickly disappointed. There was little in the way of insight and a great deal of stuff written by inclusion consultants who seemed to be primarily part of an industry with little capacity for self-reflection. 

In late January this year (2025) Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi published Make Work Fair in response to a politically motivated backlash against DEI in the US.  In October Andrew Doyle published a substack essay – The Death Rattles of DEI. This was a caustic polemic against something about which I had already developed a deep scepticism. 

Commenting on a well-known presenter on DEI, Doyle observes, 

“The half-hearted poeticism barely masks the anxiety of man who fears that his racket has been exposed. The predominance of the creed of DEI, and its

usurpation of meritocracy as the guiding principle in the corporate world, is a

testament to the success of culture warriors. They have made plenty of know-

nothings very wealthy by promoting ideology as though it were uncontested

truth. But now it might well be coming to an end.”

Earlier I had spent a few months delving into the toxic world of identity politics. I was surprised and dismayed by what I found. There were 5 books that shaped my response – We Have Never Been Woke, The End of Woke, Free Speech and Why It Matters, Against the New Politics of Identity and Cynical Theories.

In response I articulated my sense of a Functional Disability Theory (FDT). See Why I needed my Functional Disability Theory from August. I felt a need to review my earlier thoughts on DEI and establish a clear sense of where I stood on disability and identity.

Below I want to reflect on these ideas because I believe it is vital that Disability Inclusion advocates must develop a lucid position on what is happening. I am not saying mine is the position to be adopted, only that it is one position of many – one that dissents from most of that many. My concern is that, given the sensitivities, advocates will be best served in meeting their objectives if they are clear about what they think and believe.

Finding the calm in the storm

The emotional heat Doyle brought to his essay reminded me that critiquing beliefs and practices can seem to be fair enough but often causes collateral damage. Some DEI practitioners are deeply committed and doing good work. Some are professional and others are just passionate. But passion can be misdirected, miscommunicated and misinterpreted.

Well-intentioned people are doing the best they can. And sometimes this can be spectacularly inept. Nothing is uniform. DEI comes in many flavors – and some are unpalatable. Doyle’s reaction is spot on in important respects. DEI is about organizational, social and personal psychology and not about smooth talking performers spouting ineffectual bullshit for handsome fees. It is about a professional practice based on knowledge and insight.

Back in 2000 I explored the idea of personal praxis in my Social Ecology course. It took me quite some years to mature my early thoughts into a useful insight. I was helped by contracting GBS which led to me spending 18 months trying to make my body work again. I still have significant disabilities, but I am grateful things are as good as they are. It could have been so much worse. 

Regardless of the opinions (send him to a nursing home) and the expertise of physiotherapists everything came down to what I was prepared to do. I needed an attainable and workable objective, a theory of how to get there, and the determination to put in the very considerable effort necessary. Even as a patient I needed a praxis.

Praxis is an under-used term. Wikipedia describes praxis as “the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, realized, applied, or put into practice.” Reflection and review are a vital part of the process. Again Wikipedia is helpful in its description of action learning – “an approach to problem solving that involves taking action and reflecting upon the results.”

The purpose of DEI is to generate and guide positive change for individuals and yet it seems often that the ideas of neither praxis nor action learning have entered the heads of its champions. This is regardless of the fact that DEI is a novel and complex endeavour. Many go no further than seeing it as a good idea that can be engaged with in a rewarding way.

It is easy to criticize others or be intimidated or offended or annoyed by them. In the swirling storm of passions about DEI, Wokeness and Identity Politics none of it now seems of any use to me. It was handy to be aware of it and try to understand what is going on. That now seems like a vastly complex task that yields practical value. I am glad I asked the questions and sought, but I am also grateful I feel no impulse to become further involved. 

My goal, with my notion of FDT, is to focus on what works to address access, inclusion and dignity needs in the most effective way. 

Exclusion is often the first thing advocates for inclusion practice. 

Back in 2019 I was invited to attend a meeting run by another agency’s Disability ERG. There were only a handful of participants present. I asked about their relationship with the agency’s executive. There was none. They had made no attempt to engage the agency’s leadership at all. I was initially stunned. Then I understood that here the ERG was modelled on a union whose primary mode was contestation rather collaboration. 

