The objection is familiar. Without experience in this industry, why would anyone hire you? The question sounds reasonable. It has a reasonable answer, but the answer takes longer to absorb than the question takes to ask.
What industry experience actually measures is competence inside a frame — the ability to navigate an organisation’s assumptions, speak its language, understand its political landscape, and produce recommendations that fit the category of things it can consider acting on. That is genuinely useful. It is also precisely not what is needed when the frame itself is the constraint. A diagnostician who has been fully shaped by the assumptions of an industry cannot see outside them. The inside knowledge and the outside view are not compatible in the same person, at the same moment, applied to the same problem.
But this answer rarely lands in the procurement conversation. The deeper reason is that organisations reach this kind of work at the end of a long journey, and most of them are nowhere near the end when the conversation begins.
When an organisation hires a large consultancy to address a serious problem, it does not just hire a method. It buys a worldview — a theory of change, a set of categories, a way of reading what the problem is and what kind of solution can reach it. The work that follows is conducted inside that worldview. Success is measured by its own standards. The engagement ends, and the next one often begins from the same set of assumptions, with a different firm applying a similar frame. This is not a criticism of any particular firm. It is a description of how the market works, and why the consulting paradox persists even when people are aware of it.
What takes time is not implementing the solution. It is recognising that the worldview the solution was built from is not neutral. That recognition is not available at the start of the engagement. It requires living through the implementation, noticing the places where the frame does not reach, watching recommendations that were technically correct fail to change the underlying dynamic, and slowly arriving at a different question. That process takes years. Some organisations complete it quickly; most do not complete it at all, because the next engagement with the next firm restarts the cycle.
This is why organisations at the right moment for diagnostic work are rarely the ones who have never tried anything. They are the ones who have tried the standard approaches, found they did not reach the actual problem, and are asking a different kind of question. The crack in the frame shows up precisely where the conventional solutions stopped working. That crack is the opening, and it requires the long way round to reach it.
There is an irony in the budget conversation that follows. Organisations frequently say they cannot afford to experiment with an unknown provider. The framing is revealing. What they mean is that they have a limited appetite for the perceived risk of an unfamiliar category of help. What they do not say is that they have already spent substantially — in money, but more consequentially in time — on large engagements that were themselves experiments. An experiment conducted at scale, over years, with a household name attached, does not feel like an experiment. But the question of whether it reached the actual problem is exactly the question an experiment is designed to answer. Time is harder to recover than money. The organisations that recognise this have usually arrived at the recognition the expensive way.
The absence of industry track record is not a deficit to be explained away. It is a structural feature of the position. Diagnostic capacity of this kind is built across contexts, precisely because the constraint being addressed is not specific to any one industry. The patterns that produce frame blindness — the narrowing of what is measurable, the separation of knowledge from authority, the slow compression of what is thinkable — recur across sectors with remarkable consistency. Recognising them requires breadth, not depth in any specific industry’s assumptions. An industry expert and a diagnostic generalist are not interchangeable. They are doing different jobs. The procurement question is which job is actually needed.
The organisations that are ready for this tend to know it. Not because they have worked through a checklist, but because the question they are carrying has already outgrown the answers available from inside their frame. They are not looking for someone who knows their industry. They are looking for someone who can see what they cannot.
Further reading:
↳ Why track records don’t transfer — the epistemological argument this piece builds on
Garden notes
- Why track records don’t transfer — track records measure in-frame competence precisely, which is the wrong proof when the frame is the problem.
- The consulting paradox — the structural reason organisations keep buying the same kind of help even when it does not reach the actual problem.
- Which markets are ready — the conditions that produce organisations who have completed enough of the cycle to ask a different kind of question.