Chapter 6 | Why Consultancies Keep Selling Bullsh!t

Here’s draft chapter 6, sent from Tuscany (pics at the bottom) as we hit the halfway mark of our maternity and paternity France/Italy road trip.

As always, I’d love your thoughts. I’ve received lots of helpful feedback on earlier chapters 🙏

Chapter 6: Why Consultancies Keep Selling Bullsh!t

If linear approaches don’t work in complex systems, and if the evidence for this has been available for decades, why do smart people keep selling them? The easy answer is that consultants are charlatans, cynically peddling snake oil to gullible executives. This answer is satisfying in its simplicity. It locates the problem in bad actors and implies that the solution is to expose them. But it doesn’t survive contact with reality. I know a lot of people in this field. I’ve worked alongside them and learned from them. Most are not charlatans. They believe in what they’re doing. They’ve seen their approaches work, or at least, they’ve seen things that looked like their approaches working. They care about making organisations better. They’re not running a con.

I remember another l lecture where someone asked the obvious question. If international development is locked into an inappropriate mindset, offering linear solutions to complex problems, experts flying in with frameworks that can’t work, what do we do about it? Sami smiled. That cheeky smile he often had. “We wait for movers and shakers at the World Bank and IMF to die.” We laughed, before realising he was serious. These old economists weren’t for changing. Their worldview was locked in. They’d built careers on linear thinking, identities invested in it. They couldn’t see the paradigm was reliably leading them down blind alleys. We just had to wait for them to croak. We’d been hoping for something more actionable. A strategy. A framework, even. Something we could take into our careers and use to make things better. Instead we got a stark lesson in how hard paradigm shift is.

Twenty years later, I’d find myself in rooms (or LinkedIn discussions) full of consultants who couldn’t see what they were inside either. Smart, well-intentioned people who woke up in a morning and tried to help. But just as stuck as the economists Sami had given up on. And so the field keeps producing the same results: confident promises, expensive interventions, and transformations that never quite deliver. If it’s not cynicism, what is it? The answer, I think, lies in the structure of the industry itself. The incentives, the business models, the career paths, the relationships between consultants and clients. These create a dynamic that selects for certain kinds of claims and filters out others. Individual consultants aren’t lying; they’re responding rationally to an environment that rewards confidence and punishes candour.

The Transferability Assumption

Consulting is the business of selling expertise. A client has a problem they can’t solve themselves, so they hire someone with specialised knowledge to help. This basic transaction has existed for as long as humans have had specialised knowledge. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it. But the modern consulting industry has evolved in such a fashion that this transaction creates perverse incentives. Large consultancies need repeatable products. You can’t build a global firm with thousands of consultants if every engagement requires bespoke work from scratch. You need methodologies that can be trained, packaged, and deployed across different clients and contexts. You need frameworks that junior consultants can apply with minimal supervision. You need deliverables that can be scoped in advance and priced accordingly.

This requirement pulls directly against what complexity tells us about organisational change. If every organisation is different, if context is everything, if what works in one place might fail in another, then the whole premise of scalable consulting is questionable at best. The product being sold assumes a level of transferability that the reality doesn’t support. But the consultancies can’t acknowledge this. Their business model depends on the transferability assumption. So they keep selling frameworks and methodologies as if they were portable solutions, even as their own experienced practitioners know that the real work happens in adaptation and judgment that can’t be packaged. The result is a systematic overselling of what can be delivered. Not because anyone is lying necessarily, but because the business model requires claims that exceed what the evidence supports.

Same Dynamic, Different Scale

I operated in a much smaller version of this, but the dynamics were the same. My course needed to be repeatable. I couldn’t run a different programme for every cohort based on their specific contexts. So I developed curriculum, readings, and exercises that would work across different participants from different organisations. The curriculum assumed that certain practices were broadly applicable. It had to, or there would be nothing to teach. The playbook was even more explicit about this. It laid out “patterns found in progressive organisations” as if they could be adopted by anyone. The whole point was to make the ideas actionable regardless of context. That’s a transferability claim, and I made it without testing whether it was true.

