Lessons we can all learn from the outrageous Post Office Scandal

Here are two powerful business lessons from one of the biggest institutional scandals of a generation.

Ignore them at your peril.

What is the Post Office Scandal?

The British Post Office scandal, also known as the Horizon scandal, is a major miscarriage of justice that unfolded between 1999 and 2015.

It involved over 700 sub-postmasters who were wrongly convicted of theft, false accounting, and fraud based on errors in the Post Office's Horizon accounting software.

I'd heard about it.

But I didn't care about it as much as I do now.

This month, ITV dramatised the scandal in a four-part series. It told the story of how loyal sub-post officers have been destroyed financially. Four tragically lost their lives. The scale of the mental strain on honest, hard-working families of the scandal has yet to be fully understood. I can only imagine.

This has been the catalyst for outrage on a national scale. Whilst people love a good outrage, the level of anger feels beyond justified.

A tipping point, even?

If we look at this as a social phenomenon, what might the way this huge miscarriage of justice has ignited such a fierce national response mean for you and your business?

Lesson One: How to Change Something

There are lots of things we can trust to change something.

You can trust institutions.

You can trust the process.

We can trust each other.?

All sorts.

After 20 years of relentless campaigning, the Post Office victims have finally got cut through. Only now are people taking serious notice of the mistreatment of ordinary, honest British working families.

So, what changed?

They had already trusted institutions like the Post Office and The Government.

They had already put their trust in the process - like the legal process.

But still ... they waited.

Only when they put their trust in their story - and told it in an epic, powerful ITV drama - did people finally take notice. Each element of the story created massive empathy between viewer and victim.

And the result? The scandal has gone from an administrative inconvenience for the Post Office to a national outrage.

If you are a business and you want to change something (And if you don't, why are you in business?), then:

... trust your stories.

Lesson Two: “Protecting the brand.”

In court, one of the Post Office defendants declared: “I was protecting the brand” before she revealed the full extent of the lies the Post Office had manufactured.

Protecting a brand sounds like a really smart idea. Until it presents a contradiction as we’ve seen in the alarming Post Office scandal.

Blind incurious faith in anything, let alone a brand, spells danger.

And, corporate narcissists - you may want to take note!

If you don't protect a brand, what should you protect?

Simply this.

Before anything else, you must protect the values of the stakeholders you serve.

In the case of the Post Office scandal, this would mean placing the values of hundreds of honest and loyal sub-post officers ahead of a flawed computer program.

For your business? Remember this:

Instead of protecting your brand, protect your stakeholder values.

Place the communities you serve at the centre of everything.

GUARANTEE: If you protect your stakeholder values as a priority and with purpose, your brand will look after itself.

P.S. A little bit of politics:

As the Government and its cowardly public representatives circle back and pretend to care about an issue (maybe garner some votes?) that their own institutional paralysis has inflamed, they could do well to remember:

Protect stakeholder (voter) values above your own petty narcissistic, self-absorbed existence.