Why Access Fails in Organizations—and How to Design Systems That Work

Hardly anyone really intends to fail at access. At the very least, organizations that I know, don’t. They do what they think will work: new policies, statements, committees, and training. They try to address compliance and they throw good intentions behind their work. However, access– which often just feels like a basic building block towards belonging– still fails or feels like a slog. People start to take the lack of progress or any mistakes as personal failures, and then they do what almost anyone would– they give up on access (whatever that means to them), or at least, they dread it.

When access fails consistently or is spotty and unreliable, I don’t see it as an individual problem or threat. I see it as a systemic issue.

The Core Mistake: Treating Access as an Add-On

In most organizations, access lives downstream. It is something that is done later in a process or it is owned by a certain group of people, such as HR, Facilities, or Legal. Worse yet, it might live with just one person– the perennial “access champion.”

Access rolled out this way is self-defeating because it shows up after an organization has set strategy, timelines, and power. It can’t be baked in if it’s something that is considered later and then has to work around everything else. That’s how we get the many stories about individual heroes– whether it’s disabled people or other marginalized folks– working around what the system has set, or it’s internal actors realizing they’ve made a mistake and are now building a mental or physical ramp in whatever time they have and usually outside their job duties.

When we do access this way, it becomes fragile and unpredictable. It can leave as easily as the customer with a disability, the employee who is an ally, or the specialized role that we once funded and now cannot. That’s not a sustainable approach.

Access Is Not a Feature. It’s Architecture.

Access was never supposed to be the thing to do after the policy was made, after the door was installed, or after the website was created. It was never a standalone service or fix. It should be the structure through which your organization plans and operates.

Just like budgeting, governance, or risk management, access shapes:

who participates
how decisions get made
what tradeoffs are acceptable
whose time, energy, minds, and bodies are protected and honored

Without making access the architecture, we will never get to a place where it feels like something required, consistent, and well-resourced. Honestly, it won’t ever feel doable– and that’s where most of us are right now– quietly dreading what happens if someone realizes that it was never part of the discussion and we’re just waiting for someone to realize we don’t even know how we would fix it.

Why Traditional Approaches Keep Missing the Mark

As an attorney by training, I often think about compliance. That’s what three years of law school and twenty or more years in a profession will do to someone. However, compliance never made anyone’s heart sing. What we’ve seen is a failure of equity and access initiatives because they are focused on compliance behaviors instead of design conditions.

Common traps include:

One-time trainings without structural follow-through
Accessibility audits with no authority to change decision-making
Inclusion goals that aren’t tied to supports, accountability, or values
Policies that assume everyone starts from the same baseline and we operate in systems that will make the exception when it’s required

These approaches ask people to try harder inside systems that were never built for them– whether they built the system or are just now trying to navigate the gauntlet. Compliance is never transformational. It is a way of managing risks and limiting friction.

A Different Frame: Designing for Access Upstream

At Aligna, I work with organizations to reframe access as a design problem.

Instead of asking:

“How do we accommodate people when issues arise?”

We ask:

“What conditions would make access the default outcome?”

For me, that means looking at:

Power: Who has it? Who doesn’t? How is it exercised?
Time: Who pays the cost of urgency? Who absorbs delays? What is the context of the respective players when it comes to demands on their time and pacing?
Information: Who understands how decisions are made?
Flexibility: Where do systems allow or even encourage variation— and where do they punish it?
Care: What assumptions are baked in about capacity, independence, availability, and resilience?

I brought this approach to creating The Access Wheel. The Access Wheel is a systems-based framework rooted in disability wisdom and lived experience to examine and improve decision-making that extends far beyond whether or how we grant a reasonable accommodation. By its very nature, disability is a problem-solving mindset to survive. We are often not presented with the opportunity to redesign environments, norms, and expectations, but it’s incredibly freeing and important far beyond my community when we get to do it.

The Access Wheel goes beyond individual inquiries and fixes attached to a person to build a better baseline by asking:

What is the system doing?
What is it rewarding?
What is the system making costly or even impossible?
And who is paying the price and how?

What Changes When You Design for Access

I’m not an architect. I’m a lawyer and consultant, but I view access as the structure and architecture of how we relate to one another, make better decisions, and move through conflict. Why access? Isn’t that too specific? Access is simply a proxy for respect for variation of needs and experiences. When we view it that way, with disability as a prime example of human variation, we can use access-as-architecture to develop organizations and communities where:

1. Decisions Improve

More perspectives surface earlier. Risks and disconnects are identified before they become crises. Strategies reflect reality, not just hopes and avoidance or best practices that were for another context.

2. Participation Becomes Real

People don’t have to self-advocate just to be included. The system already anticipates difference and welcomes it.

3. Burnout Drops

When access is shared work instead of often unseen labor carried by a few people, or not really at all, we see organizations better able to retain talent and build trust.

4. Equity Moves from Values to Practice

Access stops being something you say and becomes something you do, consistently. That kind of consistency becomes something that others can do, too, because they know it is important to the group and they have other people in various stages of learning that can become resources.

Designing Systems That Actually Work

Designing for access isn’t about waiting until the perfect moment, full funding, or a checklist of all the problems. It is about embracing better questions at the right times– which can often feel like the most stressful and messy periods internally.

Here are some questions to ask yourself about your organization right now, whether you consider yourself to be a leader or you feel tossed around a bit by dynamics that feel out of your control:

Are our timelines designed around human capacity or institutional convenience (or even reactive events)?
Do our policies assume sameness, or do they plan for variability?
Who or what is expected to adapt—the person, or the system?
Where are decisions made without feedback loops?
What happens when someone can’t “make it work?”

Access Is a Strategy Choice

We can act as if access is something that requires a full-blown strategy with a bench of consultants. It’s something we will get to when we have “critical mass” or there’s a greater risk– or bigger budget or more community feedback. There are so many things we can tell ourselves about access and what they often have in common is denialism.

Your organization already has an access strategy. Wait, you can’t find it on the shared drive? It’s often implicit, inequitable, and unquantifiable. It can show up as individual action or inaction. It can be a commitment to nondiscrimination or a process that has not been examined since 1999. The real question is what kind of strategy you are building. Intentional and designed or accidental and reactive? Centralized and coordinated or fragmented and technical-dependent? Supported and uplifted or precarious and marginalized? Creative continuous improvement or ongoing barrier removal as demanded?

Disability is one of the best teachers of the lesson that designing systems is ongoing, humbling work, not the pursuit of perfection. There is no “normal” user, employee, or community member. Even if we think we have identified the “average experience,” we are not tackling where things break or cause the greatest harm. Access needs to be a shared responsibility and core skill. We have treated access as a problem to solve later instead of the framework for building processes, policies, experiences, and yes, ramps. Access, however, is about creating structures that can be flexible and sustain us.