the way there in terms of those stated values? Are we part the way there? Because it’s in the answer to that question that you start to, I think, understand where you might have work to do in terms of listening better, in terms of a shared set of expectations about what somebody wants and how that’s going to be achieved. I think simply asserting an aspiration without doing the work to understand where you are in comparison to that is not the right way to go. ST: Can I add to that? I think there’s a piece of work that I’ve certainly been thinking about quite a lot about the assumptions we make that all people with disability understand their rights and I don’t think that’s the case or at least their rights have been compromised for so long in many respects that really it’ll be little things that might change a person’s life and their experience through really basic things. So, if the way your question was “what advice will you give to providers?” I think there's a broader conversation about asking people that they’re supporting “what’s important to them?”. It’s not about saying “oh well you’ve got this code and we’ve got to meet these standards for you”, well what does that mean to that person in that moment that they’re receiving some kind of service, whatever it might be? What would make a difference to them? I think about it in terms of you’ve got to know the people you're supporting, you’ve got to actually build a relationship with them and in a lot of these organisations that are delivering in the NDIS, sometimes the relationship can be a bit too distant in terms of the people who frame the training and the information for workers from actual people that are being supported by those workers. So they’ve got to build up the dialogue at an organisational level and really take account of what people say is important to them and deliver on it. GT: I love that, Sam. I think that’s critical and it goes back to what the tenants were saying. They were saying “listen to me” but they also talked a lot about “understand me, know what I need” and I think that what you just said there is really about that. If you’re just a provider that hasn’t got a good understanding of your customer and doesn’t understand where they’re at in terms of understanding their rights or where they’re at in being able to speak up for themselves, then you’re going to not do what you need to do. GH: That can be experienced by someone as feeling like they’re being shoehorned into the service that a provider wants to provide rather than that service adapting to their requirements. So I think part of my advice to providers is to think very carefully about “well what are the implicit and explicit features in your business model and if a big part of what you’re doing is providing supports and services to people who will have very, very different needs, how well designed is your business model about being truly responsive to that?” As you often do see people on the one hand inviting people to say something so listening in a way, but because of the rigidity of the way they’ve designed particular aspects of their business model, not really being able to do anything with what they’ve heard in that process, which just drives a lot of frustration.

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