The castle and the drawbridge

Why the drawbridge goes up

Most people who hold privilege — whether that is social, professional or positional — do not experience themselves as privileged. They experience themselves as people who worked hard, made reasonable choices and ended up where they are. When someone tells them that their position comes at the expense of others, or that their behaviour causes harm they cannot see, it does not land as useful information. It lands as an accusation.

And when we feel accused, we defend. The drawbridge goes up. The conversation stops before it starts. Nothing changes — and sometimes things get worse, because the person inside the castle now feels justified in keeping the gates shut.

This is not a moral failing on their part. It is how the human threat response works. The challenge for anyone doing inclusion and diversity work is not to ignore that response — it is to design around it.

Lowering the drawbridge

The metaphor shifts the practitioner's frame entirely. Instead of asking "how do I get people to accept that they are wrong?", the question becomes "how do I create conditions where people feel safe enough to be curious?"

In Joanne's words:

"What we need to do somehow is create an environment where it's not threatening, where we can lower that drawbridge down. We can put a table on the drawbridge. We can all come around and sit on that table and have conversations in a nonthreatening way."

The table on the drawbridge is the key image. Not inside the castle — that would require the person with power to fully surrender their ground before the conversation begins. Not outside the castle — that leaves the marginalised person entirely without shelter. The drawbridge itself: a shared, temporary, neutral-enough space where both parties can sit down without either side having conceded defeat.

What this looks like in practice

Lowering the drawbridge is not about softening the message until it says nothing. It is about sequencing and framing conversations so that the person you need to reach stays present long enough for something to land. A few practical approaches:

• Start from shared goals, not competing identities. Most people in organisations want their teams to work well and for colleagues to feel valued. Begin there, not with a taxonomy of privilege.
• Ask before you tell. Questions — genuine ones, not rhetorical ones — keep the other person in the conversation rather than pushing them out of it. "What has your experience of this been?" opens a door that "here's why you're wrong" closes.
• Name the discomfort without weaponising it. Saying "I know this can feel uncomfortable, and that's normal — I feel it too" reduces the threat signal and models the kind of honest, non-defensive engagement you are hoping to create.
• Give people a path forward. Defensiveness often spikes when people cannot see how to change — when admission of a problem feels like admission of permanent failure. Show what "better" looks like; make it achievable.
• Be patient with the pace. Behaviour change rarely happens in a single conversation. A nonthreatening first conversation makes the next one possible.

The limits of confrontation

None of this means that challenge has no place. Direct challenge is sometimes necessary — particularly when harm is immediate, repeated or being ignored. The castle-and-drawbridge model is not a call to be endlessly gentle with people who are actively causing harm. It is a call to be strategic about when confrontation will produce change and when it will simply produce a locked gate.

The most effective inclusive leaders learn to read the room: knowing when a direct challenge is the right tool and when the table on the drawbridge will get further. Both are skills. Neither replaces the other.

Psychological safety is the drawbridge mechanism

The concept connects directly to psychological safety — the idea that people do their best thinking, their most honest communicating and their most creative work when they do not fear punishment for speaking up. Building psychological safety in a team is, in a sense, the long-form version of lowering the drawbridge: creating the ongoing conditions where difficult conversations can happen because they have become normal rather than exceptional.

Explore this further in the guide on psychological safety, or hear the ideas unpacked in depth on the Inclusion Bites podcast.

Joanne's approach

The castle-and-drawbridge metaphor runs through Joanne's keynote and workshop work because it gives practitioners — and leaders — a concrete, non-blaming image to hold onto. The goal is never to shame the person in the castle. The goal is to make it worth their while to come to the table.

That is the spirit behind Smile · Engage · Educate: create the conditions first, then do the work. Browse all guides, or get in touch to talk about how this thinking can shape your next inclusion programme.