How a systems-thinking approach embedded inclusion into core business operations, driving a cultural shift from reactive compliance to proactive design.
Client details are private under an NDA.
Duration: 9+ Months
Team Structure: Cross-functional coalition (Design, Engineering,
Delivery, Legal, Procurement, Regulatory) integrated with global business units.
Strategy & Vision
Systems Thinking
Executive Communication & Influence
A global organization was struggling with a fragmented and inconsistent approach to digital accessibility. This challenge was magnified by its operational footprint across diverse regions, including EMEA, APAC, LATAM, and NAMER, each with its own unique and evolving accessibility laws. This complex legal landscape made a unified, compliant approach nearly impossible to manage.
Initial evangelism efforts, including partnering with the company's Disability Network to run webinars, struggled to gain traction. Accessibility was still seen as an optional, end-of-pipe compliance check, creating significant and unpredictable legal and reputational risk across multiple jurisdictions.
An initial evangelism-first approach, focused on education, failed to gain traction against delivery pressure. Accessibility was still seen as an optional, end-of-pipe compliance check.
The critical pivot was to stop advocating and start integrating. We built a coalition with Legal, Regulatory, and Procurement, reframing the conversation from ethics to their goals: risk mitigation and operational predictability.
With the coalition's backing, we embedded accessibility into core systems. It became a contractual requirement in all vendor SOWs and a non-negotiable checkpoint in the official approval pipeline.
With the governance engine built, we deployed Power BI dashboards to all divisions for KPI tracking. A weekly, company-wide blog translated legal risks into tangible business realities, solidifying the cultural shift.
The initial strategy centered on evangelism—educating teams on technical specifics, such as the shift-left approach or how to work with VPATs. However, this "hearts and minds" approach hit a wall against delivery pressure and regional complexity.
The critical leadership pivot was recognizing that education alone was failing. A strategic decision was made to shift the conversation away from advocacy and toward operational integration. This required months of negotiation to build a powerful coalition with key departments, especially Legal and Regulatory, who were essential for navigating the complex web of international regulations, and Procurement. The goal was to embed a flexible yet consistent accessibility framework into the core systems that governed the entire organization.
The strategy was to stop evangelizing and start operationalizing. Using systems thinking, the interdependencies between departments were mapped to identify the most powerful leverage points for change: procurement and legal.
The solution was a governance-first approach that created a global standard while allowing for local legal adherence.
| Stakeholder Department | Core Business Goal | System-Level Solution |
|---|---|---|
| Procurement & Legal | Mitigate Global Risk & Ensure Vendor Quality | Made accessibility a contractual requirement in all vendor Statements of Work (SOWs), adaptable to regional laws. |
| Delivery & Product Teams | Increase Predictability & Reduce Rework | Integrated VPAT reviews as a non-negotiable checkpoint in the official approval pipeline. |
| Global Business Units | Scale Knowledge & Empower Teams | Deployed Power BI dashboards to all divisions, tracking accessibility KPIs for their digital properties, and provided a centralized SharePoint knowledge hub for support. |
Success demanded a blend of top-down governance and bottom-up cultural engagement, designed to feel like an evolution of existing workflows rather than a new layer of bureaucracy.
The program was designed to be a seamless extension of existing approval and procurement pipelines, not a new layer of bureaucracy.
The program included actively managing relationships with accessibility vendors to equip teams with best-in-class tools for testing and validation, ensuring they had the resources needed to meet the new standards.
A critical function of this role was to act as a final quality gate. All new release projects were reviewed to ensure they achieved the highest possible accessibility scores before launch, making the new standards enforceable and non-negotiable.
The Power BI dashboards made accessibility progress visible and measurable across all divisions, transforming it from an abstract requirement into a concrete, trackable business metric.
A weekly, company-wide blog was launched to maintain momentum. It featured best practices, analysis of current accessibility lawsuits, and interviews with legal experts, translating abstract legal risks into tangible business realities.
The integrated program created a scalable, global standard for accessibility that successfully navigated a complex international regulatory environment. The initiative drove an 18% reduction in accessibility defects in six months and accelerated delivery by preventing late-stage issues. The project's lasting impact, however, was the cultural change it created. The governance-first approach, supported by data and consistent communication, shifted the organizational mindset from reactive compliance to proactive inclusion.
This initiative revealed that for large-scale cultural change, top-down evangelism is ineffective without systemic, operational enforcement. True, lasting change comes not from persuading individuals, but from fundamentally redesigning the systems in which they operate. It reinforced the belief that the most powerful leadership tool is the ability to build coalitions and embed new behaviors into the core workflows of the business.
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