Introduction
I have been infected with the mad idea of writing a book. It has been haunting the back of my mind for some time, and I was resisting it quite nicely until Donald Trump said rude things about DEI hires. It wasn’t just that Trump was rude, but that DEI had become lost in the chaos of reactive passions. It has become an easy target for people who feel vindicated by having someone to pick on and denigrate. Its tempting to hate back, but these folks have a disability that impairs their capacity for compassion and respect. We need to break the cycle of mutual accusations of being unworthy humans.
I started off this blog attending only to Disability Inclusion and progressively became aware that there are challenges that embrace anyone who has been excluded for any unfair reason. Disability has singular themes that other ‘diversity groups’ don’t have. A lot of our inclusion needs are physical changes to our environments – landscape and architectural – and material changes to technologies, systems and processes. But we also share the want of awareness and respect in the people we engage with that others also encounter.
Below I want to share some of the themes I plan to explore in depth in the book.
Inclusion is hard to do
It is easy to imagine that because we agree inclusion is a good thing we have a moral tailwind giving us a boost. A lot of people agree with that, and they are positively responsive to our efforts – to varying degrees. Others resist, and it is easy to see them as morally deficient.
I don’t want to attempt an essay on moral philosophy, so I will keep this brief. There are sound reasons lodged deeply within our psychology, and some say our genes, that argue that resistance to inclusion is innate. We may argue that it is now misguided, but it hasn’t always been so.
We are naturally biased. We naturally create stereotypes. We naturally form in-groups and out-groups. Those ancient reflexes can be activated and locked in an ‘on’ setting by historic, cultural, religious, community and personal life experiences. Such experiences may be objectively discriminatory and cruel. Being conditioned by such experiences, which may go back many generations in origin doesn’t make an individual bad. The expression of those reflexes can be modified with intent and effort – if a person chooses to do so. We need to understand that making that choice can be immensely difficult for some people.
These reflexes are deeply embedded and have become unconscious. They served a pro-survival function in that we were triggered to make choices with little cognitive effort. These days, especially when we live in large, complex, pluralistic communities we constantly engage in automatic discriminatory behaviour. We would become emotionally and cognitively exhausted otherwise.
The question isn’t whether this kind of discrimination is good, but whether it is appropriate in every setting. We will miss out on many opportunities for rewarding interactions because we made assumptions about a person. In a normal social context, usually no harm is done. But sometimes it is, like when a stranger moves into our community and we reject them because some attribute we react to.
Here we have an interesting situation. In our private lives we are free to be as inclusive or discriminatory as we like – up to the point of engaging in unlawful activity. In our communities we are free to exclude and reject – even when doing so causes harm. But in our workplaces, we often have legal and policy constraints on our conduct which may conflict with strongly held personal views.
Is it okay for us to take our biases and prejudices into our workplaces and persist with them in contravention of the legal and policy obligations our employer is required to comply with? This is a genuine moral concern. The issue isn’t whether the inclusion obligations are right or wrong in our eyes. It is whether we honour the obligations put upon us because of where we choose to work.
Organisations respond to DEI in various ways. It can be an investment in shaping workplace culture in ways that deliver financial and productivity benefits. It can be a recognition that the safety and wellbeing of staff is part of the organisation’s core business. Or it can be an add-on compliance cost to meet legal and policy obligations.
How DEI is seen will determine how it is resourced and supported. Is it valued as an investment in creating a dynamic, creative and productive workplace culture? Is it another compliance cost that diverts funds away from ‘real’ priorities?
DEI policies and strategies are often efforts to persuade conformity with legal and policy obligations without ever clearly saying so. And they also attempt to persuade those who disagree with the policies to change their minds.
Compliance by a mixture of enforcement and persuasion is how our traffic laws are policed. And despite decades of such an approach non-compliance persists. My point is that DEI has almost zero recourse to enforcement and limited means to engage in effective persuasion. Inclusion is an inherently difficult goal to achieve. This is especially so if the organization’s leadership doesn’t have a clear, rational and conscious commitment to it.
