Zombie CEOs and zombie organizations

David Pilgrim posts….

Recently a group of BPS members have set up a petition to remove Sarb Bajwa. In typical high handed fashion (or was it just panic over the Society’s dwindling finances?) he  proposed shutting down valued qualifications without consultation. This is par for the course. From the start of his reign at the top he has held the membership in contempt. When we at BPSWatch.com began our campaign in 2020 to expose the corruption and dysfunction in the BPS, his opening gambit was to go the Board of Trustees and ask them what he should do with members who kept pestering him with complaints. This was a pointed reference to our multiple letters, asking legitimate questions, which were being blocked and ignored. We were threatened with legal action and told that we were breaching the Society’s dignity at work policy. It was clear that disaffection in the ranks of ordinary members was seen as an irritation and threat to managerial interests and not an opportunity for dialogue, quality improvement or organizational learning. And as events were to prove, and over 80 posts on BPSWatch later, the BPS was certainly in need of both of these. 

Bajwa’s position has been nothing but consistent: in his view members are an impediment to unbridled managerial discretion and power. An example of this irrational authority was of his co-authoring a paper in Lancet Psychiatry about mental health policy (Bajwa, Boyce and Burn, 2018). What was his intellectual authority for putting his name to the paper on behalf of the BPS? The answer is that he had none, but a few of the Society’s members, had they been consulted, could have shared their wisdom from years of research and practice. Then we had the £6 million Change Programme. Did he consult experts in the membership on organizational change? Were targets properly defined and communicated? Has that enormous spend subsequently been evaluated properly? Have members got a better service via a streamlined Customer Relations Management System? The answers are all ‘no’.  And then there are all the letters sent to him by members, including those multi-signed. What did he do? The answer is that simply ignored them. What did he do with follow up prompts? The answer is that he simply ignored them.

Bajwa is a very clever man but his talents have not been put to work in the interests of the membership. To be fair he has been busy. He had his column with its pearls of wisdom to write for the ever biddable Psychologist until that went silent after his largely covered-up suspension. He also had to work hard to save his skin during that period. His subsequently imprisoned PA, who stole more than £70k of members’ cash for a year and a half (“A Kid in a candy shop” was her hapless comment at sentencing) had been given the blessing for the phoney expense forms being signed off under Bajwa’s nose. He wasn’t keeping his eye on the Finance Director either, who was reassuring him that, following an earlier fraud, things had been tightened up. At this point, Bajwa needed, and he found, the skills of Houdini. Off went the similarly suspended FD, setting a trend of virtually an annual turnover in that role ever since. This pattern itself reveals the financial and managerial anomie of an organization that is lurching towards bankruptcy (in more ways than one). To this day the members of the BPS have been given no account of this period of corruption. It has been buried, like so many of the Society’s murky recent secrets, by mendacity from the top, the antics of Bajwa’s favourites, the Comms Directorate, and – unfortunately – indifference from below. 

When cornered, Bajwa always has another card to play: he asks to see the complainant for a chat. This act of noblesse oblige puts him in control. Does he apologize? The answer is probably ‘no’. Does he bullshit? The answer is probably ‘yes’. If the ‘come in for a personal chat’ gambit fails, another jape up his sleeve is to delegate the need to apologize to an underling. A good example here was in relation to the failure of the BPS to deal with the scandal surrounding the work of H.J. Eysenck (Pilgrim, 2023).

In December 2018 David Marks (then the editor of the British Journal of Health Psychology) sent a letter prompting Bajwa to do something about a matter that had been ignored by the BPS since the 1990s when the psychiatrist Antony Pelosi blew the whistle on Eysenck’s work. Bajwa, as is par for the course, ignored the letter. After his return from suspension (October 2021), he received a prompt from Marks. Three years [sic] had gone by. Bajwa still did not reply. However, presumably he nudged a subordinate with one of many Orwellian titles in the BPS (‘Head of Quality Assurance & Standards’) – Dr Rachel Scudamore – who replied to Marks thus:

“We accept that a failure to respond is discourteous and that it would leave you in a position of not knowing what action has been taken. I can only apologise on behalf of the Society for this error on our part.”

‘We’ presumably is a coded euphemism for ‘my rude and indifferent boss’; Scudamore herself had nothing to apologise for. Why did Bajwa not send the letter himself with a personal apology? After all, the original letter and prompt were not sent to Scudamore but to him. In light of his haughty contempt for members noted above, the answer is fairly obvious to any observer with an ounce of nous.

To be fair, Bajwa has only got away with this brass-neck management style because of complicity. He returned after almost a year off on his full and substantial salary, a weak smile on his face standing next to the woman the Board had used sleight of hand to install as President when the whole Presidential team of 3 disappeared in three months whilst he was “gardening”. The Board of Trustees could have sacked him on the spot given his parlous performance but they did not. There are reasons for that which are not best described as his “blamelessness” and may be more to do with his holding their dodgy processes over the BPS. The BPS members, alerted to it by numerous reports from us in BPSWatch, could have risen up en masse and demanded his resignation but they did not. Maybe they are still getting the organization and managers they deserve. Either way the BPS is not a membership-led or membership-responsive organization and it is still being run by a morally bankrupt group of leaders. The survival this CEO reflects the history and continuation of a group of appointed and elected Trustees, who clearly have not understood the scandalous state of affairs they have both created and continue to defend. Or if they do understand they have not cared. The caveat here is the fates of elected Presidents along the way, so many resigning before their full term in the team was complete. A hitherto BPS stalwart (and past-President) David Murphy noted that, in 2022, only one of the recent past 6 presidents completed their full three-year term. He resigned as Vice President when he could no longer go along with the Board’s corporate position and issued a shocking disclosure letter citing his misgivings about governance on his X(Twitter) page, having suffered bland misrepresentations in The Psychologist . Now, however, the sudden resignation of the first ever independent Chair of the Board of Trustees might prove a watershed. We do not know the real reasons why he resigned – yet.

The Board at the time did not take responsibility for stopping the fraud or holding those responsible for it to account or for keeping the membership informed about its sources and aftermath. They also went on to support the kangaroo court expulsion of a whistleblowing elected President, with a casual contempt for natural justice. That is a saga which continues at present in legal jurisdictions.

Of great importance is the fact that poor governance has enabled policies which fail the criteria of the BPS mission and are at odds with child protection. 

The first is the extant and unrevised policy on gender, which is clearly out of sync with the Cass recommendations. The statement issued by the BPS in response to the Cass interim report is nothing short of lamentable. The second is the extant and unrevised policy on memory and the law (see here and previous posts), which limits relevant psychological evidence to false positives in cases of those accused of historical child sexual abuse. This leaves survivors of abuse silenced by their deletion from what is considered to be legitimate psychological research. Both these topic areas, gender and memory, are central to conceptual, research and practice dimensions of psychology. 

The CEO, Sarb Bajwa, and those who were responsible for the above picture of organizational dysfunction and its policies that fundamentally undermine child safeguarding, ought to be ashamed of themselves. The evidence to date is that the required shame will not be forthcoming. 

Bajwa, S. Boyce, N. and Burn, W. (2018) Researching, practising and debating mental health care. Lancet Psychiatry 5, 12, p954

Pilgrim, D. (2023). Verdicts on Hans Eysenck and the fluxing context of British psychology. History of the Human Sciences, 36(3-4), 83-104.