Active Bystander Training: Why Knowing Something Is Wrong Isn’t Enough

6 days ago

4 min read

One of the things I hear most often in Active Bystander Training is: “I knew it wasn’t right. I just didn’t know what to say.”

And honestly, that is the gap we’re trying to close.

Most people already know that discrimination, harassment and harmful behaviour are wrong. The harder bit is knowing what to do when something actually happens.

- Do I challenge it there and then?

- What if I make things worse?

- What if they’re more senior than me?

- What if I freeze and only think of what I should have said afterwards?

Telling people to speak up is one thing. Giving them the confidence and practical tools to do it is something else.

The conversations happening outside work come into work too

Over the last year, I’ve noticed more organisations asking us for help with difficult conversations and Active Bystander Training. When I started Be What You See, I thought most of our work would sit within health, education and sport.

Now we’re working with councils, museums, art galleries, community organisations and commercial businesses too. Different workplaces, but often the same challenge. People are navigating increasingly difficult conversations around race, identity, belonging and discrimination and those conversations don’t disappear when we walk into work.

I was reminded of that personally recently when someone told me to “go back to your own country.”

I hadn’t had those words directed at me since I was a child.

In the moment, I didn’t come out with a perfect response. I simply asked: “What do you mean by that?”

And then: “What country do you think is my own?”

That conversation reminded me why I use questions so much in training. Sometimes asking someone to explain what they mean brings the assumption sitting underneath a comment right into the open. It gives us something to challenge. And it also shows why being an active bystander doesn’t always mean having a big confrontation.

This is not awareness training. It is behaviour change training. It is behaviour change training

This sentence has become really important to how I talk about our work at Be What You See.

This is not awareness training. It is behaviour change training.

People can know all the right things and still not feel able to act in the moment.

So our training looks at what happens between recognising something isn’t right and actually doing something about it.

● Can you spot the behaviour early?

● Can you think about the impact, not just what someone intended?

● Can you recognise the role you might have in that situation?

● And, most importantly, do you know what your options are?

We teach the 5Ds because there isn’t one perfect response.

Sometimes you challenge something directly, interrupt or distract, ask someone else to step in and sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is check in with the person afterwards.

The point isn’t to turn everyone into the bravest person in the room. It’s to help people feel like they have choices.

What our impact report told us

This year, seeing the impact of that work written down was quite emotional.

Between September 2024 and August 2025, we delivered 6,210 hours of Active Bystander learning to more than 1,135 people.

If you’d told me five years ago that, in the space of one year, Be What You See would help that many people feel better equipped to step in when something wasn’t right, I honestly don’t think I would have believed you.

And there were a few figures that really stayed with me:

● 98% of participants increased their confidence in recognising microaggressions

● 95% reported increased confidence to act

● 85% left with a clear intention to take action

But what I really loved was reading what people said they were actually going to do:

● Speak up earlier

● Check in with colleagues

● Share the 5Ds with their team

● Think more about how their own actions might be perceived

One participant simply said: “Implement it daily in my practice.”

That’s the bit that matters to me. Because behaviour change isn’t usually one huge, dramatic moment. It’s lots of smaller ones.

Someone asking a question instead of staying quiet, checking in, challenging a comment a little earlier or deciding not to laugh something off because everyone else did.

Those things can feel small, but across hundreds of people and lots of different workplaces, they add up.

And that’s why I still feel hopeful

There are times when the wider conversations happening around us feel pretty bleak.

But then I go into a training room and people turn up wanting to learn. They ask difficult questions. They admit when they don’t know something. They talk about situations they wish they’d handled differently. And they practice what they might do next time.

That gives me hope.

We can’t control every conversation happening outside our workplaces. But we can help people feel more prepared for the ones happening in front of them. We can give people practical ways to challenge discrimination. We can help colleagues support one another.

And we can make it less likely that harmful behaviour goes unchallenged until it simply becomes “how things are done around here”.

That, for me, is what Active Bystander Training is about. Not creating perfect people or perfect workplaces. Just helping more of us feel able to do something when we see something that isn’t right.

Because awareness is where it starts. Behaviour change is where the difference happens.