Inclusion Was Never Meant to Hurt This Much!
- Georgina Brown (hershe)
- Jul 10
- 5 min read
For nearly three decades, I’ve lived and breathed inclusion.
Training. Leading. Auditing. Coaching.
Persuading, pleading, and PowerPointing.
Writing policies. Running workshops. Creating Campaigns.
Organising events. Championing dedicated Days and Months.
Creating strategies, action plans and dashboards.
Sitting in rooms thick with resistance, courage, and the occasional biscuit-based bribe.
I’ve done this work with my whole heart.
And I know many of you will have too.
But still... something’s not quite landing.
Culture change keeps stalling.
Backlash is growing louder.
Brilliant EDI leads are burning out.
And the work that began as a moral compass now feels like a minefield.
So, after learning to sit with my own frustrations, the quiet tears, the rage at box-ticking exercises disguised as transformation, I started asking myself new questions.
Not better questions. Just… different ones. Wider. Softer. Seen through a new lens.
That lens didn’t come from a book or a webinar, it came from my own biology, rewired, unexpectedly, by the messy cocktail of menopause and complex grief.
I didn’t choose the change. I didn’t consciously will it.
My brain changed without asking me first.
And that, oddly enough, became the moment I began to see everything else differently.
One realisation kept rising to the surface:
What if we flipped the frame entirely? What if the problem isn’t the individuals fragility, resistance, or lack of will… but the biology of the brain itself, and how it processes change, threat, and difference?
We talk about what the brain does in unconscious bias training.
But rarely work with how its' biology, hormones, neural loops, nervous system signals, etc. shapes everything we do, feel, avoid, and defend.
This got me thinking, reading, learning, researching... and yes signing up for a PhD!
It was all about curiosity.
Compassion.
And possibility.
Neuroscience doesn’t just give us a new tool.
It gives us a new lens.
One that shows us how to build inclusion that actually works, not just in policy or theory, but in the body, in the brain, and in real life, through influencing our biology.
And that lens could be the missing link that finally brings the impact we’ve been chasing for decades:
Less friction. More flow. And change that actually sticks.
This is Not Another Gimmick or Framework.
This is a Nervous System Shift.
We’ve tried to tackle bias, belonging and behaviour from the outside in, with tools like targets, toolkits, and training.
But the brain doesn’t change because of a PDF, being told to or after seeing data. It changes because of:
Repetition
Safety
Emotion
Social cues
Story
Feedback loops
Time
And it resists change when it feels:
Shamed
Judged
Unsafe
Overwhelmed
Overcorrected
Watched
Sound familiar?
Neuroscience Isn’t Soft. It’s Radical.
Here’s where the shift begins.
When we understand that:
The amygdala (threat brain) activates in 0.07 seconds, before conscious thought.
Bias lives in pattern recognition, not in belief.
The prefrontal cortex, responsible for empathy, ethical reasoning, and perspective-taking, goes offline when the nervous system senses social threat.
Learning requires the neurochemistry of safety: oxytocin, dopamine, and emotional regulation.
Culture is built in mirror neurons, not mission statements.
…it changes everything.
We stop seeing resistance as ignorance or fragility, and start seeing it as neurological overload.
We stop over-investing in awareness, and start investing in habitual rewiring.
We stop expecting policy to carry the weight of change, and start working with the human systems underneath it.
Let’s Talk About the Traps We’ve All Fallen Into
We’ve done this work with the best intentions, and still, we’ve accidentally built some brain-unfriendly systems. For example:
The Awareness Trap
We told people that “awareness is the first step.”
But we stopped there. We may have changed a few policies and process but we forgot about the biology.
Without daily repetition + emotion + action, awareness stays in System 2 (slow, reflective thought).
Real change happens when we rewire System 1, the automatic, pattern-driven part of the brain that runs the show.
Awareness isn’t enough. Rewiring is everything
The Policy-Practice Gap
We built elegant, equitable frameworks. But beneath the surface, organisational culture was still running on threat cues, coded language, and centuries of patterning.
Culture isn’t written in a strategy. It’s lived in the limbic system.
The Metrics Without Meaning Problem
We counted things because they were measurable. We pushed quotas, targets, and scorecards. But without cultural and neurological buy-in, this triggers reactivity, not reflection.
Diversity without emotional safety = cortisol, not creativity.
Calling In, Still in a Threat State
Even our evolved, gentle, relational approaches (like “calling in”) can backfire when someone’s neurobiology is already defensive.
No matter how beautifully we frame it, if someone’s body is in a threat loop, their ability to change, hear or grow is zero.
It’s not just what we say. It’s what the nervous system hears.
The Neuroscience of Inclusion could be the Evolution We’ve Been Waiting For
Neuroscience doesn’t replace our knowledge.
It enhances it.
It explains why what we’ve been doing sometimes works brilliantly, and sometimes backfires.
It gives us tools to make change that is embedded, embodied, and biologically possible.
It helps us:
Design learning that sticks
Build cultures that don’t just feel “diverse” but feel safe
Coach leaders through regulation, not just responsibility
Create interventions that engage neuroplasticity, not just compliance
Move from “fixing people” to freeing systems from our autopilots
This is not about being kinder.
It's about being smarter, with the science to back us up.
To Every EDI Practitioner Reading This
This is not a critique
It's a curtain lift
It's a shared breath
It's a whispered: “I think we were working without the full map.”
We’ve done astonishing things without neuroscience.
Imagine what happens when we bring it in.
Not to impress. But to build braver, deeper, more humane inclusion, from the neurons up.
TL;DR
EDI work is powerful, but often runs up against the brain’s threat systems
Neuroscience helps us understand why change stalls, backfires, or burns people out
Inclusion that sticks requires safety, habit, emotion and repetition, not just awareness and policy
The Neuro-Inclusive Maturity Model (NIMM) offers a scaffold to evolve this work
This is not a criticism of the past, it’s a bold, hopeful invitation to the future.
Ready to evolve inclusion from the inside out?
→ Find out more about NIMM (the Neuroinclusive Maturity Model)
→ Join the BARDO NIMM Team BARDO Academy Coaching Qualification
→ Book a chat with us about rewiring your leadership, learning or culture programme
Let’s stop working against the brain.
And start building inclusion that actually sticks.
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