I am a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Specialist at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), leading Accessibility and Disability Inclusion across the organisation. My role focuses on embedding accessibility by design into everyday workplace practices, ensuring disabled and neurodivergent colleagues are able to fully participate, contribute and thrive. This spans organisational strategy, policy development, workplace adjustments, digital accessibility, leadership capability and learning, helping to create environments where inclusion becomes part of how we work rather than a standalone initiative.
My professional background spans more than 25 years in learning, leadership development and organisational capability. Throughout my career I have been passionate about helping individuals, teams and organisations reach their potential through practical, evidence based learning. That experience has shaped my belief that lasting inclusion is achieved not by asking people to adapt to existing systems, but by designing workplaces that recognise and respond to different ways people think, communicate and contribute.
While leading the FCA’s accessibility and disability agenda, I recognised a recurring challenge. Many leaders genuinely wanted to create inclusive workplaces but struggled to understand the hidden barriers experienced by neurodivergent colleagues during everyday meetings. Traditional awareness training increased knowledge but often failed to create the depth of understanding needed to influence day to day leadership behaviours. I wanted to explore whether immersive technology could create a different kind of learning experience, one that moved beyond awareness and enabled people to experience how workplace design can either create or remove barriers to participation.
This led to a collaborative partnership with Charlie Pearmund and the team at Kiin. Together we combined complementary expertise to create a bespoke immersive learning experience. The FCA contributed workplace accessibility, neuroinclusion, behavioural learning design and organisational context, while Charlie and the Kiin team brought specialist expertise in immersive virtual reality, embodiment, psychology, neuroscience, immersive learning design and technical development. Through an iterative co-creation process we challenged assumptions, refined the participant experience, strengthened psychological safeguards and developed a learning intervention that was both technically innovative and grounded in practical workplace application.
Within the project I led the workplace challenge definition, learning objectives, behavioural learning design, co-design, pilot testing, facilitator design, structured reflection and evaluation. One principle remained constant throughout: the technology should never become the focus. Instead, every design decision needed to help participants recognise barriers they may unintentionally create and equip them with practical actions they could immediately apply within their own teams.
On a personal level, this work is deeply meaningful to me. I am dyslexic and received an ADHD diagnosis in midlife, giving me first hand insight into many of the hidden barriers that neurodivergent people can encounter. Throughout my education and professional career I have often invested significantly more cognitive effort than others, working longer hours to process information, organise my thinking and demonstrate my capability. Those experiences have strengthened my resilience, but they have also reinforced how easily workplace systems and everyday practices can unintentionally create barriers to participation.
They have also fuelled my determination to help create workplaces where people do not have to work harder simply because the environment has not been designed with different ways of thinking in mind. Whilst this project focused on neuroinclusion, my ambition extends more broadly to improving understanding of the cognitive impact experienced by people with a wide range of disabilities and long term conditions. By helping leaders experience the workplace from a different perspective, we can encourage greater empathy, remove unnecessary barriers and create more inclusive ways of working that enable everyone to contribute, perform and thrive.
I am proud that this initiative demonstrates what can be achieved through genuine collaboration. By combining the FCA’s expertise in accessibility and organisational change with Kiin’s expertise in immersive technology and experience design, we created more than a VR module. We created a practical learning experience that helps leaders rethink everyday workplace behaviours and demonstrates how technology, when used with purpose, can drive meaningful and lasting inclusion.
