From Bedtime Chats to Business Strategy: How One Leader Is Fuelling Equitable Change
A candid conversation with Jeff Dodds, Chief Operating Officer at Virgin Media O2
by Suhlle Ahn
One of the beauties of the Equity Sequence™ is that it can be practiced by anyone at any level of any organization. In fact, a recurring Tidal Equality theme—and the idea behind the name—is a wave of change that starts deep below the surface.
A ripple, however small, generates ripple effects. So even if you have power enough to create only a ripple, you do it in the hope that it will gather momentum and widen into a wave.
At the same time, one of the harsh realities about inequality is that it, too, relies on momentum to build on itself. Inequities, rooted in uneven distributions of power, compound over time and coalesce into a fixed pattern. It can take that much more energy from a fresh power source to dislodge these.
And not everyone at every level of every organization has the authority, status, or clout to draw extra energy from their station.
But—to milk this metaphor while I’m on it—I talked to someone in May who does: Jeff Dodds, Chief Operating Officer at Virgin Media (the interview was carried out before Virgin Media merged with O2 to become Virgin Media O2), who is making it his mission to accelerate equitable change with a seismic push.
Jeff Dodds and Suhlle Ahn
And he’s using the Equity Sequence™ to do it, rolling out the training across Virgin Media.
Here’s a sampling of what he said to me about its effects so far:
“The results we’re seeing in our business are nothing short of staggering. We’re massive fans here.”
And this:
“I probably get an email a day or a handful of emails a week from various people in the business saying, “I’m doing Equity Sequence™ training right now, and I want to tell you, it’s fascinating. It’s something that is absolutely going to change the way I work.”
Since Jeff first tried the training at the urging of his associate, Victoria Whitehouse, long-term practitioner in the DEI space and former Inclusion Lead at Virgin Media, who brought it to his attention as a cutting-edge concept in DEI thinking, the training has been rolled out to over 2,000 employees, including all c-suite leaders and board members.
“I will be honest with you,” Jeff acknowledged. “Before I went through the training, I didn’t really know what to expect.”
“What I found in the five filters or lenses of the Sequence™ was something incredibly thought-provoking. It made me really reflect on some of the big decisions we take in our business and whether they’re constructed with equity in mind.”
When I asked Jeff how he thinks Equity Sequence™ differs from other DEI methods he’s been involved with to-date, he echoed what other practitioners have pointed out: while unconscious bias training has its merits—illuminating, for example, the ways in which we all have biases that we don’t realize we carry,
“What it’s not,” he said, “is a process, or an architecture through which you make decisions. And that’s been the key difference for us.”
In fact, it was based on feedback they had received—that unconscious bias training, however informative, was not driving the kind of behavioural change they wanted to see—that they began to look for something that might.
But to seek behavioural change throughout an entire organization—and a large one at that—is to understand that the practice cannot stop at the top. Nor, at the same time, can its potential as a game-changer in reshaping behaviour and action be realized unless there is genuine buy-in from participants at all levels.
As much as Jeff might find the Equity Sequence™ thought-provoking, if it doesn’t spark similar interest in the layer below him, or the layer below that, the wave breaks. You hit a wall.
“I have teams who make the more specific decisions,” Jeff explained. “So when it went down to the next layer, I really hoped they’d find it as thought-provoking as I did. Well, not only did they find it thought-provoking, they really started to use it to change the way they constructed campaigns or ran the business.”
As one concrete example, Jeff told me about one of his proudest moments, when he spoke to his department heads who have a complex role, who, in discussing what they were most focused on for the coming year at their end-of-year review, said it was ensuring that all their big decisions be focused through the lens of Equity Sequence™, and that they make all those decisions with equity in mind.
As Jeff’s recent flood of emails likewise indicates, he is seeing similar signs of enthusiasm and adoption all around.
“We’re still rolling out the training, but we’re seeing some really positive progress. It’s in the language; in the vernacular. People are talking about it. They’re now making decisions with equity in mind.”
I appreciated his initial qualification, “I really hoped.” It acknowledges the realistic nature of rolling out a program at scale. If the aim is earnest engagement, not just pro forma acceptance, it’s possible not everyone will take up the banner with the same degree of passion.
And that is okay. Because real change expects more heavy lifting from natural changemakers in the world. That may not be everyone. But it can be anyone, at any level.
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The enthusiastic reception Jeff is seeing at Virgin Media magnifies on a wider scale what Tidal Equality has been hearing from individual learners on a smaller scale:
First, that Equity Sequence™ draws strength from its application at the moment of decision-making. Like a conscientious super-ego (without the Freudian overtones), it asks you to catch yourself, challenge yourself, and second-guess your initial impulse.
Second, but by no means less critically, the simplicity and common-sense nature of what the Sequence™ asks anyone to do is a huge part of its persuasiveness, appeal, and effectiveness.
“I think the training speaks for itself,” Jeff said, when I asked him about the skeptics or cynics, who often are quiet about it, as he himself suggested.
“Provided they don’t sit there twiddling their thumbs; if they actually engage in the training, I would defy most people to go through that two-and-a-half hours and not to come off the program and do something different. Even if those leaders ask two of those questions that they didn’t ask before, they’re going to make some different decisions that are more progressive and more representative.”
