When Good Organisations Go Wrong

Why warning signs get ignored, why good people stay quiet, and what it costs

‍A keynote by Alison Kervin OBE, author of The Monster of Harrods

The talk

Alison Kervin spent years investigating how one of the most admired institutions in Britain allowed a man to abuse women on its premises for twenty-five years, and how hundreds of ordinary employees, many of whom knew, allowed it to continue. The Monster of Harrods, her bestselling account of Mohamed Al Fayed's reign at the store, was built on first-hand interviews with the people who worked inside the machine: the HR staff who processed the complaints, the security officers told not to see, the technician who maintained the surveillance.

Almost none of them thought of themselves as part of it. They were doing their jobs.

This is what stays with audiences…it is not only the abuse, it is how ordinary the cover-up looked from the inside.

The warning signs were visible for years, and every one of them was unremarkable at the time. An unusually high turnover in one department. A complaint settled quietly. A rule that applied to some people and not others. Large payments to young women that nobody questioned. Supervisors arranging for certain staff not to be on the floor when the owner walked it. Every person who had built a workaround would have said, in good faith, that they had no concerns to report. That is the part that unsettles senior audiences, because it describes them.

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Why now?

From this October 2026, under the Employment Rights Act 2025, the duty to prevent sexual harassment rises from reasonable steps to all reasonable steps, and liability for harassment by third parties returns across every protected characteristic. Boards will have to evidence prevention rather than policy: not what the policy says, but what actually happens when somebody raises something. This session is not legal training and does not pretend to be. It does the harder thing: it makes a room believe it could happen to them, and sends them back with questions they hadn't thought to ask.

What the room takes away

‍Using revealing examples from inside Harrods, this session shows boards and senior leaders how corruption becomes normalised, how control functions can be captured, and why apparently reassuring processes may conceal rather than expose wrongdoing. Participants leave with five practical questions to test whether their own organisation is genuinely safe, accountable and open to challenge.

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Alison has watched this mechanism operate in two worlds that could hardly be less alike. At Harrods the risk was criminal, and the cover was reputational. In professional rugby, where she campaigned for five years on concussion and was appointed OBE when the protocols changed, the risk was medical, and the cover was commercial. The institutions had nothing in common. The pattern of denial was almost identical. Which is why she is confident this was never really a story about one man. The question is never whether somebody knew. It is what happened to the person who said it out loud.

Format

A keynote speech, or shaped to suit: a leadership away-day, a closed board or executive session, an all-staff conference, an HR briefing, or a client seminar for professional services firms. Also available as a longer workshop. In person or online.