The function of a Disability ERG isn’t to solve inclusion problems itself but to work with its agency to help it meet its responsibilities. That will include insight-driven leadership. 

Our default mode is moral assertion – often assigning blame for perceived failings. We assume that the mere assertion of a moral duty is sufficient to induce action and any failure to act is a moral failing for which the other party is to blame. It is easy to see how this can escalate into conflict. We assume and assert the moral high ground and assign culpability to those who do not agree or comply. It’s the way we do politics on a global scale and often how we do relationships on a personal scale.  It’s not a functional way to achieve inclusion, however – no matter how self-satisfying we might feel.

I observed to my department’s Secretary some time ago that there was an abundance of goodwill across the agency. What we needed to figure out was how to activate it in service of our inclusion goals. Admonition was not the way to go. We needed a more subtle approach. We had to become genuinely inclusive – working with the many moods and modes of the staff to excite a common desire to be more inclusive. 

This challenge led us to be aware of when we slipped back into default mode and began applying blunt moral force.  We needed to understand the difference between the motive force of goodwill and the cognitive capacity to engage with it. 

DEI practitioners seem to often rely on the ‘low hanging fruit’ of inherent goodwill and fool themselves into believing they are responsible for initial positive responses to DEI efforts. But when the easy good outcomes dry up and the hard work begins, they can fall back on admonitions or blaming others for being resistant.

We have now dropped the idea of New Year’s Resolutions because we finally comprehend that we rarely have the capacity to engage the cognitive energy to break habits or prioritize one set of thoughts and feelings over another. 

In short, if we want to trigger inclusive action we must demonstrate it. This means being patient and forgiving of those who fail to do what they signal they want to do. 

By focusing moral imperatives, we are bringing rocks to a gunfight. Over the past 50 years research into our psychology has yielded a breathtaking amount of insight into how to influence our behaviour. This insight has been employed by those who seek profit and advantage and only by a minority of people who desire to do good. 

The art of positive persuasion – of changing behaviour for good outcomes – isn’t easy to learn because it first requires us to be honest and insightful about ourselves. It is far easier to manipulate others to our advantage than to persuade them to act to shared and mutual advantage.

My early exploration of DEI practitioners suggested that virtually none of them had developed this insight. There was a practical reason here. Delivering a training session had to be a business proposition resulting in a pay day. Developing the art of positive persuasion takes practice grounded in insight and determination. That’s unattractive to a business wanting a quick fix. Generally, the organization, its staff and the provider are on the same page here. The quick ‘fix’ works for all. Except the ‘fix’ meets only compliance needs and while it may give a warm glow to participants it doesn’t move the needle far beyond what natural good will would do.

Beyond moral

Our desire for greater inclusion is sensible. As our communities evolve to be more complex and pluralistic, so our values must change. Once, we built public buildings that made no provision for people with mobility disabilities. Now, in most places that is unthinkable.

We think these changes are moral. But I disagree. I used to think that. But I don’t think that failing to make building access is a moral lack, so much as a perceptual and conceptual one. Our perceptions change and, to ensure that those changes are reflected in our life-worlds, decisions must be made and funds allocated. There might be moral issues arising from decision-making processes though. 

Our instinct is to see anything requiring cognitive effort as a threat. With this wired into our brains we can see why learning can be so unpopular. We’d rather be having fun, taking it easy. For those for whom exclusion and inequity are threats there is a greater willingness to learn. But we still rely on moral assertion to stimulate and inform what we learn. 

We are always playing catch up with change. Our environment changes and then we react to adapt. If we misinterpret the nature of the change and misunderstand the response we should employ, we will fail to reach our goals. 

I think we also have a need to be thought of as ‘good’. But this depends on whose opinion we value – who is ‘one of us’. This might be our family, our friendship network, team members, fellow employees or members of our community. The larger that group the more idealistic and inclusive we are. 

As observed above, on the whole, our communities reflect an abundance of goodwill, which means we are increasingly more inclusive decade by decade. We respond positively to advocacy for positive change.

