Here’s my hypothesis on why good consulting work won’t always get you the next engagement.
It will come down to adoption.
When clients don’t adopt your recommendations – don’t change their behaviour, their tools, their ways of working – the project stalls. And when a project stalls, you don’t get called back. Even if your diagnosis was right.
This is about to get harder.
As consulting becomes more tech-forward – AI tools, automated workflows, productized deliverables – the gap between what you recommend and what organisations actually do is going to widen. Technology changes fast. People change slowly.
There’s another shift happening at the same time. As consulting moves away from billable hours toward outcome-based engagements, someone in the organisation is going to start asking:
What did we actually get out of this? Where’s the evidence?
If people haven’t changed, there is no evidence.
Change management used to be someone else’s problem. A separate workstream. The client’s job.
It’s becoming the difference between a one-time engagement and a long-term client relationship.
If you don’t have an adoption answer – whether you build it in, bring in a change management partner, or at minimum ask who owns adoption on the client side – you’re leaving repeat business on the table.
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