When participants struggled to implement patterns, or when the practices didn’t stick, the structure of my offering pushed me toward certain explanations. Not enough practice. Not enough leadership support. Wrong organisational context. These explanations protected the validity of what I was teaching. They located the problem in the specific situation rather than in the approach itself. It was the natural result of having a product that needed to be sold again, not conscious manipulation. If the practices don’t transfer well, then I don’t have a viable offering. So I found ways to interpret the evidence that kept the offering intact. Every consultant faces this pressure. Every training provider. Every author with a methodology to promote (spoiler: I do not!). The alternative, admitting that what you’re selling may only work in some contexts, is economic suicide. So you don’t admit it, not even to yourself.

My version was smaller. So is most of the industry. The independent consultant, the boutique, the founder-led firm with a methodology and a following. They present themselves as the antidote. Different from the suits in the airport lounges. Friendlier vocabulary, smaller engagements, an alternative to all that. And in style, they are. In structure, less so. The same operating system in a smaller chassis. The economics are arguably worse. A solo consultant with three good clients is one lost contract away from a crisis. This encourages confident claims more so than the heft of the big four does, because at scale you can lose a deal and shrug. At this end of the market, you can’t. As such, you don’t talk yourself out of the gig. You believe what you need to believe, because that’s how the mortgage is paid.

Then there are the people selling not consulting but a packaged version of it to a much bigger audience. Books, courses, frameworks, communities. The product is no longer a single engagement with a single client. It’s a methodology with a following, monetised at scale. Which means the transferability claim isn’t being tested in any one organisation. It’s being broadcast to people who will mostly never run it past reality. The big firms sell transferability to clients, the big followings sell it to readers. Clients sometimes complain, readers don’t. They read the next blog and continue to hope that they might one day experience this glossy brochure. The personal-brand bit makes it even harder to back out. A McKinsey consultant doesn’t have to be the methodology. We do. My name on the course. My face on the playbook. You can’t pivot away from that without dismantling your identity and your income at the same time. Which is one reason people rarely do.

Buying Cover

The client side of the equation reinforces these dynamics. Executives who hire consultants are under pressure to deliver results. They’ve identified a problem, low engagement, dysfunctional culture, slow decision-making etc etc and they need a solution. They’re accountable to boards, to shareholders, to their own bosses. They typically can’t say “we’re going to experiment and see what emerges.” They need a plan. When they hire consultants, they’re buying cover as well as expertise. If the intervention or transformation fails, they can point to the reputable consultants they engaged. They followed ‘best practice’. They brought in the experts. The failure wasn’t due to lack of effort or poor judgment on their part.

This creates demand for confident solutions. Executives want consultants who have answers, not ambiguities. They want methodologies with track records, not experiments with uncertain outcomes. They want the transformation or intervention to be something that can be planned, budgeted, and measured, because that’s precisely what their governance structures require. Consultants learn to give clients what they want. They might know that the situation is complex and the outcome uncertain, but lead with that and you don’t get the gig. The client goes to someone who projects more confidence. So you learn to project confidence yourself, to downplay the uncertainty that complexity guarantees.

Having remembered some of what Sami taught me, I was crap at this. But I gave it a go on occasion. Needs must. In pitches and proposals I’ve been known to emphasise the success stories and minimise the caveats. I presented patterns as proven rather than promising. I gave clients the confidence they were looking for, even when my own experience suggested more caution was warranted. Was this dishonest? I believed my work could help and I’d seen it work in some contexts. But I was also selective about what I emphasised, as I had a business to run. The line between optimism and overselling is blurry.

Echo, Echo

Then there’s the conference circuit, which creates its own pressures. I spoke at events dedicated to New Ways of Working, progressive organisations, the future of work. These events have a particular culture. They’re aspirational spaces. People come to be inspired, to learn about what’s possible, to connect with others who share their values. The mood is optimistic, even utopian, and this shapes what gets said from the stage. Success stories dominate. Failures are mentioned only as setups for eventual triumphs. The narrative is one of progress: we’re building something better, the movement is growing, change is possible. Speakers who bring this energy are invited back. Speakers who complicate the narrative are less popular.

I learned to read the room. When I shared doubts or complications, the energy in the audience shifted. People came for inspiration, not ambiguity. So I learned to package my messages in inspiring ways. Even when I was questioning orthodoxy, I framed it as constructive: here’s how we can do better, here’s what we’re learning, here’s the next frontier. This wasn’t entirely cynical. Inspiration has value. People need hope and energy to sustain difficult work. But there’s a difference between a hopeful scenario and false hope, and the conference environment leans toward the latter. Complexity (beyond lip service), uncertainty, the likelihood of failure, these don’t fit the format. So they get left out, and what remains is often a distorted picture of what’s possible.

