Culture, Leadership & Denial.

This week many of us were shocked by the Casey report into the Met. Once again it was found to be failing in terms of its approach to equity being described as institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic. Shocking particularly for those of us who first heard the term Institutionally Racist when the Met was challenged on its handling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. Has nothing really changed in those intervening 30 years??

Three words stood out for me in the news coverage, culture, leadership and denial and I will come back to these later but what also surprised me was how?Sir Mark Rowley the new commissioner brought in to root out the deep seated problems appeared in interviews to avoid accepting the term institutional. He appeared to have a real problem with this description of the organisation he now was leading and I wondered why??When appearing before the London Assembly's police and crime committee, he said the word institutional was "ambiguous" and a political term that might imply most people in the Met were racist. I found this explanation hard to understand and was wondering if this was yet further denial so I decided to revisit the definitions of the original term when applied to racism.?

As I expected I found that Institutional racism, also known as systemic racism, was defined as policies and practices that exist throughout a whole?organisation that result in and support a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others based on race. The term institutional racism was first coined in 1967 by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. Carmichael and Hamilton wrote in 1967 that while individual racism is often identifiable because of its overt nature, institutional racism is less perceptible because of its "less overt, far more subtle" nature. Institutional racism "originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than individual racism".

Institutional racism was further defined by Sir William Macpherson in the UK's Lawrence report (1999) as: "The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin". It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour that amount to discrimination through prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people."

These same definitions can I think also be applied to the wider discriminatory behaviour described by Casey and I can well understand Sir Marks desire to avoid painting everyone working in the Met with the same brush. But the term ‘institutional’ does not and never did mean everyone in the organisation behaves the same way and why did he view it as ambiguous and political. I don’t think the term is open to more than one interpretation. It is specifically defined to be different to individual discrimination and refers to the nature of an organisation and its processes, procedures, rules and decision making which may conspire to create unfairness to certain individuals and groups. And yes the personal behaviour of individuals is part of this but does the organisation not have processes and procedures that deal effectively with these personal behavioural failures, if not it’s clearly an institutional failure as well as a personal failure. And yes equity and fairness is by its very nature a political issue.?

Not withstanding these views the Casey report sets out recommendations to deal not only with personal behaviour of the so called ‘bad apples’ but the changes she believes are required in the institution itself that have to date facilitated and maintained the negative culture that has prevented change.?

Why is all this relevant to the future of sport and activity? I don’t for one minute want to suggest that as a sector or as individual organisations we could be described in the same terms as the Met. But equally I would suggest that we do have parts of the sector, particularly elite sport that have recently had exposed significant behavioural problems round equity and the treatment of individuals and I’m also sure that we have our own individual ‘bad apples’ in terms of racism, sexism, homophobia and misogyny.?

However, we must start from the premise that as a workforce we are not representative of the communities we serve and we have for decades failed to achieve equity in terms of participation, our primary purpose for being there. Could it not therefore be argued with some justification that in terms of equity we also have institutional or systematic failure in that we continue to maintained processes and practices that exist throughout our organisations that result in and support a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others. Is there not also a collective system wide failure in our organisations which can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour that amount to discrimination through prejudice, ignorance or thoughtlessness resulting in our inability to provide an appropriate and professional service to all people fairly.?

The Casey report highlights I think three key factors in the systematic failure. First the culture that has formed and become embedded in the Met, second the failure of leadership in changing this culture and thirdly the degree to which the leadership itself remained in denial about what was happening and their failure to deal with it. Whilst many commentators have welcomed Sir Mark Rowley’s stated ambition to now address this, his unwillingness (denial) that the problems were institutional has perhaps brought into question his ability to succeed. If he sees the problem only as one of individuals, the bad apples, will he fail to change the organisational processes, procedures, rules both written and unwritten that have sustained and protected the old system and prevented change from happening before. Will he fail to change the system that created the culture?

There have also recently been some other interesting research into the implementation of the new Integrated Care Systems and how far the leadership are enabling the system change envisaged in the design of the new system to actually happen. I will be sharing some of these thoughts shortly but there are many similarities between the ability of ICS leadership to create a new culture in health and the failures of leadership in the Met to successfully address culture change and it’s clear that resistance to change or outright denial that change is needed is a key factor in both. ?

I have long held the view that our own sector are not generally universal advocates of change and we too have our fair share of leadership denial. Certainly it has taken far too long to acknowledge our own failures in terms of addressing inequality in participation. There are always it seems extraneous factors and reasons for the lack of progress including the non participants themselves. In the pandemic there was a very strong desire to create ‘new normals’ rather than recreate ‘old normals’ yet the old normals soon returned until the energy crisis and cost of living crisis has finally started a movement to ‘pivot to health and wellbeing’. Over coming months the sector will also need to really wrestle with what this pivot actually means as well as wrestling with wider aspects of system change and place working all designed to finally address inequality in activity. Our own movement for change will inevitably have to focus on culture change and will require significant investment in leadership and the development of better leadership but I hope there remains no hiding place for denial.?

The report on the Met is frightening because the denial and the failure of leadership to drive culture change has fundamentally undermined the public trust not only in the Met but in the Police in general. Organisational reputation has been destroyed and it will take years for this to recover. In health the focus on Integrated Care is about system change and culture change that finally puts the patient not the provider centre stage and if this change process fails public confidence in health and social care will also be destroyed.?

We too face our own moment of truth and unless we can drive significant culture change and finally address inequality in activity we too will deserve to loose the confidence of the public. Let’s not look at the Casey report as if it has no relevance to us but let’s learn from it and above all let’s make sure denial does not destroy us too.

Martyn Allison.

March 2023