The Search for a Villain

Every campaign for change faces a seductive temptation: find the person responsible and defeat them. Villains simplify the story, energise supporters and give frustration a face. But in five years of campaigning to overturn one of British boxing's oldest rules, I learned that the search for a villain is almost always a category error. The rule that excluded boxers with Type 1 diabetes from professional licensing for nearly ninety years had no villain. It had a system: procedures, precedents and duties that produced an unjust outcome without a single unjust person involved.

Understanding that distinction is, I believe, what separates leaders who change institutions from campaigners who merely fight them.

Systems Produce Outcomes; People Inherit Systems

The officials who applied the old rule did not write it. They inherited it, along with the responsibility for fighter safety that made cautious application feel obligatory. Attacking them personally would have been both unfair and strategically disastrous: unfair because they were doing their duty as the system defined it, and disastrous because those same officials were the only people who could ultimately change the rule.

So the campaign drew a hard line from its first day: we challenge the policy, never the people. In every meeting, submission and public statement across five years, the individuals we dealt with were treated as what they were: professionals of integrity operating inside a framework whose assumptions had expired.

Why This Is Strategy, Not Politeness

Some read this approach as mere courtesy. It is far more than that. Institutional decisions are made by people who must weigh personal and professional risk. If saying yes to you means admitting they were villains, they will never say yes. If saying yes means joining you in modernising a system they inherited, agreement becomes an act of leadership on their part rather than an admission of guilt.

By separating the system from its people, we gave every official a dignified path to the right decision. When the first professional boxing licence was granted to a boxer with Type 1 diabetes in the UK, the governing body was not conceding defeat. It was exercising exactly the judgement its role exists to provide, on better evidence than it had ever been given before.

Challenging Systems Requires Harder Work

Blaming people is easy; changing systems is rigorous. A campaign against a person needs only grievance. A campaign against a system needs a complete alternative: we had to show, with independent medical expertise, how modern diabetes management could satisfy every safety requirement, and propose protocols that could be applied consistently to future cases. The system could not simply be criticised; it had to be redesigned, tested and handed back improved.

This is the discipline I bring to my advisory work with organisations and governments: diagnose the system, not the personnel. In my experience, from founding one of the UK's largest online furniture retailers to working across international governance, the vast majority of institutional failure is structural, and structure is what leaders are responsible for fixing.

The Human Dividend

There is a quieter benefit to challenging systems rather than people: the relationships survive. Many of those involved in administering the old rule became, over five years, genuine participants in shaping its replacement. The campaign ended not with a divided sport but with a governing body able to take pride in a historic modernisation. Reform achieved through humiliation breeds quiet resistance for years. Reform achieved through respect breeds custodians.

A Test for Every Leader

When you next confront an outcome that angers you, apply this test before assigning blame: if every person involved were replaced tomorrow, would the outcome change? If the answer is no, you are facing a system, and challenging individuals will waste your energy and harden the institution against you. Map the system, understand the duties it imposes on its people, and build the evidence that lets those same people change it with confidence.

Great leaders challenge systems, not people, because systems are what actually produce outcomes, and people are who actually change systems. The five-year campaign that reshaped British boxing's approach to Type 1 diabetes proved both halves of that sentence.

If you are leading change today, resist the instinct to find a villain. Ask instead what the system in front of you was designed to prevent, whether that danger still exists in its original form, and what evidence would allow the people inside the system to update it with confidence. Then supply that evidence with patience and respect. It is slower than blame, but unlike blame, it works. You can read more about the principles behind my work on my about page.