DEI and Disability advocates play a role in signaling that change is desired. But what they are not good at is persuading the hold outs – especially those who are in positions of influence and power. This matters because people in such positions are less likely to be empathic, compassionate and inclusive. There’s good research (in cognitive science and neuroscience) on this theme which I urge the reader to discover and explore. A Psychology Today article might be a useful starting point. I found that and other sources when I searched ‘power and the loss of empathy’.

So, precisely when insight into how to persuade those in power to be more empathic the DEI and Disability advocates run out of ideas, insight and capability to stimulate positive change.

Conclusion

On a personal level I now see DEI as a high-level set of values based on a theory rather than a basis for practice. It needs a rethink and thorough overhaul.

I take Bohnet’s and Chilazi’s point that with DEI there’s now a political dimension that is contestable and political. It didn’t need to be there and it distorts and stains what should be an unquestionably worthy objective. They argue that fairness is a better, more universal, value. I agree. 

It may be that arguing that everybody gets an equal chance will trigger some deeply entrenched biases but that’s an easier thing to deal with than asserting people of a ‘protected’ class deserve particular attention. Inclusivity must include everyone, rather than groups of identified people we see as a ‘protected’ class of persons. 

If we focus on individual attributes, we increase the risk of undesired focus of attention when people just want to be ‘one of us’. We discriminate for, rather than against. It’s as if we think this counters the adverse response. But what we often do is just paint a nicer target on people’s backs.

I am aware that the politics of identity is now embracing disability. I have no desire to engage with the arguments about it. They don’t concern me, so I have no useful opinion to express. I remain focused on disability being about what I and others can’t do in settings where we are entitled to equity of opportunity and dignity. What accommodations and adjustments are necessary to enable that equity? How then can we make those accommodations and adjustments happen? 

Here there are two considerations – the attitudinal and the functional. There isn’t yet universal agreement that this equity is to be actively and willingly brought to fruition. The means – priorities, permissions, processes, plans and funds – must also be realised, often against pragmatic or ideological opposition. 

The method to achieve functional equity is persuasion. The moral argument has been put and won. We have legislation and policy in place. Now we need action to evolve what is into what is desired. Persuasion in this context is ethical and sophisticated. It is a form of leadership. It requires self-awareness, insight and empathy. It requires knowledge and skill. Ideally it is a form of praxis sustained by action learning practices. 

It is hard work that can’t be knocked over in one-off training seminars or on-line courses. It’s more complex than self-styled disability advocates and DEI trainers can imagine or bother with. Doyle is right about one thing in particular. The performers get paid for their slick deliveries while the people who are doing the hard work at ERG levels are often expected to donate their time. 

Introduction

The human mediated environment modifies the natural world to our advantage – but not for all. We make roads, footpaths and ramps over which people with impaired mobility can travel more freely, but this isn’t universal across our public spaces. The Social Model of Disability originally argued for a more inclusive design for people with impaired physical mobility. But making our shared public spaces more accessible should be about more than just mobility disabilities.

A few weeks ago, I watched a webinar on The Social Model of Disability – 40 years on. Speakers agreed that we needed to move on from it, but there wasn’t a satisfying exploration of where we might go. The webinar is worth watching because it does demonstrate where the conversation is up to at an academic level. I also watched a few videos featuring Tom Shakespeare. Tom is a Professor of Disability Research at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and was a useful thinker for me because he is refreshingly clear.

Below I reflect this on conversation and the videos. I have previously expressed my discontent with the Social Model and argued a case for where to go next.

Re-thinking the Social Model

Current Social Model proponents induce some to believe that the Medical Model of Disability isn’t valid or useful. This is nonsense. It’s just not absolute. I am ‘disabled’ because of a physical condition. My ankles don’t work well enough to allow me to walk independently. That’s true in any situation or context. It’s got nothing to do with society. I can walk with aids – Canadian crutches mostly. But then the physical environment must be conducive. The natural world isn’t a place I can go walking – unless there are human made paths that cater to my needs. And human-made environs must also be conducive. So insisting that disability is determined by social factors is a very urban perspective.

