Tilting the Lens has played a fundamental role in supporting ITV as we seek to deliver on our ambition to ensure that accessibility and disability equity is built into everything we do.
Strategy services
Tilting the Lens is a company’s strategic partner, providing independent insights, expertise, and constructive challenges to support organisations to become more accessible in a measurable, meaningful, and sustained way.
Why does strategy matter?
We deliver strategy as a collaborative and expertise-driven approach grounded in Disability Justice, aiming to embed accessibility and inclusion as core principles across an organisation. We understand that it is vital to resource and measure accessibility as a business objective and priority in order for system change to take place.
Leadership plays a crucial role in embedding accessibility into the fabric of the organisation. Supporting leadership teams to distribute both opportunity and accountability across departments ensures that accessibility is embedded into workflows rather than isolated in silos. Establishing mechanisms for accountability and progress reporting helps maintain momentum and transparency, reinforcing the organisation’s commitment to change.
Any strategic framework should be communicated clearly across all levels of the business, with a critical path defined to guide the organisation’s journey towards meaningful and measurable change. These milestones provide a roadmap that aligns stakeholders and supports coordinated action. This action creates accountability mechanisms and enables teams and leadership to report on progress.
We foster a cultural transformation that is driven from the top down, built from the bottom up, and championed across all levels of the business. This transformation must be supported by developing embedded and sustained solutions that outlive our partnership.
Ultimately, taking on strategic work with a wide reach, will affect individual experiences as well as the collective consciousness of a workforce. The work will increase the cultural value and confidence of disabled people in the organisation.
What is a strategy project?
- Establishing a global, company-wide strategic ambition for accessibility, including a mission and vision statement to communicate the short, medium and long-term objectives.
- Developing a global reasonable adjustment process that supports regional markets to localise based on national standards, ensuring cultural relevance.
- Creating a partnership to develop a pipeline of talent, supporting their networking and holistic development.
- Developing an adaptive product that embeds end-to-end accessibility from market research to execution and activation.
- Developing a building framework and matrix to advance the accessibility of corporate offices, retail and residential properties through a global and national lens.
Generic title
Tilting the Lens brings strategic thinking and expertise with a very personal approach to create an authentic accessibility and disability strategy for Jo Malone London.
Our methodology for strategy
There may be some practical variations, depending on the specific service area, as we create a process that is bespoke for each client. However these are some consistent priority strands that we implement across projects.
1. Stakeholder engagement and research
Our approach is underlined by stakeholder engagement and research to specify objectives and understand existing processes. Disabled people exist in every organisation (private sector, governments, non-profits and cultural organisations). We meaningfully engage with key representatives, who are positioned across departments and at different levels of the organisation. This provides deep insights and nuanced understandings of the current challenges, the barriers to change, the ways in which decisions are made, the culture and behaviours that are valued, and how those closest to the problems view the solutions.
For a banking client, our objective was to create targeted, context-specific training informed by customer research and colleague insights. Our in-depth primary and secondary research included reviewing existing EDI and recruitment materials, and conducting meetings with a wide range of staff. The final outcome was training that was made compulsory for all customer-facing personnel in the organisation.
2. Co-creation with disabled people
A central principle of our methodology is to explicitly partner and co-design with disabled communities. We operate under a model of Disability Justice, recognising and valuing disabled people as the foremost experts in their own experiences and access needs. This ensures that the strategic frameworks developed are directly informed by the lived realities of those most affected by accessibility barriers, either as consumers, colleagues or leaders.
For example, our work with a retail company in EMEA involved centring the lived experience of disabled consumers from the outset of their Accessible Store Development Strategy, through a mixed-methods research approach including surveys and focus groups with disabled participants. We coordinated and led co-creation design sprints and other relevant forums to ensure solutions could be ideated, evolved, and implemented with lived experience as a starting point.
3. Expertise rooted in lived experience
As a majority-disabled team, our strategic guidance is inherently shaped by our own lived experiences and cross-industry professional expertise. This provides a distinctive and practical understanding of accessibility challenges and opportunities, going beyond mere regulatory adherence to achieve meaningful impact. Our team comprises individuals with specific expertise across the built environment, policy, community impact, innovation, and research.
4. Holistic and intersectional method
Tilting the Lens adopts a holistic perspective, considering accessibility across various dimensions of an organisation: Built Environment, Product and Service Design, and People and Workplace Culture. We strive to support a holistic customer and colleague journey and recognise the essential nature of intersectionality, acknowledging the interconnected nature of social identities and their influence on individual experiences.
Strategy project case studies
Discover more about some of the strategy projects we have worked on.