The community reinforces the message. When you work in a field, you tend to spend time with others in that field. You read the same books, attend the same events, follow the same thought leaders. Your social world becomes populated by people who share your assumptions. This creates an echo chamber. Ideas that would be challenged in a more diverse environment get reinforced. Doubts that might surface in conversation with outsiders stay suppressed because everyone around you is singing from the same hymn sheet. The paradigm is invisible because everyone you talk to is under its spell. I was part of this community. The progressive organisation people. The New Ways of Working crowd. We read each other’s newsletters, commented on each other’s posts, invited each other to speak. It’s easy, in that environment, to mistake shared assumptions for obvious truths.

The Paradigm Doesn’t Discriminate

The best thinkers fall for the paradigm just as readily as the lazy ones. I watched a peer, someone I respect, publish an entire series on organisational redesign. Twenty instalments. It was sophisticated work. They named real problems: rigid systems compressing people, meaning being squeezed out, identity reduced to job titles. They drew on serious research. I agreed with most of the diagnosis. Still do. Then they landed on a new model. A framework with its own vocabulary, its own diagnostic tool, its own set of practical exercises. Five steps, one for each big question. Run this audit. Deliver the workshop. Start these practices. The diagnosis was complexity-aware, but the prescription was as linear as can be. They used complexity-adjacent language (emergence, adaptation and such) but operationalised it as a sequence of steps. And I don’t think they saw the gap. The paradigm had done its work, and even genuine insight got funnelled back into the only shape the field knows how to produce: a linear methodology. It wasn’t transformation. It was redecorating the paradigm.

I’m not pointing from above. I did the same thing for years. That’s the point. The paradigm doesn’t discriminate by intelligence or intention. It co-opts the thoughtful practitioners just as completely as the superficial ones. Maybe more completely, because when someone smart builds a framework, it looks like progress. It has research behind it. It feels different from the crude five-step tripe cluttering LinkedIn. But the underlying move is identical: diagnose the mess, then offer a structured way out of it. The sophistication makes the category error harder to see.

Five-Step Bullsh!t

There’s another force that’s made all of this worse over the last decade: social media, and LinkedIn in particular. LinkedIn didn’t invent linear thinking about organisational change. Consultants were selling five-step bullsh!t long before anyone was posting carousels about it. But social media has given that way of thinking a powerful distribution channel. And in doing so, it has helped normalise ideas that don’t survive contact with complexity. The platform has preferences. It rewards confidence and compression. It rewards posts that promise progress. Do these five things and your culture will change. It rewards frameworks you can forward to a leadership team with a hopeful comment attached. What it doesn’t reward is reality, ambiguity, or anything that requires you to wait and see what actually happens. That’s a problem, because complex change takes time. It unfolds unevenly. It produces false starts, partial successes, and long stretches where nothing much seems to happen. Most of what’s honest about it doesn’t make good content. “This helped for a while and then faded away” is probably the most accurate summary of many change efforts I’ve seen, but you won’t see much of that in your feed.

Instead, what circulates are beginnings presented as endings. The first experiment. The energising workshop. The moment when something felt different. These moments are real. They’re not fabricated. But they’re radically incomplete. They tell us almost nothing about durability. When fragments like these are repeatedly presented as evidence that an approach works, they create a distorted picture of what’s achievable. The bigger problem is epistemic damage. This kind of content actively interferes with people’s ability to understand complexity at all. By repeatedly presenting organisations as systems that respond predictably to the right sequence of steps, it trains readers to look for linear solutions when none exists. Each new five-step framework reinforces the idea that organisations are machines waiting to be fixed, rather than living systems shaped by history, interaction, and context.

I don’t think most people producing this content are acting in bad faith. But a lot of it is intellectually lazy. It treats complexity as an inconvenience to be edited out rather than as the central fact to be reckoned with. And because this behaviour is rewarded with attention, status, and commercial opportunity, it keeps reproducing itself. Five-step bullsh!t thrives because it fits the medium perfectly, not because people are stupid. If you recognise yourself here, I hope you pause. That you notice the gap between what you know privately about how messy this work is, and what you present publicly as a clean sequence of steps. You don’t need to stop sharing what you’re learning. But you might need to stop pretending that what you’re sharing is a recipe.

