A lot of this year has felt like living in a room where someone keeps rearranging the furniture in the dark.
Reorganise, merge, separate, rename, publish a model, add a layer. We do it because it looks like action. It produces artefacts. It soothes the anxiety upstairs. But when the ground moves, gripping harder doesn’t make you safer. It makes you brittle.
There’s a simple pattern I keep seeing: when feedback is uncomfortable, we replace it with control. Then we lose the signal, so we pull even harder, and call the resulting silence ‘alignment’. Without feedback you don’t have control, you have theatre, at best.
Consulting has its own version of this. Turning up with answers can work like an anaesthetic. Everyone relaxes. The room stops learning. The work doesn’t stick because it never became anyone’s practice. Better to arrive with questions that sharpen feedback, then do the unglamorous work of building capability in the host, not dependency on the visitor.
That’s also why ‘relational public services’ matters, when it’s real. Under the buzz is an old constraint: good work depends on good relationships. So design for continuity. Fewer handovers. Stable teams. Social care doing social care, not being dragged into everything else. Integration isn’t meetings. It’s whether the person living in the service experiences it as joined-up.
And yes, I spent part of the year enthusiastically launching ‘ai consultants’ and fixing systems thinking with accreditation – two posts from back in April where we undeniably, definitely got things 100% right. Sometimes the only sane response to our rituals is to hold them up to the light and see if we still recognise ourselves.
I’m going into 2026 with one test in mind: are we treating people as people, or as categories. Because when you treat people like objects, you don’t get compliance. You get objections. Usually in the form of workarounds, complaints, staff churn, and a demand curve that refuses to behave.
Question: what are you currently calling ‘non-compliance’ that might actually be a desire line, and what would change if you treated it as intelligence rather than failure?
Posts from this year
See also
chosen path 