SSF Weekly Reflection | Through the SSF Lens
Accountability and certainty have been occupying my thoughts this week.
What does accountability look like when the threshold for certainty keeps moving further away?
And what happens when that threshold is not the same for every issue?
The immediate catalyst for this reflection was the discussion following the death of Professor Jason Arday and, more recently, a LinkedIn post from Professor Anthony G. Reddie.
Professor Reddie reflected on the impact of what had happened to Professor Arday and on the responses — and silences — of others.
One short sentence stayed with me:
“The silence of others is also noted.”
But something else in his post particularly caught my attention.
He described journalists approaching him — another Black professor — and asking whether he too was a “diversity hire” and whether he believed he deserved his position at Oxford.
That stopped me.
Because whatever conclusions any of us eventually reach about the allegations concerning Professor Arday, something else appears to have happened.
The scrutiny did not remain neatly contained around one individual and questions about his work.
It spilled outwards.
Another Black professor found his legitimacy being questioned.
And that raises some important questions about accountability and certainty.
Accountability and certainty: how long is the road to certainty?
A recent LinkedIn exchange made me think again about something I have previously described as the White Privilege Fence.
The person responding was not denying racism. In fact, he acknowledged structural inequality and questioned whether the extraordinary intensity of the scrutiny Professor Arday received had been proportionate.
But he was reluctant to say whether racism had been responsible because the available information was disputed and incomplete.
There is something entirely reasonable about caution.
We should be careful about making claims that evidence cannot support.
The University of Cambridge’s statement concerning Professor Arday itself emphasised the importance of thorough processes, noting that investigations relating to his qualifications, appointments and alleged academic misconduct were underway.
But this led me to another question:
How certain do we require ourselves to be before racism is allowed to become part of the explanation?
Imagine someone sitting on a fence.
On one side are several possible explanations.
Perhaps there were failures in academic scrutiny.
Perhaps mistakes were made during an appointment process.
Perhaps legitimate questions required investigation.
The distance from the fence to those conclusions can sometimes appear relatively short.
Then look over the other side.
There is racism.
Suddenly, the drop seems much longer.
Now we may want to know intent.
We want more evidence.
We want to establish exactly what everyone involved was thinking.
We want to eliminate every alternative explanation.
We may even find ourselves asking whether racism was the cause.
And because complex human behaviour rarely provides that degree of certainty, the ground can remain permanently out of reach.
The person stays on the fence.
Not necessarily because they reject racism.
Not necessarily because they lack concern.
But because the evidential threshold required before naming racism has become extraordinarily difficult to reach.
This connects with an earlier SSF reflection about how our psychological lenses shape what becomes visible — and what becomes invisible — to us.
Perhaps our lenses also influence how much evidence we believe we need before something becomes visible enough to name.
Accountability and certainty: is the fence level?
This may be one of the more uncomfortable questions raised by the White Privilege Fence:
Do we apply the same standard of evidence to every explanation?
Or do some explanations require a much shorter journey from uncertainty to acceptance?
For the purposes of this reflection, I have been thinking about this as asymmetrical scepticism.
We can scrutinise some explanations far more rigorously than competing explanations without necessarily recognising that we are doing so.
An explanation compatible with what we already understand about ourselves, our institutions or society may be accepted relatively easily.
An explanation that challenges that understanding may be subjected to a much higher evidential threshold.
That matters because uncertainty is not always neutral.
Sometimes uncertainty protects us from reaching premature conclusions.
It encourages us to remain curious, gather information and resist simplistic explanations — an important principle within the Six Stages Framework’s movement from certainty towards curiosity.
But sometimes perpetual uncertainty can protect us from responsibility.
There is an important difference.
VF011: The White Privilege Fence – Unequal Roads to Certainty here
The certainty drop
The Visual Formulation accompanying this reflection introduces another idea: the certainty drop.
The certainty drop is the distance between:
“I can see that this may be happening”
and
“I have enough evidence to accept that it is happening and respond.”
My question is whether that drop remains the same depending upon what explanation we are considering.
If I were somehow suspended above an organisation and able to see all of its roads to certainty, would they be approximately equal?
Would a concern about poor performance require the same evidential journey as an allegation of racism?
Would concerns about an employee’s conduct be subjected to the same scrutiny as concerns about organisational culture?
Would the testimony of someone reporting psychological harm be granted the same credibility as the system explaining why that harm could not have occurred?
Or would I see dramatically different drops?
That is not simply a question about racism.
It is a question about power, credibility and accountability.
Accountability and certainty: when “racism is like ketchup” reverses the problem
Someone recently responded to one of my posts with a meme suggesting:
“Racism is like ketchup. You can put it on everything.”
The implication is familiar.
We see racism too readily.
We attribute too many things to race.
We have become too quick to reach for racism as an explanation.
Of course, we should remain curious about alternative explanations.
The Six Stages Framework is not an invitation to abandon evidence, complexity or critical thinking.
But I wonder whether the ketchup argument can obscure an opposite problem.
What if, in many situations, racism is actually subject to a higher threshold of proof than competing explanations?
