How lived experience can change policy

Last week, I attended the first parliamentary reception for Trans+ History Week, supporting Marty Davies, one of The Unmistakables' Culture Makers.

One of the things that struck me most about the evening was how quickly the conversation moved beyond policy.

Listening to people share their experiences, I found myself thinking about organisational lag. At The Unmistakables, we define organisational lag as the gap between how leaders believe the world works and how people actually experience it. It is a challenge that shows up everywhere. In government. In business. In workplaces. In any environment where decisions are made without enough proximity to the people who will ultimately live with the consequences.

The challenge is not that organisations lack data. Most are drowning in it. Research reports, dashboards, customer feedback, engagement surveys and performance metrics are more accessible than ever before. Yet despite all this information, organisations still find themselves caught off guard by changing expectations, shifting behaviours and growing disconnects between what they intend and how they are perceived.

The longer I do this work, the more convinced I become that information is rarely the problem. More often, it is proximity.

Communities experience change first. Culture reflects it second. Institutions tend to recognise it last. By the time a shift appears in a report, it has often been visible in people's lives for months or even years. By the time a conversation reaches a boardroom, it has usually been happening around dinner tables, in group chats, on social platforms and within communities for some time.

Perhaps that is why I kept returning to the idea of organisational lag throughout the evening.

As I listened throughout the evening, I was struck by how many conversations started in different places but arrived at a similar conclusion. People were not asking to be spoken for. They were asking to be heard. There is a difference. One positions people as subjects of a conversation. The other recognises them as contributors to it.

People whose lives are often the subject of policy conversations were not simply being discussed. They were helping shape the conversation itself.

That may sound obvious, but it is surprisingly rare.

Too often, lived experience enters the process once decisions have already begun to take shape. A consultation is held. A listening exercise takes place. Assumptions that have largely been formed elsewhere are tested and refined. The intention is usually good, but the sequence is revealing. People are invited into the conversation once it is already underway rather than at the point where the conversation is being shaped.

The evening felt different because lived experience was not being treated as something that needed to be validated or accommodated. It was being recognised as a source of insight.

There is a tendency in professional environments to separate expertise and lived experience, as though one belongs to the world of evidence and the other belongs to the world of personal opinion. I have never been convinced the distinction is that clear.

Lived experience may not tell us everything, but it often tells us something important. It tells us where policies meet reality. It reveals how decisions are experienced by the people they affect and often exposes the gap between intention and impact long before that gap appears in a report, a complaint or a reputational challenge.

The strongest decisions are rarely built on expertise alone. They emerge when expertise and experience sit alongside one another. Data can help us understand what is happening and research can help us identify patterns, but lived experience adds context, nuance and perspective. It helps us understand why people respond the way they do and what might be missing from our interpretation of the evidence in front of us.

This matters because relevance is ultimately a question of understanding.

Organisations stay relevant when they understand the people who determine their future. Their customers. Their employees. Their communities. Their stakeholders. When that understanding weakens, organisational lag grows. Internal conversations become increasingly disconnected from external realities, assumptions begin to replace insight and strategies become optimised for the world as it was rather than the world as it is becoming.

Most growth challenges are relevance challenges in disguise.

The organisations that struggle to attract talent, retain trust or identify new opportunities are often not suffering from a lack of capability. More often, they have lost touch with the people they need to understand. The distance between decision-makers and lived reality has grown too wide.

This is why we often say that inclusion creates relevance.

At its best, inclusion helps organisations understand people more accurately. It broadens perspective, challenges assumptions and reduces the distance between internal decision-making and external reality. The result is not simply better representation. It is better understanding. And better understanding tends to lead to better decisions.

Last week's reception was a reminder that lived experience has the power to do something remarkably important. It brings decision-makers closer to reality.

In a world where expectations, behaviours and communities are changing faster than ever, that proximity is not simply valuable. It is one of the most important forms of organisational intelligence available to us.

Because the organisations that grow are rarely the ones with the most information. They are the ones that stay closest to the people shaping what comes next.