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
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.
Now, she has built that investigation into a session for boards, executive committees and senior leadership teams.
It is not a talk about Mohamed Al Fayed. It is a case study in how an organisation with functioning processes, competent staff and an excellent reputation carried something like this for twenty-five years, and what the warning signs looked like at the time, to the people standing right next to them.
Why does your company need this now?
Two regulatory changes land six weeks apart this autumn.
For FCA-regulated firms, from 1 September 2026, a new rule brings bullying, harassment and violence more clearly within the conduct framework, and new guidance sets out how such behaviour bears on fitness and propriety.
For every employer, from 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.
Pointing at a policy will no longer be enough. An organisation must show what it did, not what policies it created.
The story of Harrods
The 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.
Using real accounts from inside Harrods, the session shows boards and senior leaders how misconduct becomes normalised, how control functions get captured, and why apparently reassuring processes can conceal wrongdoing rather than expose it.
What the room takes away
Participants leave with five practical questions to test whether their own organisation is genuinely accountable and open to challenge. Each comes out of a real story from inside Harrods.
The ordinary signals. An unusually high turnover in one department. A complaint settled quietly. A rule that applied to some people and not to others. Nobody looked twice at any of it at the time. What do those same signals look like in your organisation this morning?
Who does everyone know to avoid? At Harrods it took the form of an unwritten rule about who should be on the shop floor and when. Most organisations have an arrangement like it somewhere: the person who is never put on that project, the meeting somebody is quietly left out of. Nobody reports it, because to the people maintaining it, it is not a problem. It is the solution.
When the watchdog is the problem. The department responsible for vetting recruits and maintaining standards was the one used to select women for the chairman. The access and the authority that made it useful as a safeguard were exactly what made it worth corrupting. How to spot a function being used for the opposite of its purpose.
Does anyone actually use the complaints procedure? One woman's complaint was received, considered and closed, and the file afterwards looked precisely as a good file should. Having a procedure and having people who trust it are two different things, and most boards only ever see the first.
What happens to the person who speaks up? A speak-up culture is real when someone who got nowhere the first time has the confidence to come back and raise it again. Does yours?
Format
A keynote, 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.
Booking
Fees from £5,000, depending on format, audience and date. Plus VAT and travel.
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