There is a reasonable assumption at the heart of how organisations choose advisers. If someone has worked with ten large companies and all ten will speak well of them, that history is informative. It tells you they have operated successfully within complex organisations, navigated real stakeholders, and delivered something the client valued enough to recommend. As a signal, it works — for a specific kind of work.
The problem arises when we apply the same signal to a different kind of work. Track records measure one thing precisely: the capacity to function well within existing assumptions. They cannot measure the capacity to see outside them. And for problems that live in the frame itself, this distinction matters more than almost anything else.
Russell Ackoff spent much of his career on a related observation: that most of what organisations call problem-solving is actually operating inside a frame they have never examined. The tools they reach for, the solutions they consider, the options they place on the table — all of these are pre-shaped by assumptions they are not aware of making. A consultant who has spent twenty years deploying those tools with great success has demonstrated mastery of the frame. It is precisely the wrong credential for diagnosing whether the frame itself is the constraint.
This is where Krishnamurti’s thinking becomes useful, even in a professional context. The widely-circulated version of his words — “it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society” — is most likely a paraphrase, but the underlying idea appears throughout his work. In Commentaries on Living (1960), the nearest direct statement reads: “If he is healthy, he will not be a part of it.” The point is not that adjustment is bad in itself, but that adjustment cannot serve as evidence of health when the thing being adjusted to is itself disordered. Aldous Huxley made the same argument in Brave New World Revisited (1958), describing people who are “normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society” and observing that their perfect adjustment is a measure of their sickness, not their wellbeing.
The professional version of this is more mundane but equally consequential. Organisations that have been captured by their own frame — gradually narrowing to what is measurable, rewarded, and legible — do not experience this as pathology. They experience it as competence. They are getting better and better at a game they have forgotten to question. The consultants who serve them best are those who have internalised the same game. The references circulate within a closed system.
I noticed this early in my own career, working in large professional services. The absorption is not dramatic; it happens in small steps, through the ordinary pressures of belonging to an institution. Within a couple of years, the questions you thought were important have been replaced by questions the institution considers important. This is not cynicism — it is simply what systems do. They replicate themselves through the people who inhabit them.
This is why the accumulation of context can work against clarity rather than for it. Proximity to a system, sustained over many years, produces fluency in its assumptions. It also produces the kind of blind spots that outsiders notice and insiders cannot. The frame cannot examine itself from inside; the instruments of perception are built from the same material as the frame itself. Asking someone deeply embedded in a system to diagnose whether its fundamental assumptions still hold is like asking a fish to report on water.
None of this is an argument against track records in general. For execution — delivery, technical implementation, change management — a solid history of similar work is exactly the right proof. But when the question is whether the current frame fits the actual problem, execution track records prove nothing. Popularity within a system is evidence of success in that system, nothing more. It does not transfer to questions about whether the system itself is oriented correctly.
Ackoff argued that organisations frequently apply high-quality solutions to the wrong problems, becoming more efficient at moving in the wrong direction. The credentialling problem is a version of this. We evaluate advisers using a metric well-suited to selecting for in-frame competence, and then apply it to situations that require something quite different: the capacity to notice what the frame is making invisible, and to name it clearly enough that something can be done.
That capacity is not certified by case studies. It is harder to demonstrate, harder to procure, and harder to price. It tends to be recognised retrospectively, if at all. Which is perhaps why the incentive, for anyone building a consultancy, is to develop an excellent track record of in-frame work and to describe it in language that sounds as if it goes further. The language is not dishonest. The frame is simply invisible to the person using it.
Further reading:
↳ The Consulting Paradox — on why organisations consistently select for in-frame advisers, and whether that is beginning to shift
Garden notes
- Why the frame cannot see itself — the epistemological foundation: the instruments of perception are built from the same assumptions as the frame, so the frame cannot detect its own limits
- Contextual excess — proximity to a situation produces fluency in its assumptions, not diagnostic clarity; more context is not the same as clearer sight
- The Consulting Paradox — the structural reasons organisations keep selecting advisers who confirm rather than question their assumptions
- Productive collapse — the failure mode where an organisation performs well by its own metrics while losing the capacity to do the actual thing it was built for
- What a frame is — the foundational definition: the set of assumptions that determines what counts as a problem, a solution, and what remains invisible