The Propositions

ONE - The most meaningful indicator of whether progress is being made in achieving equality for disabled people is in the individual experiences of disabled people.

Many �objective� indicators obscure the issues still to be tackled since there is a tendency to think progress means fitting disabled people into society�s existing norms and priorities. The issue is further complicated by the fact that disabled people cannot be treated as a homogenous group.

While overall indicators are useful to policy makers they should be placed alongside the individual experiences of disabled people in particular circumstances to give a much richer picture of what progress might look like for that individual person.

TWO - While some progress has been made towards equality, disability policy and public behaviour are changing far too slowly.

Things have moved on significantly from 1983 when the government struggled to even acknowledge that discrimination against disabled people was taking place.

The debate is now less about the �what� and more about the �how�. If everyone agrees that discrimination exists, how then can it be eliminated? Further top-down legislative change is necessary, but not sufficient. Changing attitudes is also vital - but far harder to bring about.

THREE - As a �problem� for government and other organisations disability is only set to increase in importance.

To some extent, non-disabled people can in fact be regarded as not-yet-disabled people � particularly as our population is ageing: in 2003, 10% of 16-24 year olds were disabled while this proportion increases to one third in the 50 to retirement age category.

Also, for those who are non-disabled in childhood, there is a correlation between low educational attainment and becoming disabled later in life. Furthermore those in low-income households are more likely to become disabled. So structural inequalities and the reduction in social mobility that we have seen in recent years suggest that there will be more disabled people in future years.

FOUR - To move forward, the main institutions and groups with a stake in disability policy should create new �trading zones� where equal and effective communication and collaboration can take place.

Debates about disability often seem to take place in a vacuum, separate from wider policy debates about work, education, benefits and support. There has been a failure in mainstream debates to recognise and understand the perspectives of disabled people.

In the history of science literature , scholars have examined the collaborations responsible for the development of major scientific and technological projects such as the discovery of DNA or the early Apollo missions. They have found that these projects have been reliant on what they term effective �trading zones� between disciplines or groups with very different cultures. These trading zones run along a continuum of effectiveness:

1. A network dominated by an elite of experts who use their specialized knowledge to dictate. The expertise of such an elite is black-boxed for other participants in the network; access to the knowledge is tightly controlled.

2. A trading zone where the system of concern serves as an object that links the participants in the network, but experts from different fields see the object in ways dictated by their expertise. This kind of a trading zone ranges from limited, adversarial interactions to a more constructive engagement among interacting experts who agree on common goals.

3. A shared representation trading zone, in which new kinds of communication emerge as participants work on the cutting edge. Here the boundaries between groups disappear, and equal communication and collaboration can take place.

The most successful projects have managed to move along the continuum developing the second and third types of trading zone.

There are three issues we would highlight as areas where type three trading zones should be initiated by the major institutions and groups involved in disability policy:

�Exploding our definition of work: Unleashing human potential
�The engine of difference: disability, diversity and innovation
�Don�t get angry, get networked: changing public attitudes to disability


Exploding our definition of work: Unleashing human potential

FIVE � The Government�s drive to get disabled people into work is based on an understanding of �value� equalling participation in full-time, paid work. This is insufficient.

The language of the 2001 Labour manifesto in the context of disability is quite clear: �For people unable to take up paid work, we are committed to offer security�. Any other kinds of activity, no matter how socially beneficial or individually rewarding, have a lower status in the eyes of both rhetoric and policy. This approach can be summed up as �workfare not welfare�.

The implication of this is that anyone who is not working is either failing to fulfil their role as a citizen, or in need of some form of care. If people are encouraged to take voluntary or part-time roles it is as a stepping stone to a full time job, rather than a way of creating value in itself.

Work with young disabled people has shown that they are not so much concerned with contributing through paid work, as contributing positively to the lives of people around them � can they be a good friend, a brother or sister or part of their immediate community?

It is not only disabled people who can challenge the link that is so often made between value and full-time work. The impact of technology looks set to change our workplaces forever, and displace the rigid model of work. There have been huge increases in more flexible, part-time work, and in self-employment and volunteering, across all demographics.

SIX � Even within the government�s definition of work, the exclusion of disabled people is an all too common occurrence.

Current welfare to work programmes focus on whether the individual is ready for the workplace. They do not start with whether the workplace is ready for disabled employees. The result is continued exclusion of people with high levels of support needs and an array of segregated �sheltered� employment opportunities.

SEVEN � In order to challenge the dominant definitions of work, we need to begin with the views of disabled people.

As business scholars have argued, economic activity is less and less about the top down filling of roles determined in the company headquarters or top echelons of the civil service and more about adapting to allow individuals to achieve their full potential.

We can learn from this experience of the rise in the numbers of women in the workplace over the past fifty years that representation does not always lead to change in more fundamental ways. The challenge now is to enable the voices and views of disabled people not only to be heard, but also to be responded to in the way that work is organised. The key question is what might work defined by disabled people look like.

