The View From the Other Side of the Table

Most board directors experience policy from the inside: drafting it, defending it, and occasionally amending it. I experienced it from the outside — as the leader of a five-year campaign to overturn a rule in professional boxing that had stood for nearly ninety years, and which prevented boxers with Type 1 diabetes from holding a professional licence in the UK. That campaign succeeded, and the first such licence in British boxing history was granted.

Spending five years pressing against an institution teaches you a great deal about how institutions actually work — where they are strong, where they are brittle, and where good governance quietly gives way to habit. These are the lessons I believe every sports board should take from that experience.

Lesson One: Know Why Your Rules Exist

The most striking discovery of the campaign was how difficult it was to find anyone who could explain the original reasoning behind the ban. The rule predated almost everyone involved in administering it. It persisted not because it was regularly examined and reaffirmed, but because no one had ever been required to justify it.

Boards should treat this as a warning. Every rulebook accumulates provisions whose original rationale has faded. A disciplined board schedules regular reviews of its most consequential policies and asks a simple question of each: would we adopt this today, on current evidence? Where the answer is uncertain, that policy belongs on the agenda — not in a drawer.

Lesson Two: Evidence Beats Advocacy

Early in the campaign, passion was abundant and progress was scarce. The turning point came when we changed our currency from argument to evidence. We engaged medical specialists, gathered data on modern diabetes management, and built protocols that answered every legitimate safety concern in concrete, operational terms.

For boards, the lesson runs in both directions. When petitioners arrive with emotion alone, a board is right to be cautious. But when they arrive with credible evidence and expert support, the board's duty is to engage with that evidence seriously — not to retreat behind precedent. The quality of a board's decisions is ultimately determined by the quality of the questions it is willing to entertain.

Lesson Three: Process Is a Feature, Not a Flaw

It would be easy to tell the story of the campaign as five years of institutional obstruction. It would also be wrong. Much of that time was consumed by processes that, however slow, were doing exactly what governance processes should do: testing claims, consulting experts, and ensuring that any change could withstand scrutiny.

What boards should take from this is not that slowness is a virtue, but that transparency about process is. The hardest periods of the campaign were not the ones where we were told no — they were the ones where we were told nothing. A board that communicates its process, its criteria and its timelines earns trust even from those it ultimately disappoints. Silence, by contrast, converts even reasonable caution into apparent indifference.

Lesson Four: Reform Strengthens Institutions

There is a persistent fear in boardrooms that admitting a rule is outdated will undermine the institution's authority. The boxing campaign demonstrated the opposite. When the governing body ultimately modernised its position, it did not look weaker — it looked like an organisation confident enough to be corrected by evidence. The new licensing framework was more rigorous, more medically informed, and more defensible than the blanket ban it replaced.

Institutions do not lose credibility by changing; they lose credibility by refusing to change long after the case has been made. This principle now sits at the heart of the governance and advisory work I undertake with organisations across sport and business.

Lesson Five: The People Affected Must Be Heard

Behind every policy is a person whose life it shapes. The boxing rule was, on paper, a line in a rulebook. In reality, it was a closed door in front of dedicated athletes who had done everything right and were excluded for a condition they managed with discipline most professionals would envy.

Boards govern best when they keep those people in view — when consultation is genuine, when affected voices are invited into the room rather than managed from outside it. My own journey, from building businesses to campaigning for change in sport, has convinced me that the distance between a board table and the people it governs is the single best predictor of how badly a policy will age.

A Standing Invitation

Policy reform is not an event; it is a capability. The boards that build it — through regular review, evidence-led deliberation and honest engagement — will rarely find themselves on the wrong side of a five-year campaign. Those that do not may find that history, and their own athletes, force the issue on far less favourable terms. If your organisation is confronting these questions, I would welcome the conversation — you can reach me through my contact page.