What if we are so concerned about falsely identifying racism that we pay insufficient attention to the consequences of repeatedly failing to identify it?
These are two different kinds of error.
Seeing racism where it is not operating is one possible error.
Failing to recognise racism where it is operating is another.
Yet public discussion can sometimes behave as though the first is the only mistake worth guarding against.
So perhaps the question should not simply be:
“Are people too quick to call something racist?”
We should also ask:
“How much evidence do we require before we are prepared even to consider racism as part of the explanation?”
And:
“Would we require the same amount of evidence for another explanation?”
Accountability and certainty: two truths can coexist
This is particularly important in relation to Professor Arday.
There were questions concerning aspects of his academic work and qualifications which institutions considered sufficiently serious to investigate.
That matters.
It should not simply be dismissed.
But it does not settle a second question:
Was the nature, scale, framing or amplification of the scrutiny also racialised?
Associated Press reported that Professor Arday was the subject of 289 articles within 22 days, describing a wider debate involving academic standards, media scrutiny and systemic racism.
Both questions can exist.
There may have been legitimate matters requiring investigation.
AND
race may have influenced who became suspicious, how the story expanded, how much attention it attracted, how credibility was assessed, how much benefit of the doubt was extended and what happened when the individual became symbolic of something much larger.
Recognising the second possibility does not require denying the first.
Nor does racism have to be the sole cause of an event before race can be relevant to understanding what happened.
That is where binary thinking repeatedly fails us.
It is also why the SSF asks us to look beyond isolated outcomes and examine the quieter patterns and movements surrounding them — something explored further in my earlier reflection on the psychology of escalation and why harm rarely begins at the extreme.
Accountability and certainty: when suspicion spreads
Professor Reddie’s account brings another dimension into view.
Why should questions about Professor Arday’s appointment result in another Black professor being asked whether he was a diversity hire?
His account has subsequently also been reported in discussion of the wider consequences of the Arday controversy.
That movement is psychologically significant.
An allegation concerning one individual appears to become a lens through which another individual belonging to the same racialised group is viewed.
The question moves from:
“Was this particular appointment appropriate?”
towards something much broader:
“Can we trust the legitimacy of Black professors appointed to prestigious universities?”
We do not need access to the internal intentions of every person involved to believe that such a pattern deserves examination.
And perhaps this is precisely where an excessive demand for certainty can become disabling.
If we believe we cannot ask questions about racialisation until we can prove the conscious intentions of everybody involved, some forms of racism become almost impossible to examine.
Structural and systemic processes do not always announce themselves through explicitly racist statements.
Sometimes they become visible through patterns of suspicion, scrutiny, credibility, opportunity, protection and consequence.
Accountability and certainty: where is the accountability spotlight pointing?
This brings me to the second idea I have been developing this week:
the accountability spotlight.
When something goes wrong, where do we instinctively shine it?
Too often, organisations point the spotlight downwards.
Towards the individual.
Something goes wrong.
→ Attention turns towards the individual.
→ The individual is examined.
→ And somehow the system doing the examining disappears from view.
Consider a child who is struggling to attend school.
The accountability spotlight can quickly turn towards the parents:
Why aren’t they getting their child into school?
But what happens when we move the spotlight?
What provision has been offered?
What is the child communicating through their non-attendance?
Has the environment become psychologically or physically intolerable?
What adjustments have been made?
What needs remain unmet?
What responsibility does the system itself carry?
This does not mean parents never have responsibilities.
It means accountability should not stop with the person who has the least power within the system.
This idea connects closely with the SSF shift from symptoms towards systems: looking beyond the visible behaviour of an individual and asking what conditions around that person may be helping to produce what we see.
Accountability and certainty in workplaces
The same movement can occur in workplaces.
An employee becomes overwhelmed.
Perhaps they are neurodivergent.
Perhaps they are experiencing significant psychological distress.
Perhaps their performance changes.
The spotlight turns towards the individual:
Why can’t this employee cope?
Why has their performance deteriorated?
What is wrong with them?
But another set of questions is available:
What is happening in the environment in which they are being asked to cope?
What has the organisation noticed?
What adjustments or safeguards were considered?
What responsibility does leadership carry for the psychological conditions surrounding that employee?
The Six Stages Framework increasingly asks us to pay attention not only to individual behaviour but to the conditions created around people.
My reflection on human encounters and psychological safety considered a similar question:
What becomes possible — or impossible — for people when they encounter us and the environments we create?
Accountability requires the same systems curiosity.
Accountability and certainty in maternity care: when individual stories reveal a system
The recent Ockenden Review into maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust provides a sobering example.
The independent review examined more than 2,500 family cases and involved individual meetings with more than 500 families.
The government’s response described women being ignored or having complaints dismissed, missed opportunities to identify deterioration, and a culture in which parents and junior staff could be silenced.
For an individual mother, however, the experience may initially have looked very different.
She raises a concern.
She is reassured.
She questions what happened.
Her experience remains an individual story.
Then another family speaks.
And another.
And another.
Eventually, what once appeared to be isolated experiences becomes visible as a pattern.
