Making Inclusion Work · Series · Part 3 of 4: Making FY 26-27 Different
At the start of this series, I asked what three numbers your DIAP should have been able to produce for FY 25-26. Last week, the question moved to boards: what should they have asked before signing off on this year’s plan?
Both pieces assumed something worth stating outright now: most organisations are about to plan FY 26-27 the same way they planned FY 25-26.
Same template. Same consultation process. Same actions, renamed slightly. Same review date, twelve months out, with no checkpoint in between.
And most will get the same result.
Planning isn’t the problem
Every organisation I’ve worked with plans. Plans get written, workshopped, approved, and published. The planning step is rarely where things go wrong.
Where it goes wrong is in the eleven months between publishing the plan and reviewing it. That’s where a plan either becomes something a governance structure carries, or something one motivated person carries until they leave, get busy, or move on.
If FY 25-26 didn’t move the needle, the honest question isn’t “was the plan good enough.” It’s “what was actually different about how it was resourced, owned, and tracked, compared to the year before.”
For most organisations, nothing was different. Which is exactly why the result wasn’t different either.
I see this pattern constantly. An organisation runs a genuinely good consultation process, produces a thoughtful plan, gets sign-off, and then the plan sits. Not because anyone abandoned it — usually because the person who championed it through consultation moves onto the next priority, and nobody else was ever given the job of carrying it forward. Eleven months later, someone asks, “How did we go with the DIAP this year?” and the honest answer is nobody quite knows, because nobody was ever specifically responsible for knowing.
That’s not a planning failure. The plan was fine. It’s a structural failure — the thing that was supposed to hold the plan in place after the workshop ended was never built.
The specific things that have to change
Not vague commitments. Three concrete shifts, each one testable, each one something you can check for right now.
A named owner, not a named champion. A champion is a person who cares. Champions are genuinely valuable — they’re often the reason a plan gets written at all. But a champion’s commitment lives in their own motivation, which means it leaves when they do, or when their attention shifts to whatever’s most urgent that quarter. An owner is different: it’s a role with the plan written into the position description, into performance objectives, and into handover notes for whoever takes the role next. The test is simple. If the person currently driving your DIAP left tomorrow, would the plan still have someone assigned to pick it up? If the answer is no, you have a champion, not an owner — and champions are a fragile foundation for a multi-year strategy.
A checkpoint before the annual review. If the only time anyone looks at the plan is the twelve-month mark, you find out it didn’t work, a year too late to do anything meaningful about it. A quarterly check-in doesn’t need to be elaborate — even a short, structured half hour against the plan’s own actions is enough to catch drift while there’s still time to correct it. Organisations that only review annually tend to discover, at review time, that half the actions quietly stalled around month four, and nobody noticed until the deadline arrived. A checkpoint isn’t extra bureaucracy. It’s the difference between catching a problem in month four and discovering it, unfixable, in month twelve.
A number that isn’t activity. “We ran three training sessions” is an activity. “Staff-reported psychological safety moved from X to Y” is the outcome. Activity numbers are easy to produce and feel like progress, which is exactly why organisations default to them — but they don’t tell you whether anything actually changed for the people the plan was meant to help. If FY 26-27’s plan can’t name at least one outcome measure alongside its activities, it’s structurally set up to repeat FY 25-26 regardless of how much effort goes in, because there’s no way to know, at any point in the year, whether the effort is working.
Who needs to do what
If you hold budget or sign-off authority, the test is whether you can name the owner, the checkpoint date, and the outcome measure for your own plan right now, without checking a document. If you can’t, that’s not a personal criticism — it’s the diagnostic doing its job. Fix those three things before the plan is finalised for FY 26-27, not after it’s already been signed off and the year is underway. It’s far easier to build a checkpoint into a plan at the design stage than to retrofit one in month six once momentum has already stalled.
If you’re the practitioner without that authority, your leverage is naming the pattern, not carrying it alone. You can’t unilaterally create a checkpoint or force an outcome measure into a board paper — that’s not within your authority, and trying to force it usually just adds to your own workload without changing the structure. What you can do is bring the same three questions to whoever holds sign-off authority, framed plainly: who owns this next year, when’s the first checkpoint, and what outcome number will tell us it’s working. Let those in authority decide what to do with that information. Your job is to make the gap visible, not to personally compensate for it by working harder inside the same unchanged structure.
A live example, three weeks old
Disability Pride Month just closed. If your organisation marked it, it’s worth asking honestly what actually happened. A post. Maybe an internal email. Perhaps an event or a panel.
None of that is wrong to do. But notice what kind of number it produces: an activity number. A post went out. An event was held. What it doesn’t tell you is whether anything changed for a disabled staff member’s actual working conditions, whether the visibility translated into anyone reviewing a policy, or whether the goodwill generated in July survives past August.
This is the exact pattern from Part 1, playing out in miniature and in real time. A month of visible activity is not the same as a measurable outcome, and the gap between the two is precisely where FY 26-27 planning needs to land differently than FY 25-26 did. If Pride Month produced a post and nothing else changed structurally, that’s not a failure of the month — it’s the same structural gap this whole series has been naming, showing up on a smaller, faster timescale you can actually observe before the year is out.
What this isn’t
This isn’t a claim that effort doesn’t matter, or that the people running these plans aren’t trying. Almost everyone I work with is trying hard, often without enough time, budget, or organisational backing — and it would be both unfair and inaccurate to suggest otherwise.
It’s a claim that effort within an unchanged structure produces the same result as last year, no matter how much harder people try. A plan carried entirely by one person’s goodwill will produce roughly the same outcome whether that person works reasonably hard or exhaustingly hard, because the structural gap — no owner beyond them, no checkpoint, no outcome measure — doesn’t close just because someone tries harder against it. Structural problems don’t respond to individual effort. They respond to structural changes.
Next week, the final piece in this series pulls Parts 1 through 3 together into a single, practical question worth asking before you finalise anything for FY 26-27.
Over to you
Try the test from earlier in this piece, right now, before you keep scrolling: name your DIAP’s owner, its next checkpoint date, and one outcome measure it’s tracking. If any of the three came up blank, that’s worth sitting with for a minute before FY 26-27 planning locks in.
Reply or comment and let me know which one was hardest to answer — I read every response, and it usually tells me more about where an organisation actually is than the plan document does.
Work With Me
If you already know your organisation can’t pass the three-numbers test from Part 1 or the board-accountability questions from Part 2, that’s usually the moment to bring in outside support rather than trying to solve it alone within the same structure that created the gap. My free Workplace Disability Inclusion Assessment is a good starting point, or book a time to talk it through directly.
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