For more than 30 years, I’ve worked in inclusion.
And if I’m honest, I remain optimistic about what’s possible – but increasingly impatient about how slowly we still move.
We still spend far too long trying to find a genuinely accessible restaurant in central London. Actually accessible. Not just somewhere with a ramp at the front door, but a space designed properly for wheelchair users throughout.
Talking to highly capable people who openly shared their disability or ethnicity during recruitment processes, only to never hear back or secure an interview despite being more than qualified.
I still walk into some male-dominated spaces and immediately feel the subtle signals of exclusion before a word has been spoken. Crossed arms, stern faces, the subtle but unmistakable signal that you are tolerated rather than valued.
And I’m often perplexed by even as an SME start-up, we often seem capable of delivering better accessibility and more thoughtful inclusion than some FTSE businesses – despite having a fraction of the budget and resource.
After three decades, I still find myself asking what we are getting wrong, because this cannot simply be a resource issue anymore. And yet despite all of that, something strange is happening.
In some organisations, inclusion has become politically inconvenient. In others, it has quietly disappeared from the agenda altogether. The impact of US-style politics has travelled much further than many predicted, and I can see businesses reducing investment, scaling back ambition, restructuring experienced teams, or quietly retreating from commitments they were speaking loudly about only a few years ago.
Not because the work is done – far from it – but because the political and commercial climate around inclusion has undeniably shifted.
And yet the reality across society has not changed nearly enough, despite years of evidence supporting the business case.
Women remain underrepresented in leadership and investment. Ethnic minority talent still faces disproportionate barriers to progression. Financial exclusion continues to lock out millions of growth and stability. Digital exclusion – especially with AI – increasingly determines who can participate fully in modern life and who cannot.
And disability? Despite progress, accessibility and deaf inclusion reporting still shows inconsistent outcomes across employment, communication access, progression and leadership representation.
So perhaps the question is no longer whether inclusion matters, but instead, what should we call it now? Because interestingly, many organisations are not abandoning the work altogether. They are reframing it:
- Belonging.
- Human Sustainability.
- People & Culture.
- Inclusive Growth.
- Customer and Colleague Experience.
- Fair Access.
- Human-Centred Design.
- Responsible Business.
And perhaps that reflects something bigger. The future may be less about labels and more about systems, capability and organisational understanding.
Because if this is truly about serving people better, then perhaps the challenge is not simply one of identity politics, but whether organisations can actually understand human complexity well enough to design services, workplaces and experiences that work for more people.
That, ultimately, is what the Disability Dividend Framework has always been about. The intention was never to position disability as a niche issue, a compliance exercise or an act of charity. It was about understanding customers and colleagues properly in order to build better organisations, services and systems:
- Designing systems that work for more people.
- Building organisations that reflect the real world.
- Reducing friction.
- Improving access.
- Creating trust.
- Driving innovation.
On reflection, the framework applies far beyond disability. It applies equally to gender, ethnicity, financial inclusion, digital exclusion, ageing populations, neurodiversity and the growing complexity of modern human lives.
Because vulnerability is rarely inherent to the individual. More often, it is created, or intensified, by systems that were never designed with enough human complexity in mind.
We now have countless examples where the absence of inclusive thinking has directly contributed to poor commercial, social and reputational outcomes.
We saw it during rapid digitisation and still do, where millions of people, particularly older customers, disabled people and lower-income households were effectively excluded because organisations assumed everyone was digitally confident.
We see it in AI systems trained on incomplete or biased datasets, producing poorer outcomes because the teams building them did not fully reflect the populations affected by them.
We see it in financial services through “vulnerability” failings, where customers navigating bereavement, disability, mental health challenges or financial distress were treated as process problems rather than human beings.
And we continue to see it in workplaces where organisations publicly step back from inclusion commitments while simultaneously struggling with retention, trust, innovation and understanding younger generations of talent and consumers.
This is no longer simply an inclusion conversation. Increasingly, it is a leadership, growth and customer insight conversation about how organisations understand and respond to human complexity.
Maybe “inclusion” was always too small a word for the scale of the challenge. Because ultimately, the organisations most likely to navigate AI disruption, demographic change and economic uncertainty successfully will be the ones that understand people best.
The organisations that succeed will not necessarily be the loudest about inclusion, but they almost certainly will be the ones that understand their customers and colleagues better than their competitors.
Lived experience is crucial and so is empathy. Try walking into your bank wearing noise-cancelling headphones and attempting to discuss your finances without being able to properly hear or follow the conversation around you. For many deaf customers, that experience is not occasional discomfort, it’s their everyday reality.
So perhaps the future is simpler than we think:
- Understand people properly.
- Measure what matters.
- Build teams that reflect the world as it is.
- Design systems that work for more humans in practice, not just in principle.
And then walk with your feet where brands fail to meet the needs of you, your family, your friends and your community.
Because after 30 years, the slow pace of progress no longer feels like a communications issue. I really believe it’s a leadership one.
