This closes out the four-part series on FY 26-27 inclusion planning. If you’ve been following along, you don’t need a recap. If this is the first piece you’ve landed on, here’s what you need to know: the last month has made one argument, in three parts. This is where it comes together.
Part one measured. It gave you a way to check where your organisation actually stands — not where the last DIAP said you’d be by now, but what’s true today.
Part two escalated. It gave your board, or whoever signs off on your FY 26-27 inclusion plan, a set of questions to ask before they approve it — because a plan that doesn’t answer those questions isn’t a commitment; it’s a document.
Part three named the change. It said, plainly, that repeating last year’s approach and expecting a different result isn’t optimism. It’s the definition of the pattern most organisations are stuck in.
None of those are separate ideas. They’re a sequence.
The sequence, not the steps
Most organisations treat inclusion planning as three separate activities happening in three separate rooms: someone measures (usually a practitioner, alone, with a spreadsheet); someone reports up (usually compressed into a single slide by the time it reaches the board); and someone decides what changes (usually nobody, because by the time the report lands, the planning cycle has already started again).
Treated this way, each step is honest work done in isolation — and the whole thing still fails. The measurement doesn’t reach the people who can act on it. The escalation doesn’t provide sufficient evidence to compel a real decision. The change never gets resourced, because nobody upstream ever had to answer for its absence.
The fix isn’t doing any one of these three things harder. It’s connecting them, so that what you measure is what gets escalated, and what gets escalated is what actually changes the plan — not just the language describing it.
What that looks like in practice
If you’ve done the diagnostic from part one and you know your numbers, the next question isn’t “what do we do differently this year.” It’s “who above me has to answer for these numbers before FY 26-27 is signed off.” If nobody does, you don’t have a measurement problem. You have a placement problem — the same one part three named.
If your board has started asking the right questions but nothing changes as a result, that’s not a governance failure at the board level. It’s a sign the answers they’re getting still aren’t specific enough to force a decision — vague enough to be nodded through, not concrete enough to be actionable.
And if you already know exactly what needs to change — more budget, a different reporting line, real authority instead of an advisory committee — but it hasn’t happened, the honest question is whether anyone with the power to change it has actually been asked to, in writing, with a number attached.
That’s the whole series in one test: can you point to the person, the number, and the decision that connects them? If you can answer all three, FY 26-27 has a real chance of being different. If you can only answer one or two, you know exactly which link in the chain to fix first.
Where you’re starting from
Most organisations reading this sit in one of three places:
You haven’t measured yet. You have a sense that things aren’t where they should be, but nothing concrete to put in front of anyone. Start there — you can’t escalate or change what you haven’t named.
You’ve measured, but it hasn’t moved anyone with authority. You know your numbers. You’ve maybe even said them out loud in the right room. But the plan for FY 26-27 looks a lot like the plan for FY 25-26. That’s a translation problem — the evidence exists, but it isn’t reaching a decision.
You know what has to change, but it hasn’t been resourced. You’ve done the diagnostic and the escalation. What’s missing is the actual decision — budget, authority, or both — landing on someone’s desk with a deadline attached.
Each of those is a different conversation, not a different problem. And each is one I have regularly worked with organisations at exactly this point in their planning cycle.
Work With Me
If you’re not sure which of the three positions above you’re in, that’s usually the first thing worth working out — a quick conversation is often enough to place it. Here’s how I can help, depending on where you land:
- DIAP development and review
- Governance and committee reviews
- Co-design and stakeholder engagement
- Disability Inclusion Outcomes Framework™
- The Inclusion Lens
📅 Book a free intro conversation 📋 Workplace Disability Inclusion Profile (free resource) 🧭 Framework Strategy Call
Making Inclusion Work is written by Ainslee Hooper, disability inclusion consultant and applied anthropologist.
