Is it imaginative enough? Episode 2 of our new podcast
- brap
- 7 hours ago
- 4 min read
The Royal Free London is one of the largest NHS trusts in the country. One day, its chief exec went on an anti-racism leadership course. When he got home, he sat down with his family and started ranting:
It was after either the first or the second session. We'd had a very good set of conversations about race and the history of race. It was intellectually challenging, emotionally stimulating, and quite hard to face up to.
I remember going home, sitting at the dinner table, and just talking with such animation and passion to my family. I was passionately ranting, giving them a blow-by-blow account of the session. It really affected me deep down. And as I'm saying these words, I’m feeling the passion, I’m feeling a little bit of shame. I’m feeling the desire to want to make things better…
The chief exec is Peter Landstrom, and that whole-body response Peter describes is the moment equality work stops being performative or an intellectual exercise and turns into something that is real.
But feelings that strong don’t come from nowhere. A spark has to be lit.
How to light that spark is the topic we discuss in episode two of our new podcast series, The Quiet Revolution.
The comfort of ‘doing stuff’
Like most large institutions, the Royal Free had no shortage of activity around equality and diversity. Peter is honest about that:
We’d done loads of stuff around equality, diversity and anti-racism. And you know what it’s like on an NHS board: we look at some metrics – we love a metric, don’t we? – and look at the staff survey, see it move a little bit, congratulate ourselves on 0.5% and all of this kind of stuff.
But Crystal Akass, then Chief People Officer, had begun to feel that this way of working was not getting to the nub of the issue. She had seen how traditional equality approaches can skim the surface without disturbing the foundations.
Her response was not to design another intervention for those experiencing racism. It was to focus on those holding power. As she puts it:
You have to do the work and invest the accountability where the power is held. And when we look at our organisations in the NHS, the power is held predominantly by white leaders. If we want to create a change – it could be a reduction in waiting times or an increase in performance on cancer –it's that tier of the organization that we engage to do it. Why would it be any different on the problem of anti-racism?
Listen to a snippet of episode 2 of the The Quiet Revolution
The moment the script falls away
So Crystal's strategy was to flip the traditional model on its head. Instead of focusing interventions on the people experiencing racism, she decided to focus it on the people who held most power to dismantle systems that perpetuate it.
She signed up for a programme brap created with a deliberately unambiguous title: Anti-racism for White Leaders. The programme was not a technical training course. It was an invitation to think differently. Peter describes the moment he realised it was not business as usual:
One of the moments that lives really richly in my head is when we were all blown away by the concept that there is no such thing as race – that it's something that was created for discriminatory purposes originally. I remember sitting with one of my colleagues just talking and we both looked at each other and we just went, ‘oh my God! I've been thinking about my upbringing and I think I might be institutionally racist’.
The real test
When you do this kind of work, there's a moment, or a series of them, where the ground shifts and you see something you can't unsee: a truth about yourself, perhaps, or about your organization, about the norms you've always taken for granted.
And the question then becomes ‘what now’? Because naming racism isn't the same as dismantling it and doing something new isn't always the same as doing something that works.
A large part of the answer is about turning the lens away from those experiencing racism and pointing it directly at the leadership who run the systems. But there’s a world of difference between the clarity of that decision and the complexity of what comes next, because taking on this work seriously means stepping into uncertainty. It means letting go of the need to have all the answers. And for leaders who have built careers on solving problems, that can be a profoundly uncomfortable place to be.
Late in the episode, Peter talks openly about feeling like a fraud:
I have felt a fraud at times. Who am I, privileged white, early middle-aged male? I have felt really unsure of myself… I’ve got to my position successfully in my career because I’ve been good at solving things. I’ve been good at making things happen. This is this amorphous, ingrained, difficult, huge beast of a societal thing that we are trying to grapple with here… I feel really daunted sometimes by it.
But feeling daunted is part of the process. It’s a natural, perhaps even inevitable, part of grappling with anti-racism. What we and Peter and Crystal discuss in the podcast is how to get past this feeling and keep the passion and the spark alive – even when it would be easier to let it fade.
This work asks you to stand in discomfort, to stay with hard questions until something new starts to grow. What would it mean if you did that? These are the questions we all need to sit with. The answers – your answers – will shape where we go from here.
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