The normal human made physical environment has been designed to cater to the needs of able-bodied people. This means that those who are not able-bodied are frequently unable to access human made structures (streets and paths, parks, buildings and so on). This is what the Social Model set out to address. It has succeeded in many ways. This has made it possible for people with disabilities who were previously unable to move around freely in public to participate in public life and to be seen – and be known about to a far better degree. But it’s still not a universal reality for those living even in major urban settings.

For multiple reasons the Social Model is now clunky. It is still relevant but in need of a rethink. Among those reasons are:

1. New technologies that change the scope of accessibility and inclusion – on the physical, sensory and communal levels. 
2. New definitions of disability. 
3. New expectations about rights and dignities. 
4. New expectations about attitudes and behaviors

I don’t think we need to have a ‘model’ of disability at all. At the time the Social Model was developed the concept of a ‘model’ probably made sense, but now it does not. Now we have a swarm of theories and political passions that can end up engaged in pointless argument as they try to define disability according to their particular lights.

Disability is complex and highly individualistic. I want to suggest that we think of disability in terms of an ecology rather than a model. But let me be clear here. I mean this in terms of thinking about disability in the abstract only. Not in terms of thinking about people with disability – who belong within our communities as included members.

The term disability community is better used to denote a ‘community of interest’ rather than an actual community of people who get together for whatever purpose. This terminology risks being separative while it is intended to be the opposite. This is what happens when we fail to distinguish between abstract and concrete notions. 

Personally, I detest the term. I don’t identify as being a member of a community defined by disability. Yes, I have friends who have disabilities, but that’s not why they are my friends. We do share our disability-related experiences because, as friends, we share our experiences. Disability is a significant part of my identity – but on a superficial level only. It makes me stand out because I get about with Canadian crutches and I am limited in where I can go and what I can do. But, aside from that (as Tom Shakespeare observes) life is good. I live with my disabilities; I don’t dwell on them. I think about disability a lot because it’s been the theme of my professional life for decades. Long before I acquired disabilities of my own.

Disability is profoundly context dependent, and most people encounter disability only within specific contexts. However, when we talk about Disability Inclusion or Disability Policy we get into far more abstract realms that we feel must be made more manageable by thinking in terms of models. This is where we have gotten ourselves into bother. We can put water from a river into vessels, but we cannot contain the river itself.

By focusing our attention on disability, we have fooled ourselves into thinking it is the only primary problem. It isn’t. 

Advocates of the Social Model say that, in effect, medical impairments are not disabling, our attitude toward them is. This is bullshit. A person in a wheelchair has a better life when the physical environment isn’t full of impediments to them getting around in their wheelchair. But whatever puts them in their wheelchair is still real and still impacts their life in private. Wheelchair users don’t talk openly about their disability, probably because we have so many wheelchair heroes who are seen as disability advocates. They have an image to keep up. Besides, nobody wants to be thought of as a whiner. My brother uses a wheelchair and we talk often about our take on living with a mobility disability and what an utter pain in the arse it is.

We can quibble over the language we use. Not all impairments lead to disabilities in all contexts. Not all disabilities are the result of a physical human-made environment. The social environment is disabling in the same way the absence of a hearing loop is disabling to a person hard of hearing. It reduces potential for access and inclusion unfairly.

The Social Model has a focus on physical disability – especially mobility related. But when we widen our perspective to encompass the full spectrum of disability the Social Model becomes a blunt unwieldy instrument. How do we accommodate cognitive and behavioural disabilities which don’t necessarily require modification of our shared spaces – but of the attitudes and behaviors of those who use those shared spaces? What require modification are the beliefs, attitudes and behaviors of community members. This raises some complex concerns. 

1. Organizations can require certain behaviors of members – a code of conduct of some sort. But they cannot compel beliefs or attitudes. 
2. Communities are likewise constrained but to a lesser degree. Communities are able to impose sanctions on individuals few organizations would dare.
3. Neither organizations nor communities strongly police behavioural standards. This is a practical reality. Not even authoritarian cultures are successful in this. 

