Imagine you are the first to notice that something bad has been going on at work. It has been going on for years. Some terrible mistake has been made, or some unjustifiable practice has crept in and become routine. You put down the torch and look up from the scattered piles of yellowing papers as it dawns on you: if this gets out, your organisation, your colleagues – perhaps you – will be in trouble. What do you do next?
Even spotting the problem in the first place might make you a fairly unusual person. Something happens to our powers of perception in institutions – a sort of blindness sets in. “But everyone was doing it!” was the first reaction of traders arrested in the Libor scandal. Men who ended up at the sharp end of #MeToo gestured indignantly to a long culture of harassment around them; all this seemed to be fine five minutes ago. When the 2009 expenses scandal broke, MPs bellowed down the phone at journalists: “This is outrageous, you just don’t understand the system.”
