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Anthea Mumby

Anthea Mumby is the founder of the Colour Inclusive Institute, helping organizations design workplaces and materials that never rely on colour alone, drawing on her own lived experience with colour vision deficiency. She also leads Dream Team Consulting, a strategic advisory practice for Canadian insurance brokerage owners, built on 45 years in the industry including growing and selling her family’s brokerage. She holds RIBO Level 3 multi-province credentials and the CIP designation. Connect with Anthea here…

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The Blind Spot Hiding in Plain Sight: What I Learned by Hiding My Colour Blindness for 45 Years

July 6, 2026
Contributed By: Anthea Mumby

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Roughly one in twelve men and one in two hundred women see colour differently. Run the math on your own team. If you employ 30 or more people, statistically at least one of them is colour blind, and odds are they have never told you. They are navigating your dashboards, forms, charts, safety signage, and status indicators through workarounds you will never see, because the workarounds are designed to be invisible. I know exactly how that works. I did it for decades.
I live with colour vision deficiency, two forms of it, one in each eye. For 45 years I led in an industry built on colour-coded everything: status indicators, underwriting flags, claims dashboards, risk maps. Nobody at work knew. My husband Douglas was the only person who did, and he became my quiet system for both personal and corporate colour decisions. I hid it completely, and I ran a successful brokerage while doing it.
Through the Colour Inclusive Institute, I now help organizations of every kind build workplaces, materials, and digital experiences that never rely on colour alone to convey meaning. This is not a design-industry problem. It is an every-business problem. The fix is rarely expensive. The awareness is the hard part.
My other practice, Dream Team Consulting, serves Canadian insurance brokerage owners and leaders. I bought my parents’ brokerage, grew it more than tenfold, and sold it in 2020. Now I advise owners on compliance clarity, leadership readiness, and building businesses that do not depend on them. The two practices feed each other. Both are about the same thing: seeing what others miss, then acting on it.

When was your lightbulb moment?

For decades, I hid my colour vision deficiency. Not managed it. Hid it. No colleague, employee, or client ever knew. My husband was my only confidant, helping me build private workarounds for everything from wardrobe choices to corporate materials. I memorized which position on a chart meant what. I built quiet systems so no one would ever have a reason to ask.
The lightbulb moment came when I realized my secret was actually market research. Every workaround I had invented was a design flaw someone else had shipped. Every dashboard I could not read, every form with red-and-green status dots, every map with no labels was a decision made by someone who never imagined a user like me. And here is the part that should stop every leader cold: if I could hide it at the ownership level for 45 years, your employees are hiding it too. You will not find them by asking. You find them by designing as if they are already in the room, because they are.
That reframe changed everything. Lived experience is not a limitation to manage. It is expertise no consultant can fake. The same lesson applies in my brokerage work: the owners who get the most from me are not buying frameworks, they are buying 45 years of pattern recognition. In both practices, the value is the same. I have stood where the problem lives.

What are your three words of advice?

See. Name. Fix.
See the exclusion or the risk that everyone else has normalized. Name it plainly, without softening it into a footnote. Then fix it, because awareness without action is just a more informed version of the same problem.