Enhancing access to employment for people with disabilities

• Client: The UK Work & Health Unit
• Location: UK

The challenge : Taking a whole-systems approach to enabling disabled people to find employment

According to the charity Scope, there are over ten million unemployed people living with some form of disability. Many of these struggle to find decent work and earn a living wage.

In response, the UK Work and Health Unit has been established as a cross-departmental unit charged with enabling one million disabled people to access work. This is ambitious, important, and at times controversial work.

As with all complex problems, the Unit cannot solve this on their own. Finding productive employment for one million people living with disability is a challenge that demands collective action between myriad groups, organisations and interests across sectors; employers, civil society, insurers, healthcare providers, families, education institutions and of course, individuals.

As such, the Unit finds itself having to take a whole-systems approach, one that equips them with new forms of collaboration with new networks of partners; one that allows them to see and confront ever-emerging and ever-evolving issues; one that enables them to test and learn as they forge new entry points and experiments, one that allows them to maintain a shared momentum and optimism in the face of difficult, messy and uncertain work.

Our work : Catalysing new thinking and strengthening relationships through Systemcraft

Wasafiri’s Systemcraft framework has been forged from our work on the front lines of complex problems as diverse as conflict to climate change. We designed it to to help stakeholders come together in generative dialogue to co-design practical interventions that tackle the underlying issues.

The Unit commissioned Wasafiri to develop their internal capacity to apply systems thinking approaches to their task. Drawing on Systemcraft, the team workshopped a number of live issues in a design process overseen by Wasafiri facilitators. A range of alternative approaches and new courses of action emerged from the process, serving as the basis for potential future prototypes for the team. In the words of one participant:

“I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of this training session (…) it will not only better inform how to tackle complex problems, but also how to build better working relationships, team building and wider problems within DWP. I would go as far to say this is the best course I have experienced during my time with the Department (and there have been many!). Well done!”