How to Train Your Board on Ethics Using Real Dilemma Cases

I once watched a state sporting body run its annual governance training. PowerPoint slides. Forty-five minutes. The compliance officer read the conflict of interest policy aloud while board members checked their phones. At the end, everyone signed an acknowledgement form confirming they had "completed governance training."

Nobody learned anything. Nobody's behaviour changed. The exercise existed so the federation could tick a box on its annual governance report.

This is how most sport organisations approach ethics training. And it is a waste of everyone's time.

Why dilemma cases are different

The Good Governance in Grassroots Sport project - developed by ISCA and Transparency International Germany - includes an entire chapter on dilemma cases as a governance teaching tool. It is one of the most useful things in the guidelines and one of the least used.

The insight is straightforward. Rules tell you what is prohibited. A conflict of interest policy says: declare your conflicts, abstain from affected decisions, document everything. Clear enough. But real governance decisions do not happen in black and white territory. They happen in the grey zone. The situation where the right thing to do is not obvious. Where two principles conflict. Where a reasonable person could argue either side.

That is where dilemma cases come in. They present a scenario - drawn from real situations in grassroots sport - and ask: what would you do? There is no answer key. No multiple-choice quiz. The value is in the discussion. The disagreements. The moment when two board members realise they would handle the same situation completely differently, and they have to articulate why.

As the ISCA guidelines put it: "These dilemmas may help you and your organisation consider what you think is acceptable and what is not, which helps you fine-tune your own ethical and moral compass as well as your organisational procedures."

Fine-tune your own ethical compass. That is a fundamentally different ambition than "read the policy and sign the form."

Five dilemmas for your next board meeting

These are adapted from the ISCA dilemma cases. I have framed each one as a discussion exercise - not a case study to read passively, but a scenario to argue about.

The renovation bid

Your club needs its changerooms renovated. The board is evaluating construction bids. Your vice-president's husband runs a building company that has submitted a quote. The price is competitive. His previous work for other organisations has been good. The vice-president says she can be objective.

Discussion questions for the board: Should the vice-president be in the room during the discussion? Should she vote? What if her husband's bid is the best on merit - do you reject it anyway? What would the members think if they found out the vice-president's husband won the contract and she was part of the decision? What would they think if they found out a good bid was rejected because of the relationship?

There is no clean answer here. Rejecting a good bid on principle costs the club money. Accepting it creates an appearance problem even if the process was fair. The conversation is where the learning happens.

The coaching hire

Your federation is hiring a new junior development coach. Four applicants are shortlisted. One of them is the niece of the federation manager who is leading the recruitment process. The niece is qualified. So are the other candidates. The manager insists she will be fair.

Discussion questions for the board: Can the manager lead the recruitment process? What if the niece is clearly the strongest candidate - does it matter? Would an independent panel change the outcome, or just the optics? What message does it send to the other applicants if the manager's family member gets the job?

The uncomfortable truth: at a small federation with limited staff, removing the manager from the process might mean the most knowledgeable person is not involved in the hiring decision. Governance is sometimes about choosing which imperfect option does the least damage.

The politician president

A local sports club wants to build a new facility. The council will provide the land for free. Your club president is also a local politician and a sitting member of the same council that will vote on the land allocation.

Discussion questions for the board: The president's dual role helped create the opportunity. Should she recuse herself from the council vote? From the club's discussions about the project? From both? What if her political influence is the reason the club is being offered the land in the first place - does removing her from the process actually harm the club's interests?

This dilemma is deliberately uncomfortable. The president has not done anything wrong. She holds two legitimate roles. But those roles create a structural conflict that no amount of good intentions can eliminate. The question is how to manage it, not how to pretend it does not exist.

The bank employee on the board

Your board member responsible for financial affairs also works at the bank where the club holds its accounts. Through her role at the bank, she has access to the club's financial information that is not shared in treasurer reports. She is also incentivised by her employer - every new client she brings to the bank earns her a commission. She was the one who recommended the club move its accounts to her branch.

Discussion questions for the board: Is the information asymmetry a problem, even if she never misuses it? Does the commission arrangement mean she has a financial interest in the club's banking decisions? Should the club move its accounts to a different bank? What if her bank offers the best terms?

This one tends to split rooms. Some board members will argue that as long as she acts with integrity, there is no real problem. Others will point out that the structural conflict exists regardless of her intentions. Both positions have merit. That tension is exactly what makes it a useful exercise.

