While the relative merits of Bazball continue to be debated, focus has swung away from arguably the most critical challenge that the sport faces: the findings from the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (Icec), published at the end of June. Its report, Holding Up a Mirror to Cricket, concluded that: “Cricket is not ‘a game for everyone’.”
It’s not the first major review of a sport with shocking findings, and it won’t be the last. Numerous Olympic and Paralympic sports have had such reviews and been heavily criticised over the past decade. Anne Whyte, a KC, spent two years reviewing the mistreatment of gymnasts, revealing appalling stories of abuse. You’d think by now that sports leaders would be experts, alert to the traps and mistakes of the past. The Icec report reminds us that’s not the case, uncomfortably pointing out that similar issues had already surfaced in the 1999 “Clean Bowl Racism” report yet never been addressed.
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There are sweepstakes on which sport will be next up to face a culture crisis, with an ongoing review into swimming already uncovering heartbreaking stories. We continue to sit in a vacuum, waiting for leaders in sport to step up and start leading the way in creating ethical, value-based, inclusive cultures that enable sport both to push the boundaries of human performance and play its part in contributing to what society needs from sport: strong values brought to life daily; connected, inclusive communities where we have each other’s back regardless of where we have come from; and equal access to ensure everyone has the opportunity to find their place in sport and explore their potential.
Although the Icec report highlights a stubborn constituency who remain in denial of the problem, there must surely be many sports leaders thinking that, even if they don’t have a crisis now, what should they be doing? We’ve heard the shocking testimonies that reveal misogyny, racism and sexism, plus the unfathomable fact that England’s women have never played a Test match at Lord’s, the “home of cricket”, while privately educated schoolboys get annual outings there. Behind those headlines, three key areas resonate loud and clear from the report, which also remind me of lessons from the Whyte review and, for that matter, Louise Casey’s report on the Metropolitan Police Service.
The first is the need for effective leadership in the sense of people in senior positions role-modelling and caring about the values of their organisation as much as they do the profits or short-term targets. The report unpicks naive assumptions that EDI (equity, diversity, inclusion) work and wider commercial goals would always complement each other. Without explicit EDI goals, growth and revenue generation took precedence, which may have felt good in the short term but incurred heavy human costs over the long term which never appeared on the spreadsheets.
There’s a specific recommendation to develop a set of cultural values (principles and expected behaviours) that go beyond the “spirit of cricket”, exposed here largely as a fudge and tied up with the existing discriminatory culture. The report demands leaders to be “explicit about the culture the game aspires to build and the behaviours it expects and rejects”. It’s ultimately the living and upholding of those values through thick and thin that will create the shift: with those at the top of the organisation leading as visible role models, challenging those who don’t display those values, regardless of their status in the game.
The second area that leapt out at me is the “overly defensive” attitude towards complaints. My role on the oversight board at British Gymnastics, set up to oversee the implementation of the Whyte recommendations and cultural reform, has shown me that it’s a crucial litmus test of any organisation’s culture: how it responds to and deals with complaints, big and small. It’s not an easy area to get right from the positions in which BG and the England and Wales Cricket Board find themselves – and it’s clear that greater independent expertise and support is needed in this area – but shifting mindsets towards seeing complaints as an opportunity for insight and improvement is a crucial first step. Continuous learning is a well-known pillar of high‑performance sport out on the field of play. Curiously, it seems much less deeply embedded in the way sports are run. This is an obvious area for change.
Integral to the complaints process is the vulnerability required to share difficult personal experiences – which only happens when there’s “psychological safety”. Based on a growing body of academic research (spearheaded by Prof Amy Edmondson at the Harvard Business School), there is growing awareness of the importance of psychological safety across society. It provides a deeply human perspective from which to see your school, workplace or sports environment and understand whether it has a culture where people can thrive while bringing their best efforts. It’s based around the simple question: is it safe to speak up, whatever your role, background, class, gender, race or disability? Whereas sport has traditionally been seen as ahead of the curve on all matters performance‑related, in the cultural space and areas such as psychological safety it still seems well behind the curve.
Psychological safety is a useful if challenging qualitative metric for leaders – measurable, but only by tuning into experiences. This links to the third area which lurks behind most discussions I have with leaders about culture, whether in sport or professional service firms: metrics. Our obsession with measuring and amassing high volumes of data has exploded over the past decade and pervades Whitehall departments, City firms and sports organisations alike. Attitudes towards metrics deepen our beliefs daily that “what gets measured, gets done”, and “what matters is what gets measured”.
Charts, spreadsheets and league tables have led us away from looking at insights based on lived experiences. The Icec report reminds us that this is actually what really matters, the review discovering and amplifying human voices otherwise unheard. The report’s annexe “It’s not banter: lived experiences of discrimination in cricket” is full of further incontrovertible experiences.
The most powerful part of sport is always the human stories. We must realise that’s the case off the pitch as much as on the pitch. We need to bring a broader range of stories into sport’s boardrooms and committee rooms on a regular basis, not just in culture reviews. Then there’s a chance to redefine and redesign future sporting success in terms of the stories for which cricket could be the catalyst, the stories we’d like to hear about experiencing cricket for the first time or the thousandth time, and how it might feel for those who’ve always felt excluded, to finally feel that they belong.
Cath Bishop is a former Olympic rower, independent expert on the British Gymnastics oversight board, and adviser to the True Athlete Project.
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