Dr Sarju Patel

Mind the Gap

Making difficult conversations possible.

What if the hardest conversations became easier to start? Mind the Gap builds the confidence, structure and psychological safety to explore race, gender, disability, faith and neurodiversity, and it asks everyone in, not only those with lived experience.

Play Mind the Gap How a session runs
UK universities using the deck with students
6+
countries beyond the UK: Australia, Ireland, the USA
3
languages, English and Cymraeg, in one deck
2
to play in a browser, nothing to install or sign up to
Free

Why it exists

Most people are not hostile. They are frightened of getting it wrong.

Ask a room why they do not talk about race, gender or disability at work and you rarely hear disagreement. You hear risk. People are afraid of using an outdated word, of being corrected in front of colleagues, of a clumsy sentence following them around. So the safest available move is to say nothing, and a room full of people each independently deciding to say nothing looks exactly like a room that does not care.

That silence is self-sealing. Nobody practises, so nobody gets more fluent, so the stakes of the first attempt keep rising. Training sessions do not break it, because a training session asks people to perform the thing they are afraid of in front of an audience with a right answer in the room.

88% said Mind the Gap helped them reflect on their own beliefs and values.

What the deck does about it.

Someone else asks the question.

The card is the one raising race or gender or disability, not a colleague. That removes the social cost of being the person who brought it up, which is the cost that stops most conversations before they start.

Everyone answers, so nobody is the case study.

The prompts go round the table. That keeps the person with the most direct experience of a topic from becoming the room's spokesperson for it, a common failure of the well-meaning version of this conversation.

Getting it wrong is cheap.

It is a game, and games are where people are allowed to be bad at things. A fumbled sentence over a deck of cards costs nothing and is worth everything, because the fluency people lack is only ever built by fumbling somewhere safe first.

There is nothing to prepare.

No facilitator training, no slide pack and no pre-reading. Most work like this stalls on a budget line and a diary, and the game asks for neither: a team can decide at half past ten to play it at eleven.

It ends in a conversation, not a score.

Nobody wins. The deck runs out, or the time does, and a group that had not talked about any of this has now talked about it once, which is the only thing that makes the second time easier. What people take out of the room is one card rather than a summary, and that is the point.

How to use it

A session is four moves long.

There is nothing to prepare and nobody to train. If you can book a room and put chairs in a circle, you can run this.

Who made it

Four people, four disciplines, one deck.

Creator and facilitator

Dr Sarju Patel

Reader in Medical Education, School of Medicine

Co-Chair of the Medical Schools Council EDI Alliance, and Year 2 Director in the Centre for Medical Education. He runs the sessions, and he is who a deck comes from.

Dr Sarju Patel, smiling to camera in a studio portrait, in an olive shirt with a rainbow lanyard round his neck.

Co-creator

Dr Riccardo Maddalena

Senior Lecturer in Civil Engineering, School of Engineering

Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion for the School of Engineering, alongside research into low carbon and self healing construction materials.

Dr Riccardo Maddalena in a lab coat and black gloves, smiling, at a bench in a materials laboratory.

Co-creator

Ms Deborah Syrop

School of Engineering

Her doctorate at Cardiff, finished in 2024, was on improving the impact and inclusivity of engineering outreach, which is the same problem this deck works on.

Portrait to come.

Co-creator

Dr Kathryn Jones

Reader and Head of School, Computer Science and Informatics

A Senior Fellow of AdvanceHE and co-director of the Cardiff Hartree Hub, with a long running interest in who gets access to a technical education.

Dr Kathryn Jones, smiling, in a red floral top against a white panelled wall.

What people say

The most common reaction is surprise at how easy it was.

“These cards have started many a conversation in our office, so thank you, it has really got us talking and thinking about things.”

“The game is very good at opening conversations with colleagues that you would not normally have.”

“It was nice that it placed no onus on reverse mentoring by people from minoritised groups.”

“I love this, open communication without pressure, being gently guided to understand each other more and reflect on our own assumptions.”

“The training was informative, engaging and encouraged me to reflect on unconscious bias and inclusive communication. A very useful and thought provoking session with practical examples that I can apply in the workplace.”

“Works so well being a digital set of cards. Great app. Will implement as an activity regularly in meetings.”

Taken into someone else's training

“Used as part of active bystander training at Brunel University and students were very engaged in the scenarios and were keen to share their views.”

Planned into a course

“We are hoping to use the cards to facilitate some small group discussions with our next cohort of students. Thank you for helping us to start these conversations.”

Try it

The deck is one browser tab away.

It's free, it runs in a browser, and it's there in English and Cymraeg. Nothing to install and nothing to sign up to. Turn a card over, and see what a group does with it.

Play the game (opens in a new tab)