Chasing the mirage

Imagine that someone agrees to work with you, takes your money… then vanishes.

I don’t mean that they conclude the project then break contact. I mean that they sign a contract with you, collect payment upfront for part of the work, make a token attempt at starting it… then disappear. Your emails evaporate into a black hole. Your calls and texts go unreturned. Your lawyers, when you finally snap, pick a fight, but the room is empty.

There’s a word for that sort of behaviour, isn’t there? And there are words for people who behave like this.

But, that aside, what might you think in such a situation? If you’re anything like me, your internal narrative would run something like:

What did you expect, you f***ing idiot? You should have seen this coming. It’s your job to know better than this.

You see, I know that this is precisely what I would think in such a situation. Because it’s been happening to my business, and I’ve been thinking it.

I’m a consultant. And as a consultant I have often fancied myself as an all-seeing and all-powerful figure who can stride into client offices and solve their problems at a stroke. For me, difficult takes a day. For the impossible, give me a week.

This is what is called an ego ideal: an idealised self-concept that exerts influence on how we show up in the world.

I’m far from the only consultant with this pattern of ego ideal. In fact, it dominates the marketplace. A couple of months ago on my podcast I interviewed someone I regard as the real deal in this line of work: the brilliant consultant Steve Hearsum. Steve has a lot to say about why the industry encourages such delusions of grandeur. The essence of it is this: life is challenging and mind-bogglingly complex, and we are far less in control of anything than we like to think. But this fact presents a huge threat to the psychology of the average human being. We would rather convince ourselves that what we want — the miracle pill that cures all diseases and guarantees our future health — is somehow within our grasp.

So, consultants and clients alike collude in a mirage: the world as we would like it to be, not as it is. And under the spell of this mirage, money changes hands and work gets done.

But much of the time the world might be better off if that work was never started. For consultants in thrall to a God-like ego ideal, there is a significant danger of saying and doing whatever they deem necessary to preserve that self image, regardless of its consequences for the client.

Are you ready for a revelation?

I’m not God.

I’m a 46-year-old man from the north of England.

And here are some other all-too-human facts about me. I have worked as a consultant for quite a long time. A lifelong visual impairment means that I have almost zero spatial intelligence. I’m twenty years into therapy. I’m an introvert. I fear and distrust groups. I love people and want to help them. I’m as complex and occasionally contradictory as the next person.

Over the course of my career I’ve added hundreds of millions of pounds worth of value to the businesses I’ve helped. I’ve won awards for my work. Lots of people have said lovely things about what I’ve helped them achieve. I’ve also made huge mistakes. I’ve lost money, screwed up relationships, hurt others and been hurt myself. I still make mistakes sometimes — indeed, you’re reading about one now.

But I don’t want to talk about that stuff. I don’t want to talk about my mistakes and my frailties and my occasional inability to get things right.

I don’t want to talk about that stuff, because if I do, I worry that clients won’t want to hire me. This is what happens when human frailty and insecurity collide with market incentives. In the face of the client’s psychological need for certainty, the consultant’s ego ideal offers the path of least resistance. And, just like that, it becomes oh-so-easy to play an oh-so-well-rehearsed role:

I am God. Follow me, and you too will be saved.

This is, of course, precisely as ridiculous as it sounds.

Back here on earth, in what George W. Bush called “the reality-based community”, someone took my money and vanished.

The interesting question is why. I don’t mean why they did it: that’s obvious enough. It’s why I allowed myself to get into a situation where that could happen.

Context matters. For a number of reasons both personal and professional, 2023 had been a difficult year. It was a brutal time: grinding, unyielding, numb with anxiety. You get periods like this, I think, when you run a business. Familiarity doesn’t blunt their horror.

Having survived all that 2023 had in store, I had decided to try and round a corner. Part of this process involved finding, reaching and winning new clients.

The firm I met promised to help me do that. I’d always been sceptical about those sorts of services. Indeed, I’d turned down similar providers many times in the past. This is because clients need a reason to trust consultants before they’ll engage — funny, that, when we hold ourselves out as God — and cold approaches don’t build trust. But the MD in question presented as likeable, credible and (irony of ironies) well-attuned to the trust issue.

The revealing thing was that I didn’t expect that they would hit the agreed target. Instead, I told myself that if we achieved just a quarter of that target it would be fine. I remember making that deal with myself as I signed off the invoice.

When I bargain with myself like this, it’s because in my heart I know that something isn’t right.

But I so wanted it to be right.

I wanted that particular mirage — that there were easy answers after a difficult period — to be real. I wanted it to be real so much that I gave money to a thief.

Then I didn’t want to talk about my mistake, because I wanted to preserve another, more powerful mirage: that I am the all-seeing, all-conquering consultant, and I should know better than to have done this.

Vulnerable human makes bad call.

There’s nothing special about that. Lots of us have done it, in different ways, at different times.

But an interesting question might be: for those of us whose profession is, in essence, helping others make good (or, at least, better) calls, how do we deal with our own bad ones?

The coach and organisational theorist Simon Cavicchia has written about the psychological swing that many coaches and consultants experience between omnipotence and impotence. This is a form of good/bad splitting that essentially says: “If I can solve this problem, I’m a hero. If I can’t, I’m a zero”. This, he argues, leaves consultants in a fundamental bind: most organisational problems are simply too complex for anyone to solve alone.

Then there’s the fact that, as human beings, we consultants are going to make mistakes. Not accommodating this reality creates another bind. If we cannot acknowledge our mistakes for fear of ‘falling to zero’ we cannot learn from them. This dooms us to their repetition.

However threatening it might be to my ego, I can acknowledge the fact that I’m not omnipotent. On the other hand, experience suggests that I’m not exactly useless. So, well, what am I?

I’ve concluded that the answer lies in a little kintsugi pot that I have in my office. I’m looking at it now.

Kintsugi is the Japanese technique in which practitioners use gold to repair cracks and breaks in ceramics. The skill points to a simple truth: it is in our damage that our real gifts are found. (Jung’s theory of the wounded healer says something similar.)

And I look at my little pot, with its many cracks, and it occurs to me that the money I lost — and the hurt I experienced, because theft does that to me — is like every other knockback, wrong turn and mistake. In time it will turn to gold.

And that pot feels like me — as a consultant, and also a person. I’m a driven, flawed, hardworking human being with a mind and a heart that are cracked, golden, and filled to the brim with a desire to help others. No more than that, but no less either.

Knowing what it’s like to have my money stolen motivates me to try to protect others.

The fact that I don’t see the world through fully functioning eyes primes me to offer a different perspective.

The life experiences that led me to fear and distrust groups mean I can support people who are feeling alienated.

My many mistakes are signposts to the hidden traps that lie in wait for organisations of all kinds.

My bad years help me empathise with others who are enduring tough times.

My insecurities resource me to help leaders understand and appreciate their frailties.

My insight into my own mess lends me the compassion and courage to sit with others in theirs.

And the overwhelming desire I had to chase a mirage might help you pinpoint one or two of your own.

What to take from this article

We are the sum total of our mistakes and failures as well as our successes. Indeed, it’s the totality of who we are that enables us to support our clients – one human being to another.

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