The subsequent National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation found that women across England were too often not listened to, heard or believed and called for systemic reform with accountability, equity and anti-racist practice at its core.
That leads me to another accountability question:
Why must so many individual experiences accumulate before a system becomes willing to examine itself?
At what point does the road to certainty become too long?
Accountability and certainty: the Post Office spotlight
We have seen a similar accountability pattern elsewhere.
The Post Office Horizon scandal provides one of the clearest examples of what can happen when a system retains credibility while individuals are required to prove that the system itself is wrong.
The Horizon IT system recorded false accounting shortfalls. Action was then taken against individual sub-postmasters, including demands for repayment, contract termination and prosecution. The statutory inquiry was subsequently established to examine the implementation and failings surrounding the system.
For years, the accountability spotlight pointed towards the individuals.
The system retained its authority.
The individual was required to demonstrate that the system was wrong.
That distinction matters.
Because sometimes the person experiencing harm does not merely carry the consequences.
They are also given the burden of proving the existence of the system that produced them.
Accountability and certainty: how much evidence is enough?
This question reaches far beyond racism.
Department for Education data published alongside revised Relationships, Sex and Health Education guidance found that, in the previous week, 37% of pupils aged 11–19 had heard comments that made them concerned about the safety of girls, while 54% had witnessed comments they would describe as misogynistic.
At what point do figures such as these become sufficient for action?
How many children need to report something?
How many employees?
How many Black academics?
How many mothers?
How many sub-postmasters?
How many individual experiences have to accumulate before we stop asking only:
“Can you prove this?”
and begin asking:
“What might this pattern be telling us?”
Accountability and certainty: uncertainty is not neutral
I am not arguing that we should abandon evidence.
Quite the opposite.
Good psychological thinking requires us to examine evidence carefully, tolerate ambiguity and remain open to changing our minds.
The SSF Visual Psychological Formulations are deliberately designed around enquiry rather than predetermined conclusions.
But evidence and absolute certainty are not the same thing.
In safeguarding and risk assessment, we do not normally wait until harm becomes inevitable before paying attention to credible warning signs.
We notice patterns.
We assess risk.
We gather information.
We remain curious.
We review.
We take proportionate action.
Perhaps organisational accountability requires something similar.
We may not know everything.
We may later revise our interpretation.
Competing explanations may remain possible.
But uncertainty does not automatically absolve us from responsibility for what we can already see.
Perhaps accountability should begin before certainty ends.
Accountability and certainty through the SSF lens
The Six Stages Framework asks us to pay attention not simply to what people believe, but to movement.
Awareness matters.
But awareness is not the destination.
Someone can recognise inequality while remaining reluctant to interpret what they are seeing.
Someone can acknowledge disproportionality while continually postponing judgement.
Someone can recognise that something feels wrong while waiting for a level of certainty that complex real-world behaviour may never provide.
This is where the White Privilege Fence becomes useful.
The fence is not always denial.
Sometimes the fence sounds like:
“I can see it, but I cannot be sure.”
And sometimes that is entirely appropriate.
But if we remain there indefinitely, another question becomes necessary:
What evidence would actually allow me to move?
If we cannot answer that question, perhaps our uncertainty is no longer simply intellectual caution.
Perhaps it has become a place of safety.
A vantage point from which we can continue observing injustice without assuming responsibility for responding to it.
Accountability and certainty: moving the spotlight
So my reflection this week is not that we should become less careful.
It is that we should become equally careful in all directions.
When someone alleges racism, discrimination, misogyny, institutional failure or psychological harm, examine the claim.
But also examine the system.
Examine the response.
Examine whose testimony is readily believed.
Examine whose motives are questioned.
Examine what evidence is being demanded.
Examine the alternative explanations that were accepted with less scrutiny.
And ask whether the accountability spotlight is pointing towards those with the greatest power to prevent harm — or simply towards those upon whom it is easiest to place responsibility.
Perhaps accountability should begin before certainty ends.
And perhaps one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves is not simply:
“Am I certain?”
but:
“Given what I know now, what am I responsible for noticing, questioning or doing?”
Accountability and certainty: this week’s lens check
As you think about your workplace, school, organisation or community, consider:
- Where is your accountability spotlight currently pointing?
- Whose behaviour is being scrutinised most closely — and whose is escaping equivalent scrutiny?
- What threshold of evidence do you require before you are prepared to consider racism or another systemic explanation?
- Is that threshold the same one you apply to competing explanations?
- When you say, “I don’t know enough yet,” what additional evidence would genuinely be enough?
- Are some of your organisation’s roads to certainty considerably longer than others?
- Is uncertainty helping you remain curious — or helping you remain where you are?
- What proportionate action could you take before absolute certainty is available?
Because sometimes the greatest barrier to accountability is not that we cannot see what is happening.
It is that we have decided we must be certain before what we see creates any responsibility to act.
And some roads to certainty have been made so long that we may never arrive.
Part of the SSF Weekly Reflections series by Dr Shungu M’gadzah, exploring human behaviour, leadership, inclusion, psychological safety and systems change through the Six Stages Framework.
What are you looking at — and how does it look through the SSF lens?