EIGHT - This will require a personalised system where choices are made by disabled people.

What is clear is that the boundaries between the current ideas of work and care would become much more blurred. The starting point would not be work so much as �independent living� or �livelihood� � in other words, fit-for-purpose support to disabled people; support which enables true choices to be made.

Direct Payments are a first step towards this and are welcomed by most disabled people. The next challenge here is to ensure that assessments for these payments are carried out on the basis of the social, rather than the medical, model of disability, in order that people really can be confident of being able to choose the right support. Every person�s access to support should be on the basis of their citizenship rather than their impairment.

The engine of difference: disability, diversity and innovation

NINE - Innovation is important as a response to complex problems or �messes� like those that needed to be overcome to achieve equality for disabled people.

We can distinguish between two types of problem: �difficulties� and �messes�. A difficulty is a problem where the tools for solving it are well understood, that�s not to say that it won�t take a great deal of time and expertise to solve the problem but it is agreed, that the problem is eventually soluble through expert judgement and hard work. When it comes to messes, there is certainly no agreement about how to go about solving the problem, indeed there is often no real agreement about what the problem is.

Nature, perhaps the most resilient system we know of, reacts to messes by innovating. It creates �variety�, a whole host of different solutions, the vast majority of which will fail but a few of which will succeed. It does this constantly, increasing its �adaptive potential�.

While some progress has been made to solving some messes in the disability field, it can seem overwhelming when we look at the overall rate of progress in developing solutions. In short we�re finding and creating messes faster than we know how to solve them. Thomas Homer Dixon calls this the �Ingenuity Gap�.

Capacity to innovate needs to be distributed. No matter what the centre says, specific environments and contexts will require new ways of doing things of their own.

TEN - �Diversity� in relation to the involvement of disabled people should not just be a box to be ticked by organisations, but instead holds huge potential as a new source of creativity and innovation.

There are real tangible benefits to be had from engaging disabled people in processes of innovation, both as users and as employees. This requires an openness to adapt organisations or services so that they better reflect the views, needs and aspirations of the diverse range of people they are seeking to engage.

Innovation helps us to understand �equality� as an adaptive challenge, rather than as a simple question of who has access to a pre-defined set of resources or power. The question stops being about how we can increase access to these resources, and more about how disabled people can be involved in shaping the system in the first place.

Good ideas can come from anywhere � but they are more likely to come from those, like disabled people, who have been less socialised into conventional models of behaviour or innovation.

ELEVEN - To unleash this creativity, disabled people need to move �upstream� within innovation processes.

Government, business and other organisations need to adopt a more inclusive model of innovation which recognises that problems of inequality are best approached through developing an embedded capacity to understand different needs and aspirations.

We need to move beyond separate �consultation� and innovation processes happening in parallel but separately and move to a more integrated approach to inclusive innovation where disabled people are involved at an early �upstream� stage.

TWELVE - The benefits of including disabled people in processes of innovation aren�t just for disabled people.

Evidence is emerging that involving disabled people in design and innovation processes has a wider benefit. Buildings designed for accessibility are more accessible to everyone, a phone easier to use for disabled people is just plain easier to use.

Don�t get angry, get networked: changing public attitudes to disability

THIRTEEN - Individual acts of discrimination against disabled people are often based on a level of ignorance on the part of non-disabled people. For this to change, a widespread change in public attitudes is needed.

The underlying problem with many efforts at public influencing is that they are still reliant on an outdated model of government�s relationship with citizens and consumers.

The expert-led, command-and-control approach to public influencing which came to the fore in wartime propaganda, and persisted in public awareness campaigns until the 1970s and 1980s, is no longer adequate for the complex, diverse and individualised society of today.

FOURTEEN - The most effective process of influencing public attitudes to disability in a modern complex society is by managing, cultivating and spreading change through networks.

Such thinking challenges the �billiard ball� conceptualisation of public opinion and behaviour, whereby citizens respond neatly to series of interventions, as a ball does to a well-placed cue shot.

The viral nature of behaviour change has been well described by Malcolm Gladwell who coined the term �tipping point� to describe the point at which an idea or practise is being transmitted to more than one person at each transaction. He uses it to explain how small, or even imperceptible alterations in the environment can initiate changes in behaviour.

FIFTEEN - These networks will work on a level above existing institutions but will be supported by the resources of those institutions.

Sociologist Manuel Castells proposes that, �networked organisations outcompete all other forms of organisation, particularly the vertical, rigid, command-and-control bureaucracies�. This is something that has been explored by a number of social movements in the past decade with some dramatic manifestations and results.

In essence, network campaigning allows a diverse grouping of organisations and individuals to participate through commitment to a shared purpose, while remaining autonomous individual agents. In this way it is possible to gain additional leverage over public attitudes through the �multiplier effect� of a coherent message and more efficient deployment of resources and effort, whilst maintaining the flexibility and energy which more bureaucratic forms of co-ordination tend to squander.

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