Without enforcement as a primary instrument, we are left with persuasion. Here we have three options:

1. The moral argument 
2. The communal responsibility argument. 
3. Evolving our culture to be more compassionate and inclusive.

Each has its drawbacks if employed as a primary or singular approach. One again, simple models do not work well.

The tyranny of able normality

Accusations of ableism point to a presumption that most ‘normal’ people don’t have disabilities, and this constitutes an overwhelming portion of our community – which has the power to make decisions. This is true to a point because people who are able to work, and be in positions of power and influence aren’t necessarily aware of people with disabilities -who were mostly invisible to the general gaze. 

The able and normal looked after themselves because that’s who they saw. But when we consider disability through a wide-angle lens what is normal takes on a different meaning. Impairments caused by accident, injury, illness or since birth or by reason of advanced age aren’t necessarily disabilities in a universal sense but may be so in one or several contexts only. Either people with such impairments are not often encountered or, unless an impairment is visible, it is rarely spoken of. And when it comes to older persons experiencing impairments because of advanced age, they mostly don’t see themselves as having a disability. 

This can be specific government policy too. In Australia eligibility for the National Disability Insurance Scheme cuts off at age 65. At that age one is entitled only to the relatively poorly funded aged care system – even if the disability is not age-related.

Not all impairments become disabilities in contexts where they attract public awareness or require public accommodations or adjustments. What goes on in private isn’t reported. We miss a huge portion of the reality of living with a disability in consequence.

We have efforts at estimating the level of disability in a community but how reliable are they? It is estimated that 18% of the Australian population had a disability in 2018. This is from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare so the data will reflect a strong methodology. But does that reflect reality or the constraints of a formal methodology?

How we deal with disability

So much depends on the size of a community – and hence the degree of connection with individuals. Families, tribes, villages, towns have different types of bonds compared with large cities. 

What might be a personal sense of responsibility in one setting isn’t in another. If we belong to a large community in which anonymity is the norm our response to people with disability may be different simply because no sense of personal responsibility is triggered. 

In communities or in organizations we cannot assume that non-responsiveness to disability is because the person doesn’t care. It could be that they already have care responsibilities and their capacity to do more is limited.

Not only is disability complex but so is normality and so is community. We are complicated beings who can’t be understood in simple ways – like models. 

What is the problem?

When it comes to disability my focus is on problem solving. On a personal level it’s – “How do I achieve what I want to achieve?” When I was involved in service provision it was about the person with disability and their need to have a safe, dignified and fulfilled life – and how the organization and its people were going to do that. As a disability ERG lead it was about working with my employer to address the access, equity and inclusion issues of staff with disability. 

The very theme of dis-ability is about not being able to do stuff – not having the ability to meet a need or satisfy a want or need. For an employee with a disability legislation and policy impose upon an employer a duty to assure access, equity and inclusion. But ensuring that duty is fulfilled in a compassionate or  sensitive manner isn’t something that happens.

Disability has other dimensions. It can be the cause of pain, psychological distress, make relationships (social and intimate) difficult or impossible. It exists in these dimensions because there is a need unmet through inability caused by an organic condition that is not ‘normal’. Disability can manifest on a spectrum that progresses from mild and highly context specific to profound and global. How we respond as a community is important. But is this a social responsibility or something deeper?

The personal perspective

My recent foray into thinking on disability left me feeling as if academics and political activists have taken over and the business of addressing personal needs is being largely ignored. The situation is exacerbated by the dominant role of government bureaucracies in framing policies, strategies and doling out funds. 

How do academic or political theories about disability help individuals in need of concrete solutions to real problems about access, equity and support? They don’t. 

In the past 6 months the ‘disability advocates’ that I have encountered have mostly been privileged in some way. They are employed. They have visible disabilities which are often their trademarks – confirming they have a disability – but their insight into disability as a lived experience of disadvantage and exclusion is either limited or non-existent. Some are brashly political as if their performance is going to persuade others to change and become more compassionate and inclusive. It won’t. 