I suspected I already knew the answer to my next question but asked it anyway:
What did Jeff see as the most pressing inequity at the business?
“The area where everyone finds it the most complex to make progress,” he answered, “is representation in the decision-making areas at the most senior levels of the business.”
It echoed what large organizations and enterprises in all sectors, public and private, have been starting to confront in this moment of growing awareness—namely, the lack of gender, racial, and socio-economic diversity in positions of greatest power. Short of flattening all hierarchies in the world and in engaging in flights of utopian fancy, you have to find a way to open the corridors of power to those traditionally denied entry, without resorting to a mere ticking of boxes, or gestures that fail to transform the underlying culture.
In a perfect world, Jeff acknowledged, they wouldn’t need the Equity Sequence™.
“Of all the things I’ve seen,” Jeff said, “Equity Sequence™ is the most effective way of asking a group of leaders who aren’t truly representative or reflective of the customer base to try and make decisions that are.”
He pondered whether it was reasonable, for example, to ask a middle-class white man to put himself in the shoes in a Black customer.
“I don’t have that background,” he said. “But by forcing me to go and find the answers; to ask people who do perhaps understand better; to talk to our employee networks to better educate myself—it may not be a perfect answer, but it’s going to be a much better answer than if I try it myself.”
Since Jeff identified himself as middle-class, white, and male, I asked if he had a story about how he became interested in issues of inequality, since so often it’s from personal experience of feeling marginalized that many (including myself) take an interest.
“I think I have many stories,” he said. “And I talk about these at work.”
One involved major back surgeries that temporarily created disability for him, requiring special accommodations. He has since become very involved in disability rights and he sits on the board of The Valuable 500, an organization that has signed up 500 global businesses, which all have committed to put disability on their board agendas.
“When I was growing up,” Jeff also shared, ”my dad was affected with mental health issues from retiring early. And my brother came out as a gay man in the mid-1990s here in the UK and experienced a lot of discrimination that he hadn’t previously from coming out as being gay.”
From his many years as a senior leader in business, as well, he has seen how inequity and inequality can create hostile and difficult work environments for people.
“So I guess I've experienced it personally, and I've experienced it as a leader in business. And it's an area I'm incredibly passionate about. And I see it through many different lenses.”
“I also have two young boys,” he added, “a twelve and a nine-year-old. And the thing that gives me great hope is the openness of the conversation with them. The questions they come home from school with, to talk to me about. There’s so much more visibility; so much more transparency; so much less apparent prejudice in the way they talk about the topic. That gives me great hope for future generations.”
But, he said, he thinks the challenge for adults is to learn at the rate of these younger generations, whose natural education about inequality is bound to surpass ours; to not slow them down for the sake of operating at our own rate.
He spoke of a recent—to me, quite poignant—exchange with his older son.
“I found myself with my twelve-year-old, putting him to bed and saying good night, and as I was leaving and turning his light off, he said, “Why do you think there’s so much discrimination in the world?”
Sitting at the edge of the bed (having realized that, in this proverbial parenting moment, you let bedtime slide and turn the light back on), he had a 30- to 40-minute conversation about what his son was learning at school; about different types of discrimination, both visible vs. invisible.
He felt proud of the fact that his son had asked the question. And that they were learning about it at school and learning what they could do about it.
“I’d just quite like to hand things over to them in better shape than it is today,” he summed up.
I mentioned not having children myself (just cats—one of which decided to make himself at home at the window behind me, just in Jeff’s line vision, to his amusement, in now-classic zoom fashion), but I understood the sentiment.
Yet I confess, the remark left me both heartened and worried.
Worried, because I tend toward a more cyclical view of human history. And as I look at the today around me—most particularly (perhaps myopically) at America, which I call home—every sign of progress toward greater parity and social inclusion for historically marginalized groups seems matched by some equal or larger specter of impending system failure, motivated by people whose clear intention is to preserve power for the historically advantaged.
I confess, too, that as an Asian American in my 50s, old enough to have seen the trajectory of my particular group’s fortunes rise and suddenly ebb; and come under threat with the onset of COVID anti-Asian scapegoating; my confidence that we can make enough progress quickly enough to hand things over in better shape for the next generation has been shaken.
At the same time, I’m heartened, because as much danger as I sense, I sense a simultaneous surge of determination and resolve from many with more influence than I’m likely to know in my lifetime, to resist the signs of backsliding. And their commitment tells me that, as much as some are trying to pull us back, others are working furiously to push us forward.
Jeff is clearly one of them.
“We can’t go backwards,” he said. “We have an obligation, as human beings, as leaders, to make sure that whilst we’re in charge, on our watch, we make progress. And to the ability I can make a difference, I flatly refuse to let us go backwards.”
“We have an obligation to educate ourselves,” he added. “To go away, read more, watch more, talk to more people. Because it’s only in the process of education that you truly understand how crazy some of the things we do, and how archaic some of the ways we work, are. That’s why we’re so keen to roll out Equity Sequence™ as quickly as we can across the whole organization. Because we really believe it has the potential to be transformational.”
