'Dialogue in the Dark' seminars designed to help businesses deal with people with disabilities, writes AMANDA PHELAN
A SMALL group of people sit hunched in concentration at a skills seminar in a Ballsbridge hotel. The woman on the right with a throaty voice grabs my knee. Her touch is welcome.
She’s not alone in seeking human comfort – most of the people attending this conference are gripping each other for reassurance just moments after being introduced.
Seminars on leadership skills, group dynamics and how to act in crisis are standard events for business people. But there’s a key difference with this one . . . it’s being held in total darkness. Called “Dialogue in the Dark”, the programme aims to teach people what it’s like to live with a disability. The participants are issued with white canes, and helped to move around by blind guides.
The experience of performing simple group tasks, such as assembling a rainbow using jigsaw-style pieces, is a confronting and humbling role reversal that some find overwhelming. The organisers say one senior Chinese banking executive fled a seminar screaming.
“I asked her what could be tougher than trading in millions of dollars in commodities a day? Surely staying in a darkened room couldn’t be so unbearable,” says the man who came up with the idea for the “Dialogue in the Dark” seminars, Andreas Heinecke.
The workshops are run in 22 countries worldwide, including at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last year, and aim to break the stereotypes about disability.
Organisers say the workshops’ dynamics help breach cultural boundaries, such as in Japan, where close personal contact is a social taboo.
They also provide practical business training on topics such as how to work together in a crisis, says Mr Heinecke.
The exercise in the dark is supposed to reveal things about our individual styles. After I crack jokes and fail to complete my rainbow, the organisers conclude I needed to work on my leadership skills and that I don’t function like a senior business type like, for example, a recent merchant banking group (I secretly take this as a compliment).
First established 20 years ago, the sensory deprivation exercise is now a global franchise, and Mr Heinecke, from Germany, is paid to run the seminars. This week the team was in Ireland for the first time at the invitation of Kanchi, an Irish organisation set up to foster a better relationship between people with disabilities and the general public.
Kanchi was founded by Dubliner Caroline Casey, a visually-impaired woman who named the organisation in honour of the elephant on which she undertook a 1,000 kilometre trek across southern India to shake up the stereotypes of what a disabled person could achieve.
Kanchi hopes the “Dialogue in the Dark” workshops will give business people a better insight into the daily experiences of those without the use of faculties the rest of us take for granted.
“It’s a chance to get a rare insight into the challenges faced by people who have a disability,” says Kanchi managing director Gabrielle Murphy.
To get an idea of what the seminar is like, just shut your eyes. Now stand up and try to move around or pick up something. It’s almost impossible to go more than a minute or two without opening your eyes again.
“It’s pretty intense, but it’s an exceptional experience and it makes you think outside the box,” says Kieran McDermott, who runs the McDonalds franchise in Shannon and Ennis. “It gives you an amazing snapshot into the life of someone with a disability, and you feel quite vulnerable.”
Mr McDermott was invited to take part in the seminar after he won an award for his role in employing people with disabilities in a small company.
“We have a drive-in, and I couldn’t see why we shouldn’t employ somebody in a wheelchair to take orders,” he says.
Although he had to buy a €6,000 wheelchair to fulfil his mission, Mr McDermott (44) says it’s been well worth it. “The chair is used through different shifts,” he says. “About 10 per cent of our staff have a disability, and there’s no turnover; they don’t leave because they really want the job.
“It’s important for employers to look beyond the disability, to look at what people can do, rather than what they can’t.”
Mr McDermott expanded on his idea by making his McDonalds branches accessible to people with a range of disabilities – for example, there are specially-designed tills for the hearing-impaired.
And his equality programme had an unexpected payoff – more customers. “Now we get so much custom from wheelchair and other organisations we’re usually packed with up to 70 people coming through at a time,” he says.
In the United States, disabled people control aggregate annual income of $1 trillion. “That’s a lot of buying clout,” says Mr McDermott.
There are more than 400,000 people with disabilities in Ireland, about 11 per cent of the population. The dialogue seminars aim to make their life a little easier and the rest of us a bit more understanding.
If you doubt it’s necessary, just try closing your eyes and walking around, and see how far you get.
