Month: December 2024

Introduction

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

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

Thinking in the right scale

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

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

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

Reflex and aspiration

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

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

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

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

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

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

When virtues become vices

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adaptive evolution is hard

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

Michael Patterson

31 December 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celebrating diversity as if people really matter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Patterson

12 December 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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