Disability is changing as a thing in our communities for good and ill. There are good things happening in some areas and there are unresolved concerns that are harder to address in other areas because decision-makers are remote from the realities of lived experiences that have real existential edges to them – where people are actually suffering. 

So, we can theorize about disability or we can act to address suffering. But here’s the problem. It is not only people with disability who may be suffering. 

The Social Model holds that people are disabled by their society and that the resolution to this question is for society to create more inclusive environments. That’s sensible enough – to a point – dealing with physical, technological, policy, procedural and systemic issues. These can be discretely disability focused in ways that do not exclude others and may even help them. 

But beyond that changes in beliefs, attitudes and behaviors that blend inclusivity into a culture cannot be disability focused. Empathy and compassion can’t be quarantined to disability alone. We cannot make a culture more inclusive of people with disability without making inclusivity a universal goal. It is true that some elements of our community think otherwise. But they are not representative. This doesn’t mean that you can’t be inclusive of people with disability unless you include everyone. That’s not true at a personal level. You can. But it’s not how things work in a complex, diverse and pluralist culture. 

The Medical Model and the Social Model have roles to fill still – as elements of an overall response. Both models relate to a privileged state where such solutions are accessible. But in many parts of the world all there is is community and culture – and some external aid. I have written before about YPK in Bali. They are selling t-shirts and seeking donations to raise funds to buy a mini bus. It has been remarkable how few people in places privileged enough to think in terms of Medical and Social models have been persuaded to contribute to that cause.

Conclusion

How we think about disability is evolving. It is becoming part of our social discourse on identity in ways that weren’t apparent 15 years got when I got seriously into Disability Inclusion. I retain my focus on disability as a problem to be solved to address access, inclusion and equity concerns for employees and community members.

It’s not that I mean to dismiss or diminish the social discourse on identity, it’s just that it’s not an aspect that triggers my passion. It’s hard to do problem-solving well. So, it needs focused attention. This is especially so if, as I argue, we need to move to a post-model way of understanding disability and see it as a complex context-sensitive ecological way. Yes, this is a Social Ecology perspective. It embraces culture and community and the difficult business of inspiring people to disability as free agents who are not browbeaten by clumsy moral arguments. 

It is not a linear model-based approach, but one which doesn’t try to craft hard definitions, set thinking rules, or make moral demands as if there is only one acceptable standard. In the complexity of disability there are some who need our help to participate in our shared lives to the best extent we can enable. It comes down to caring for others as an individual through whatever motivating means we elect.

Here’s an excerpt from the webinar – from Prof Scott Avery:

“Out in western New South Wales in Lake Mungo there’s an archaeological site and it’s got all these footprints in the clay. And amongst those footprints is a single right line of footprints, so it goes right footprint, right footprint, right footprint, no corresponding left footprint….. We tell this story of inclusion… the Mungo man story, the one-legged Mungo man, to say everyone has a place and purpose.” 

Inclusion is an ancient impulse.

Introduction

Following some comments about On getting to being okay I decided to do a deeper dive into the Getting Above the Line (GATL) pilot project, which was subsequently delivered in my former department by the Global Leadership Foundation (GLF) twice since 2020.

GATL was intended to deliver a relatively simple model of thinking about our emotions with an emphasis on personal responsibility and self-awareness. Neither of these things are easy to master and GATL certainly wasn’t going to deliver mastery in 4 1-hour long sessions, plus some homework. The goal was to offer a simple model that could then be the foundation for self-directed efforts.

The prompt for thinking about GATL was a reflection on the national RUOK day and how it is that so few of us are comfortable talking about our own emotional states, or even thinking about them, with any comfort or ease. Since 2020 there really has been no let up in psychological pressure, so the need for a simple ‘starter kit’ may have grown.

Originally, I was reacting to what colleagues with diagnosed depression were telling about how ‘disclosure’ of that diagnosis slammed back on them as a kind of stigma. I wanted to ‘change the conversation’ but quickly realised that if that was going happen, we needed to become more emotionally ‘literate’ ourselves.

Below I want to reflect more on GATL, its benefits and potential.

Why try?

