Diversity policies, especially when it comes to disabled people, are often created and implemented by decision makers with very different life experiences to those who their policies affect most.
We would never expect economic policy to be crafted without input from economists and bankers. We should demand the same for disability policies, if we want to create the change needed to produce inclusive societies.
Starting in 2017, I was humbled to be given an opportunity to develop the first multi-media, audio dictionary translating Bangla to English. As a disabled individual who is visually impaired, I was uniquely placed to design such a programme, based on my lived experience. The principle of entrusting service design to those who have the most experience in that area is a logical, common-sense approach to policy, yet many governments can do more in this area.
This has been particularly true throughout the pandemic, where it has been even more important to respond quickly and appropriately to the needs of citizens.
For example, school children have been failed in many countries through poor or non-existent education provision. Medical professionals have been let down due to poor access to PPE.
This begs the question, why haven’t teachers created public policy regarding schools? Why haven’t Doctors and nurses been a bigger part of public policy with regards to hospital management and equipment?
Those who have direct, lived experience should be able to formulate policy. I’m grateful that in Bangladesh and other nations, this is what is increasingly happening, with some groundbreaking results.
If nothing else, this approach is consistent with other professions: When applying for a job, an employer will always demand evidence of past experience. There is no reason why this should not apply to policy and politics.
You would never hire a builder to work on your house if they had never set foot on a building site: at most, you could hire an experienced interdisciplinary project manager if he or she was relying on the expertise of seasoned builders.
The benefit of applying lived experience to problem-solving has long been established in business – governments should follow suit.
The founders of the ‘Lean methodology’ are a great example of this, where they developed a process of continuous improvement and waste elimination that saw a failing car production company, Toyota, turn into a global market leader.
This methodology’s pioneers, Kiichiro Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno, would demand that those working on the camper van, for example, would travel themselves in the vans they were trying to improve. This enabled them to uncover the sources of discomfort created through poor design, in a way that would have been impossible in a design office in Tokyo.
This cannot be directly applied to disability policy – it would be unethical and impossible to ask someone to be ‘blind’ for a period of time, in order to develop better policy.
The next best thing is for policy makers to engage with those who have the experience.
This isn’t about denigrating the policymaking experience of those in government, but it is about helping them empathise with those whom their decisions impact. When public services are not designed with empathy for the people who use them, they are useless, or even potentially harmful.
The a2i empathy training programme, for example, arranges for relatively senior government officers to act as secret shoppers and visit citizens’ access points for services outside of their ministry or area of expertise. This exercise puts them in “citizens’ shoes” since they are forced to navigate public systems without any official or intellectual privileges. This experience helps participants develop a critical eye that they use to scrutinise their own agency’s delivery systems and improve the overall quality of services.
This kind of real-world experience (either through engaging with service users, or by putting policy makers’ in service users’ shoes), as well as high-level expertise, should be part of governance as we move towards a ‘new normal’.
There is no reason why Ministers for health shouldn’t be ex-Doctors, and Ministers for education can’t be ex-teachers. And there is no reason why disability policy cannot be informed by disabled people.
Public service is not rocket science, but if it was, it would make sense to entrust it to the rocket scientists.