The donor's son

Your club runs a popular kids' summer camp. Registration costs EUR 200 per child. A local company, Company B, donates EUR 1,000 to the club every year. No strings attached. This year, Company B's owner asks if his son can attend the camp. Registrations are full. There is a waiting list.

Discussion questions for the board: Do you make an exception for the donor's son? What precedent does it set if you do? What happens to the annual donation if you do not? Is there a difference between bumping a child off the waiting list and creating an additional spot? What if the camp genuinely cannot accommodate another child safely?

I like this dilemma because it feels small. One thousand euros. One camp spot. But the principle at stake is whether financial contributions buy preferential access. And once you establish that they do, the line between a donation and a transaction disappears.

How to run the session

Do not lecture. The entire point is discussion. Here is a format that works.

Allocate 90 minutes at a board meeting or a dedicated session. Not tagged onto the end of a three-hour agenda - a protected block with no other business after it.

Print or share the dilemma cases in advance. Give people time to read them. Some board members think better when they have had a day to mull something over. Others prefer to react in the moment. Advance distribution accommodates both.

Split into pairs or groups of four for discussion. Not a plenary session where the loudest voice dominates. Small groups force everyone to engage. Give each group 15 minutes per dilemma, then bring the room together to share positions.

Do not present "correct" answers. There are no correct answers. There are principles - disclosure, documentation, abstention, proportionality - and there are judgement calls about how to apply them. The chair or facilitator should draw out the principles that emerge from the discussion, not prescribe them.

Document the agreed positions. After discussing each dilemma, ask the board: based on this conversation, what would our policy be? Write it down. Not as a formal policy amendment - as a record of the board's thinking. These records become reference points for future decisions.

And here is the part most organisations skip: do it again next year. Board membership changes. New people bring different assumptions. Existing members forget or recalibrate their positions over time. Mihai Androhovic of the Romanian Sport for All Association, who contributed to the ISCA project, argued that governance is "action taken by members" - and action requires practice, not a one-time event.

Why rules alone do not work

Every sport organisation has rules. Constitutions. Bylaws. Codes of conduct. Conflict of interest policies. The rules are necessary. They establish the baseline.

But rules only cover the situations their authors anticipated. A conflict of interest policy says "declare your conflicts." It does not tell a board member how to handle the moment when declaring a conflict would embarrass a friend, or when the conflict is so small it feels ridiculous to raise, or when everyone on the committee has the same conflict because the club operates in a small town where everyone knows everyone.

Dilemma training fills that gap. It builds the muscle memory of ethical reasoning so that when a situation arises that is not covered by the rules - and one will - the board has practiced thinking through it.

Jean Camy of the University of Lyon, who contributed to the ISCA research, pointed to the gap between written governance standards and lived organisational culture. Dilemma cases are one of the few tools that bridge that gap. They take the principles off the page and into the room.

Scaling this across a federation

If you run a state sporting body or national governing body, you are probably thinking: this is great for one board, but I have 200 affiliated clubs. I cannot sit in on 200 board meetings.

No. But you can provide the materials and track whether they are being used.

We built TidyConnect to support exactly this kind of governance education at scale. A federation can distribute dilemma case packs to all club boards, track which clubs have completed an ethics training session, and build a picture over time of which clubs are investing in governance culture and which are not. Not by sitting in the room - that would defeat the purpose - but by knowing that the session happened, that the board engaged with the materials, and that the outcomes were documented.

Patrick McGrattan of Belfast City Council, who was involved in the ISCA project, emphasised that governance capacity in grassroots sport has to be built from within. External regulation - funding conditions, affiliation requirements - can set expectations. But the actual governance culture is built in moments like these: a board sitting around a table, arguing about what the right thing to do is, and discovering that the answer is harder than they assumed.

That is ethics training. Not a PowerPoint. Not an acknowledgement form. A conversation that leaves people slightly uncomfortable, because they realised their instincts do not always align with their principles.

Run one at your next board meeting. You will learn more about your organisation in 90 minutes than in a year of compliance reports.

References

• ISCA & Transparency International Germany. Guidelines for Good Governance in Grassroots Sport (PDF). Chapter 9: Dilemma Cases.
• Sport England & UK Sport. A Code for Sports Governance. Board development.
• Institute of Directors. IoD. Governance training.
• Transparency International. Global Corruption Report: Sport. 2016.
• NCVO. Governance Guidance. Trustee training.
• BoardSource. BoardSource. Board ethics education.