BAFTA's: Power, Paradox and Presence
I’ve been sitting with the 2026 BBC BAFTA racism incident quietly (search online for commentary).
Not because I don’t have feelings about it. I do. What happened to Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo on that stage was another cut in a lifetime of cuts. The particular cruelty was not only the word. It was watching the empathy in that room flow toward everyone except the two men who had just been harmed by it.
I’ve been quiet because I’ve learned that there is a difference between reacting to an incident and listening to what it’s telling us.
And what I hear underneath this one is a leadership story. A threshold story.
In my work, I talk about the Threshold as the space between who you were and who you are becoming. The place where old identities shed and new ones haven’t yet formed. Where you are asked to stay present through the unravelling.
What most leadership frameworks don’t account for is this: for Black leaders and leaders of the global majority, the threshold is not only a personal passage. It is a structure that has been built around us. We are born into it. We are taught from childhood that composure is not a choice but a condition of safety. That anger, however justified, will cost more than it returns. That we must absorb, adapt, and continue.
Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo did not choose their threshold that night. They were placed at it, on a world stage, in front of a watching industry.
And they held it. With a presence that most leadership programmes will never be able to teach.
This is where Power, Paradox and Presence converge.
The Power dynamic was visible to anyone paying attention. A system that required two Black men to manage their own harm gracefully while the room processed its discomfort around them.
The Paradox is one we do not talk about enough. The mandatory resilience we celebrate in leaders of colour, the composure, the professionalism, the grace, consumes the very interior space where creativity and innovation live. You cannot ask people to spend their cognitive and somatic resources on survival and then wonder why organisations struggle to access the full range of their thinking. The load is not neutral. It has a cost. And that cost falls unevenly.
The Presence is what those two men demonstrated. The capacity to stay conscious inside an impossible moment. To feel what was happening in the body and not be destroyed by it. To lead from the threshold rather than despite it.
That is not resilience in the way the word is usually meant. It is something older and harder won. It is a form of intelligence that cannot be learned from a book or delivered in a workshop. It is forged through generations of navigating exactly this.
In Leadership Legacy, I argue that the leaders our world most needs right now are those who have been required to develop this capacity. Not because suffering is a qualification, but because the ability to hold complexity, stay present under pressure, and lead without losing yourself is precisely what this moment in history is asking of all of us.
The question for organisations is whether they are willing to stop requiring that intelligence to justify itself before they listen to it.
Leadership Legacy: A Manifesto to Create a Mindful Future and a Thriving Planet is published by Wiley in 2026.