Quite apart from the fact that I have needed to confront and address my own emotional responses to acquiring a significant disability, and learn how to be more emotionally intelligent, my work background has exposed me to psychiatric disorders in many settings. I am comfortable with ‘mental illness’ as a way of understanding how and why we fail to, or are unable to, respond to experiential trauma in an effective way. I have read widely on psychiatry and psychology as well. I am not asserting I am an expert in these fields, only that I feel comfortable. This matters because the alternative is to feel uncomfortable and to be unable to confidently confront a concern about psychological distress.

I deliberately avoid using the term ‘mental illness’ because it is laden with dogmatic assumptions. There are people who experience levels of psychological distress that are extreme. But the chances of encountering them in the workplace are remote. Mental illnessisn’t a term that is useful when we are mostly considering psychological or emotional injuries. We are most dealing with concerns about emotional health. I don’t like ‘emotional illness’ as a term. I prefer ‘emotional injury’. Experiencing anxiety or depression is natural and normal but not being able to flick the ‘off switch’ and return to ‘normal’ afflicts some of us.

Why this might be the case may be subject to clinical speculation but it’s no stranger than finding you can’t recover from any other injury because of some unanticipated physical condition. This is no better demonstrated, in my view, by the way that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has evolved as a concept. It has evolved from being thought of as something confined only to a response to the risk of physical death to a response to existential harm. This is a much more sophisticated understanding that deep trauma can be triggered by experiences that cause serious emotional harm. This can include emotional abuse, rejection and isolation, sustained bullying and other experiences that cause deep existential distress.

There are those who will disagree with me, maybe even vehemently. But this isn’t an area where there is common agreement. There are people with entrenched dogmatic beliefs, some of whom practise as clinical professionals. My point is that even if you don’t want to explore the field yourself, do understand there is no indisputable authority.

I am firmly in the camp of those who think that the experience of being human isn’t innately the realm of those who have degrees in psychiatry or psychology. We have a rich heritage of wisdom and compassion of our own to draw upon to help us respond effectively to most of our woes.

Most of us don’t have the time or inclination to read so there is great value in having a simple and actionable guide to greater awareness of our own emotional states.

Centres of emotional intelligence

We naturally talk about our head, our heart and our gut when we describe our responses to life circumstances. It is interesting that we also have neurons in our gut and our heart. I like the way the GLF builds on this natural reflex to craft a model of understanding our emotional responses. On their website we can read:

“If you were asked by someone to describe what you ‘think’ with, you’d probably look at them strangely and respond with ‘My brain, of course’. Interestingly, it is not as simple as that. In fact, when we are thinking effectively, we are doing so not just with our brain but with our whole body.

‘Whole body thinking’, or presence, is thinking the balances three centres. ‘Head thinking’ is more rational and logical and provides great insight. ‘Heart thinking’ connects us with our feelings and emotions and brings intuition. And ‘body thinking’ uses our senses and brings ‘gut feel’ or instinct. Each of us is capable of thinking in all three of these ways. However, in the process of developing a personality, we tend to lean more strongly towards one of the

three, which then becomes our primary filter for perceiving what we think is reality. Higher levels of emotional health are characterised by the ability to give close to equal weight to each type of these centres.

Emotional health

The idea of emotional health is at the core of GLF’s approach. This is from their website:

“A person with a high level of emotional health takes personal responsibility for the way in which they relate to and engage with others and the world around them. Emotionally healthy people have a well-tuned inner observer: they are conscious of themselves – their thoughts, their emotions and their behaviours – and the impact they have on others. They are able to recognise and overcome the various influences and constraints they experience (either from others or themselves) through the choices they make and the practices they use.“

Vertical development

Another key way of thinking about emotional health is seeing our acquisition of skills and knowledge as a ‘horizontal’ development that must be balanced by ‘vertical’ development – which I see as gaining depth of insight. GLF’s website sums this up:

‘Vertical development’ is about building our ability to distinguish and let go

of our own limited thinking and perceptions. As this occurs we are more

able to genuinely relate to and engage with others and the world around us.