The collective effect is a conversation about organisational change that sounds far more confident and predictable than it should. Despite decades of warnings about linear thinking in complex systems, the public discourse remains full of certainty and false reassurance. That confidence doesn’t come from evidence. It comes from a system that selects for simple stories and filters out everything that muddies them.

Panning for Linear

This kind of environment shapes what gets shared publicly. It also seeps inward, influencing how people inside the field come to understand themselves and their work. I studied voraciously during those years. Books, blogs, podcasts. I’d sit in the shed at the bottom of my garden with a yellow highlighter and a pink fineline, yellow for promising, pink for definite gold. Authors started sending me their books for free (I’d have preferred records!). I thought I was panning for gold. I realise now I was panning for linear. Selecting for the transferable, the things that could become steps in a process. The bits that didn’t fit that shape got filtered out. Not consciously, I wasn’t aware I was doing it, but the paradigm was shaping my actions and those of an entire movement. When evidence emerged that contradicted our beliefs, we had ways of handling it. Implementation failures. Wrong context. Leadership didn’t commit. These explanations circulated within the community, and because everyone accepted them, they seemed robust. The alternative explanation, that the approach itself was flawed, was outside our collective frame.

Then there’s identity. At some point, being a ‘New Ways of Working’ person stopped being something I did and became who I was. My LinkedIn profile, my bio, my website, they all identified me with this movement. Walking away would have meant changing identity, not just jobs. That’s quite hard. Most people don’t do it unless forced. Identity creates motivated reasoning. Once you’ve defined yourself as someone who helps organisations, you’re inclined to interpret evidence in ways that support that self-definition. The change that didn’t stick? That was because the leader wasn’t ready. The team that reverted? They didn’t practice enough. The approach works; it’s the specific situations that fail. I’m not saying I consciously constructed the narrative to protect my identity. It’s subtler than that. The identity shapes what you notice, what you remember, what you emphasise. It creates filters that let certain evidence through and block other evidence. You end up believing things that serve your identity, because the belief and the identity have become intertwined.

There’s also a selection effect in who remains in the field. People who try these approaches and find they don’t work tend to leave. They move on to other things, or they become sceptical while staying in adjacent roles. I notice the ones who remain visible, writing, speaking, consulting, are disproportionately those who fully rely on it for their livelihood (just as I did). I don’t know how many people have gone through the kind of doubt I experienced and left without saying anything. I suspect a lot. The ones who remain visible tend also to be those whose faith survived, or who found ways to adapt their message without questioning it. This creates a survivor bias in the visible community. We see the people for whom the approach “worked,” in the sense that they built careers around it. We don’t see the ones who tried it, lost faith, and moved on. Their absence makes the remaining believers seem more representative than they are.

So, consultants keep selling linear approaches to complex problems because the business model requires it, clients demand it, conferences reward it, communities reinforce it, identities depend on it, and the selection of who remains in the field filters out the sceptics. None of this requires bad faith. It’s just how things work. But naming the dynamics doesn’t dissolve individual responsibility. I made choices. I chose what to emphasise and what to downplay. I chose to interpret evidence in ways that preserved my offering. I chose to keep selling while doubting. Some of those choices were defensible. In uncertain situations, you act on your best judgment and update as you learn. My judgment was that the patterns and practices I taught could help, and in some contexts they did. But some choices were less defensible. When I noticed patterns that contradicted my claims, I had opportunities to investigate them seriously. I didn’t. When clients struggled with implementation, I could have questioned whether the approach was right for their context. I defaulted to “try harder.” The paradigm made these choices easy. The incentives were all aligned toward continued confidence. But the choices were still mine.

I can write this book. I can name the dynamics I participated in and be more forthcoming now than I was then. I can’t undo the engagements where I oversold or the courses where I overpromised. What I can do is be useful to someone sitting with the same doubt now. If you’re in this field and something isn’t adding up, take it seriously. The doubt is where course correction begins. The paradigm will push you to explain it away. That’s what paradigms do.

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