The inverted pyramid of influence
There’s a principle in our psychology that says we are more likely to want to imitate higher status and more powerful individuals. But DEI strategies aren’t designed to first ensure that an organisation’s executive leaders and middle management are aware of, and committed to, DEI ideals and principles. Instead, non-management staff are most often the primary targets.
The upshot is that when middle management and executive leaders aren’t compliant with expectations of their roles in supporting DEI there is no accountability. This not only weakens the power of DEI to positively change the organisation’s behaviours it sends a signal that there is no genuine commitment to DEI at the top of the power hierarchy.
This in turn puts pressure to drive the desired changes on DEI team members and the organisation’s ERGs when their roles should be collaborating with clear and unambiguous direction from the top.
The absence of strong top-down support for DEI also generates problems for how accountability works out. The popular term now is to talk of ‘proactive accountability’ instead of punitive accountability. Proactive accountability must be leader-driven because it reflects a commitment to growth and learning. This must be modelled from ‘on high’ because this response takes cognitive effort. If leaders are not making the effort, why should others?
Also, in-groups don’t like imposing punitive accountability on their own members. This is why non-management staff are more likely to be subject to punitive accountability than managers who might share responsibility but experience no accountability response. This is a very common phenomenon.
We assume that executives and managers will support DEI strategies and understand them because we assume that’s how it all works. It doesn’t. Power, responsibility and influence are hierarchical, and they don’t confer any magical powers to understand the intricacies and complexities of DEI. Like any kind of cultural influence DEI is trickle-down. This is not just talking the talk but walking the talk.
Of course, there are organisations who do all of this really well. They are led by people who understand and are committed to DEI values and principles. They positively influence their organisation’s culture.
The role of ERGs
When we understand that DEI is a core business investment and not an add-on compliance cost it is possible to survey an organisation’s culture in a strategic way. From this we can understand where energy must be applied to foster inclusion and equity. Then DEI teams can be engaged productively, and ERGs can be enlisted as invaluable allies.
ERGs are often in the paradoxical situation of being asked to help and solve a problem that the organization has a responsibility to address, but they are then seen as volunteers who must contribute their own time. ERGs will do this because they know their members’ very real pain and they are highly motivated to bring the circumstances that caused it to an end – only to encounter resistance from the organisation.
An ERG must determine whether it has a passive advisory or active change agent role. It cannot flip between the two. The passive advisory role leaves the change impetus with the organization’s usually bureaucratic mechanisms – with resultant uncertainties. The active change agent role generates a host of complexities around leadership, structure and how best to act.
ERGs have a range of functions in service of their members’ interests so it’s not sensible to have a cookie-cutter approach to how an ERG might operate. But all ERGs must have a clear contract with their organisation about what is the problem that they are addressing, who has the primary responsibility, what resources are needed to address the problem in an effective way, and what is the status of the ERG within the organisation.
ERGs have a hard job to perform is they adopt the active change agent role. They must advocate for their members in an effective manner – even in the passive role. That means applying civil but persistent pressure to have welfare and safety concerns addressed in the complexity of personalities, politics, pressure on budgets and constraints on time and attention in getting procedural and behavioural change. That’s a messy space to operate in. Make a hash of it and an ERG’s reputation is ruined. Recovery can be difficult.
DEI is hard to do well as it is, but it’s so much harder for ERGs which may be run by volunteers without critical training, having to put in extra unpaid time, negotiate with managers to get access to paid time, and meet the challenges thrown up by their area of interest as well.
Without full commitment from an organisation’s executive leadership in supporting DEI, ERGs struggle to be effective. We must remember that a lot of critical research suggests that DEI efforts are not successful, and ERGs are ineffective. If the organisation’s executive leadership is disengaged, uninterested and not actively supportive, failure is what you’d expect. For an ERG encouraged to exist as a service to its members, that failure is corrosive.
