Free to Fly
(As an activist and all-round butterfly, I get asked to do some wonderful things younger me would never have dreamed of, which is how today I found myself as after dinner speaker at the Herbert Smith Freehills Oxford Disability Law Mooting Championship, an event designed to put disability and accessibility right at the heart of people’s attention. This is the transcript of my talk. You can download a pdf here)
Earlier this year I was one of the first participants in an ongoing study run by Sally Maitlis at Said Business School. We talked for about two hours about her research question — what is it like being a manager with a mental health condition?
I can boil those two hours down into two words. Cognitive dissonance. And it’s that cognitive dissonance I want to reflect on tonight.
If you’re like me, well, heaven help you, but you also probably spend a lot of time asking yourself about politicians — are they actually malicious or do they just not get it? And the answer, of course, is that most of the time no, they really don’t understand what their policies mean for people with whose lives they have no points of empathic contact, no relevant trajectories of intersection.
And yet, we so rarely ask the same question of our institutions and those who work there. I’m pretty sure before I sat down with Sally, I hadn’t done so. Not in the right terms. So I want to take the time now to replicate that conversational space, as best I can when it’s not really a conversation, and reflect on three things:
- Institutional implementation of the Equality Act (and for 28 years’ familiarity’s sake, Oxford will stand here as a proxy for institution), when it comes to mental health, is doing irreparable damage to neurodivergent individuals and those with mental ill health, to institutions, and to our world.
2. Institutions, and the individuals within them responsible for overseeing inclusion, for implementing reasonable adjustments, for changing cultural practice, are constitutionally incapable of adopting a perspective that will allow them to see this.
3. The three most promising answers to the conundrum — the market, regulation, and the excessive labour of those least able to give it — will all likely fail because they do not have the means of gaining the traction they would need in order to succeed.
It is not a very cheerful conclusion, and for that I apologise. It is often considered the job of a speaker at events like these to be witty. As anyone who has been to one of my poetry readings will attest, I don’t do humour. But if I can’t perform that function, maybe I can at least help towards a more practical purpose for an after dinner speaker and offer some thoughts that are sobering.
Let me start with an email I sent to Sally that sums up the cognitive dissonance I came to realise I felt:
“I find that being aware from the inside of the reasons why neurodivergent people and those with mental health conditions act in the way they do in certain situations, and the needs they have, can create significant conflicts with management structure, especially where there are procedures for “dealing with disability” that have often been put in place for the sake of compliance. The awareness that “inclusion as it needs to be done for our staff to flourish” and “inclusion as we do it” are dissonant in many areas is something that, talking to neurotypical managers, does not seem to be universal. This means that there is an inherent conflict driving the management process for me that just isn’t there sometimes for others, which can be exhausting and distressing, and feel invalidating but I hope can also present an opportunity for real change if it is enabled and encouraged.”
So, to go to my first point, why is it that implementation of the Equality Act is doing so much damage?
Let’s start with the damage to individuals. I am lucky to have been given the opportunity and the energy levels to co-deliver a series of workshops on mental health in the workplace here in Oxford. I’ve also been afforded platforms for which I am incredibly grateful. And the response from my colleagues, even my own managers, is universally warm and encouraging . This warmth has led me to misplagiarise Helder Camara’s famous saying about poverty:
- “when I talk about accessibility in the workplace, you call me a saint. When I ask why workplaces aren’t accessible you call me a troublemaker.”
Or
- “when I talk about my mental ill health, you call me a saint. When I ask for an adaption for my mental ill health you look at me like I’ve asked for a gold-plated Rolls Royce”
Because it’s still the case that as a workplace, Oxford loves to tell people that it is inclusive in its approach to mental health and neurodivergence but it does very little to show that it is. Our recruitment still demands qualifications and experience that are impossible for anyone whose life path has been atypical. We treat executive impairments as laziness. We treat the socially anxious as non-team-players, and we treat people whose clothing choices are dictated by sensory needs as not being bothered to make an effort.
