What raising a child and media diversity have in common - bring in the grandparents

My son was born in Beijing almost three years ago.

My sister-in-law was living with my wife and me in China at the time and was a great support at the hospital when my wife went into labour – but she did not have children. So when Moses Safari Ryder was born there was a sudden realization that none of us really knew what we were doing and we were a long way from home. (“Safari” by the way is the name given in Swahili when you are born when travelling or away from home).

But we needn’t have worried because my mother jumped on a plane and less than 24 hours later was in Beijing imparting all the knowledge she had gained from successfully raising two boy.

Three months later when my mother went back to the UK another sister-in-law appeared – who had a four-year-old daughter. Her knowledge and experience of raising a child made life infinitely easier.

If you think of a family as a business then what my mother and second-sister-law provided is a concept called “institutional memory”. They had both gone through the process before; they knew the mistakes to avoid because they had seen them before. They knew the shortcuts. They knew what should cause alarm and what not to worry about.

Whether you are trying to raise a son in a small family or roll out a new policy in a multinational corporation institutional memory is incredibly important. It can be the difference between a business repeating a costly mistake or knowing best practice that has worked in the past.

However when it comes to diversity in the media industry it can feel like we have no institutional memory.

We consistently repeat the same mistakes and fail to capitalize on the very things that have worked so well before.

Far too many people act as if the push for diversity in the television industry started when Lenny Henry gave a speech at Bafta in 2014.

The fact is I cannot remember a time in my 20+ year career when women, BAME (Black Asian and Minority Ethnic) and disabled people have not been actively fighting for a bigger place at the media table to tell their stories and have their voices heard.

When I talk to senior industry figures in their fifties, sixties and even seventies who have been at the frontline of trying to increase diversity in television I am amazed how consistently they feel that the present policies rolled out by broadcasters are either repeating the same mistakes or failing to capitalize on what has happened before.

These are not old curmudgeons who think “everything was better in my day”. Invariably these are people who can offer a relevant critique on what broadcasters are doing right and what they are doing wrong.

I cannot tell you how often a conversation about a new diversity policy will start like this:

“…the new policy initiative is OK but it is similar to what we tried in ’95 and where it went wrong was XX so if I were in their shoes I would try YY”.

Or they will say

“…I don’t know why the broadcasters are dismissing that policy approach it worked perfectly well in the 80’s and with a bit of tweaking I think we might have something”.

The sad fact is far too few of these people are being consulted about the various diversity policies that the different broadcasters role out every year. We lose this institutional memory at our peril and the fact is with increased freelance work, staff turnover and the end of jobs for life the situation is only going to get worse.

And so here is MY diversity policy suggestion:

Can one of the UK’s top media universities create a diversity institutional memory brain trust?

This would comprise of eight to ten key people who have worked in the UK film and television for the last four to five decade and have experience of diversity policies over time.

They could meet two or three times a year and critique the broadcasters’, Ofcom’s (TV and radio regulator) and BFI’s (British Film Institute) different approaches to diversity. They could offer possible suggestions as to how to improve what is working based on their own intuitional memory and maybe suggest why some policies should be scrapped. This can then be put in a report and published by the academic institution for the whole industry to learn from.

The idea of a “Film and TV Diversity Memory Bank” is something I floated last time I was in London with a few senior execs in their fifties and sixties and I have at least three people who are eager to make this happen.

My parenting and son’s life benefited massively from a little institutional memory.

Isn’t it about time diversity in the TV industry did too?