The Neuroleadership Institute backs this up when it says that we should ‘train’ for insight, not just deliver information. Triggering insight is critical if we want to stimulate our motivation to learn and to change our behaviours. Even having the technical capability to perform a task may not be sufficient to achieve a desired or intended outcome. Without insight and self-awareness we may lack that ‘secret sauce’ that enables us to resonate with others.

Conclusion

“Gaining a full understanding of emotional health is an ongoing journey, even for those of us who have worked with it for a long time.” (GLF website)

We have to start somewhere. The GLF model is simple but sophisticated. The critical ideas can be represented in visual form. The idea of a ‘line of responsibility’ (above which one should strive to stay) is almost ridiculously simple as an idea, though staying above it might be a challenge. But it is better to face that challenge with a method that isn’t going to demand complex ideas and language.

I made myself a graphic which depicted degrees of self-centredness versus degrees of behavioural freedom. They are inversely related. As one grows the other shrinks. I used to have it printed out and visible. Writing this has prompted me to put up a new one. It’s been a while.

At the most basic level, immediately above the ‘line of responsibility’ is ‘Recognition’ (self-awareness) and immediately below it is ‘Automated Response’ (reflex). A simple idea but it is so hard to shift from self-centred reflex to freer self-aware behaviour.

GATL was an effort to bring profound and powerful ideas to people quickly and effectively. Doing so in four one-hour online sessions, plus a bit of homework could only ever be an intro – a starter kit.

Below is some feedback from some participants in the 2020 pilot.

Participant 1

What empowered me from the training was that I learnt to: 

• pause and become aware my own and others’ reactions – understanding why I/they react as I/they do. 
• identify and manage my own emotions.  
• think before acting and manage impulses.
• understand motivations of other people and have empathy.
• initiate strategies to effectively manage relationships and build teams.
• think with my head, heart and gut and that a neat trick is to touch that area to remind myself to stay present in that zone.

Participant 2

I found all of the content useful. I have been trying to implement the strategies/models into my day-to-day life since we started. Once more employees across DCJ have completed the sessions it will be easier to apply these learnings into team practices and truly integrate into DCJ culture.

I think it was also exceptionally positive having participated in the training with a diverse group of people who are not all from the same team. I think that allowed us all to share our honest thoughts and feelings without fear of judgement or retribution. I can see it would be useful to have mixed groups with managers/employees as it will further enhance empathy and understanding of lived experiences.

I felt refreshed after each session. It was somewhat draining because that degree of self-reflection is not natural for me, but it was a wonderfully positive experience and I’d happily recommend participating to anyone.

Participant 4

This is not just a work training opportunity; it is a valuable and enjoyable personal growth and awareness experience!

The Global Leadership Foundation (GLF) training workshops can be influential to our organisation, as they reinforce DCJ values and can help bring us closer to creating respectful workplaces. The training concepts embed a foundational understanding and a ‘shared language’ – for us as individuals, colleagues, and for managers alike. Enhancing the way we work together, engage with one another, our stakeholders and clients. Participants will come to better understand their own and others Emotional Health (EH) levels, ‘position’ and responses. The training also promotes conscious awareness of Emotional Health levels on any given day. 

Participant 5

I thoroughly appreciated Global Leadership Emotional intelligence workshop.

This course encourages a person’s capability to moderate and control one’s emotions as well as the ability to manage the emotions of others.

This course provided me with a direct insight and awareness into:

• Self-regulation: the ability to manage one’s negative or disruptive emotions, and to adapt to changes in circumstance. Those who are skilled in self-regulation excel in managing conflict, adapt well to change and are more likely to take responsibility.
• Motivation: the ability to self-motivate, with a focus on achieving internal or self-gratification as opposed to external praise or reward. Individuals who are able to motivate themselves in this way have a tendency to be more committed and goal focused.
• Empathy: the ability to recognize and understand how others are feeling and consider those feelings before responding in social situations. Empathy also allows an individual to understand the dynamics that influence relationships, both personal and in the workplace.
• Social skills: the ability to manage the emotions of others through emotional understanding and using this to build rapport and connect with people through skills such as active listening, verbal and nonverbal communication.