We love to tell people it’s good to talk, but we institutionally will not listen when they do. And that is not just bad practice, it is reckless, dangerous, irresponsible, and we yet are called out on it about as regularly as my old college is Head of the River. We are telling outsiders looking in “you will be safe here” when our practice means they will not be.
And that is where we move to what is damaging to the institution. Study after study shows that diverse workforces do things better. Yet our implementation of the Equality Act means that we will never truly embrace a mentally different workforce, because we are implementing for compliance. We are implementing so that people are able to cope with being at work. And that means that we are institutionally incapable of enjoying the talent we have because when someone’s skillset is contoured with peaks of brilliance and valleys dictated by their impairments, instead of empowering them so that they can work at those peaks, we have a HR and a legal services structure programmed with an algorithm whose only purpose is risk aversion so that we are dragged into the valleys of jobs we “can cope with” and given a windcheater of reasonable adjustments just sufficient to keep us from hypothermia. The irony being the greatest risk we as an institution run is not empowering our wonderful people. But that is not a risk that can be quantified in terms of press coverage and payouts so we ignore it and settle for an Oxford of underemployment.
And finally there is the greatest risk of all by implementing for compliance and not nurturing for fulfilment. The risk that comes from living in a world facing unprecedented challenges where we need every brain on deck working at full functionality if we are going to get out alive.
So my second point, which is that this ineptitude, this waste of human life and potential is not the result of malice, but of not understanding. Of being unable to align perspective sufficiently to understand what “reasonable adjustment” and “inclusive culture” would actually look like.
For you to understand, there must be a perspective from which the question “why” is rendered ersatz because your view of what needs doing is aligned with that of those who need it to be done.
Put like that, it sounds impossibly complex. It’s not, of course. There is a single word that describes that process perfectly. That word is “listening.” And it’s something I don’t think I have ever witnessed from a senior manager.
Which brings me to my final point. There are three possible ways out of the fix we find ourselves in.
The first is regulation. We could insist that recruitment practice was changed, so that workplaces were made empowering, so that barriers were taken down and people were able to use their skills. And that might work, but it will not happen. Because there is always a reason in people’s heads why it is not about empowering and removing barriers. The same reason that means senior managers will not listen.
The second is the market. The business case. Demonstrating that in those pockets of good practice institutions actually grow and flourish along with the people who form them. And that will not work either. Because there is always an argument for exceptionalism. A reason why it worked there but not here. A reason why “it would work for some carefully chosen people but not as a rule”.
And finally there is the thing those of us practised in activism find ourselves driven back to again and again. The emotional, physical, and psychological labour of those with the fewest available resources to give. It is left to those of us with half of the spare resources to put in twice the work to be twice as good so that we might stand half the chance of rising to a position where we can, as individuals, make a difference. And ultimately, on a wide scale, that will not work because the maths simply do not work. And as we rise, we no longer have to be twice as good, we have to be three times as good, four, eight, sixty four times as good. We become known as the pedants and gadflies who will not shut up. We are seen as single issue people because of course we have to be single issue people when no one else around the board table will take on even a single percentage of the burden for implementing a change from compliance to empowerment. And in the end we break, and everyone can point and say “see, I told you people with your condition aren’t strong enough.”
So no, I have little hope in the immediate future for real empowerment of the neurodiverse and those with mental ill health. Not on a large scale — though I hope some of the people who listen to me some times will be so angry at my judgmental presumptions they take it upon themselves to prove me wrong.
No, we maybe can’t go from where we are to full empowerment. But maybe we can go from here to honesty. Maybe we can stop institutions being allowed to claim as promises things that amount to little more than words, and dangerous words at that. Maybe we can stop letting people claim compliance when compliance is reduced to a level of underemployment someone might be able to cope with. Maybe a few more irritating gadflies, a few more pedantic killjoys who won’t “give it up already” can start to drive institutions to do something, however small, in the hope it might shut us up, and maybe that small thing will lead to the next small thing and the next. And maybe that will happen before those of us whose labour is unilaterally demanded again and again are all broken. I really don’t know if our institutions as they are deserve that, but I believethat future generations do. And I’m damn sure we do.