Understanding the difference between the moral and the evolutionary
DEI has been driven by a powerful moral imperative, and that’s appropriate and necessary. It just isn’t the whole story, and we need to know what that whole story is.
The reflexes that create and perpetuate our biases, prejudices and willingness to exclude can’t be countered by moral demands alone. The environment that crafted those reflexes over hundreds of thousands of years no longer exists for us. I like the expression that we are using stone-age minds in a space-age world. Certainly, over the centuries since the advent of the Industrial Revolution [1760 to 1840] our ways of living and working have been utterly transformed.
There have been two critical changes – how we live together and how we work. We now have novel communities that have formed from the waves of migration since the end of WW2 and changes in social values since the 1960s. Our organisations have also transformed and have become sites for ongoing experimentation in how we work and live together.
These days we have laws that require we do not discriminate unreasonably and that we act to protect staff from harm [physical and psychological]. These laws are supported by policies that organisations develop or are required to comply with.
So, whether we like it or not, we are subject to pressure to evolve our beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. Such evolutionary pressure imposes demands upon individuals to adapt. Some will, quickly and willingly. They are in a minority. Others will resist, sometimes with determination. They are also a minority. The majority will adapt with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
There’s a handy way of thinking about this. It’s called the 20:60:20 rule. It’s a principle more than a rule, but it works reliably. What it tells us most importantly is that this isn’t a simple moral issue. It’s a complex cluster of factors beyond ready volitional influence. I am not saying there is no prospect of positive influence, just that it isn’t as easy as the advocates for change fuelled by moral passions think it is.
Conclusion
What we call DEI is a critical approach to stimulating positive evolutionary change of our beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. But research into human behaviour over the past 30 years tells us that stimulating such change is a difficult business that requires knowledge and skill.
This has been vastly under-estimated, probably because there isn’t yet an intent to create a freely accessible body of knowledge. DEI is a business for a lot of people – whether independent consultants and trainers or substantial businesses selling their knowledge and methods that resource-constrained businesses can’t afford to pay for – or don’t care to pay for.
The other problem is that passionate supporters of DEI who see their cause as a moral one often have little motive to take a more clinical or strategic approach. This isn’t just a problem with DEI. It’s a common theme across the spectrum of human services, especially in the public sector.
I want to stimulate deeper interest in what it takes to create enduring positive change in favour of those who have been the persistent targets of cruel and exclusionary conduct. This is more critical as staff report greater demands on their time. Whether they are in DEI teams or ERGS they must develop the capacity to ensure their efforts have the best chance of being fruitful. But for this to happen organisational leaders must step up and play their critical role effectively.
I want to tell a story that shows how complex the challenge is. In late 2021 I started this blog to track my quest to answer the burning question I still had when I quit full-time paid employment in June 2021. That question was, ‘Why is Disability Inclusion so hard?” It is hard because, in certain respects, it is a question about why we believe, feel, and act as we do. Inclusion is at the core of who we are in so many dimensions.
Following the adverse political attention to DEI in the USA in late 2024 and early 2025 some have argued that it is time to move away from DEI-related language. While it is true that the DEI field has brought a lot of the derision upon itself that doesn’t invalidate the ideals and principles it stands for.
It is an attractive option to think in terms of fairness and kindness, but I am not sure that this will overcome the resistance and objections to the inclusive spirit. It could be just a few more words to trash. But this is also a wake-up call to break out of habituated thinking that has become bogged down in an atmosphere of failure and exhaustion as good intent is shown again and again to be inadequate to the task at hand.
If I see a light on the horizon it is shining on a vision of a formal publicly accessible course for professional development that DEI practitioners, ERG leads, and more aware executive leaders and managers might take up. It’s just called Inclusion. If the book inspires the development of such a course, I will be content. If it inspires volunteers in ERGs to become more aware of the potential they have to achieve the changes they desire I will be happier.