The problem was never that the advice was bad. It was that everyone got the same advice.
There is a thought that circulated silently through organisations for decades. Nobody voiced it at the senior level. Doing so would have required admitting something nobody in the room wanted to acknowledge. That the decision being made was at least partly about career protection rather than strategic value. And that admission was more dangerous than the decision itself.
The thought, had anyone voiced it, would have gone something like this. Engaging a major strategy consultancy is the safest professional decision an executive can make. If the strategy succeeds, credit flows upward. If it fails, a convenient excuse is never far away. The personal risk is minimal. The career protection is substantial.
This logic was understood instinctively across organisations for decades. It was rarely examined. And it produced a dynamic that was structurally incapable of delivering what it promised.
The structural reason it could never work
The major strategy consultancies were simultaneously presenting substantially similar frameworks to directly competing organisations. The same analytical tools. The same strategic options. The same matrices and recommendations. To rivals operating in the same markets at the same time.
Competitive advantage built on analysis available to every competitor simultaneously is not advantage. It is expensive coherence maintenance dressed as strategy. The organisations that engaged them got the comfort of consensus. They got the reassurance of having followed a recognised process. They got career protection for the executives who signed off on it.
They did not get differentiation. They could not. A consultancy serving multiple clients in the same sector cannot produce genuinely original strategic thinking for each of them without contradicting itself. The frameworks travel. The recommendations converge. The differentiation dissolves before the engagement is complete.
This is a precise illustration of the Galileo Dilemma operating at industrial scale. The consultancies were not producing original thinking. They were producing thinking the system would recognise and reward. Frameworks that fit existing architecture. Recommendations that could survive institutional approval processes. Analysis that confirmed what the system already broadly believed while providing the veneer of independent rigour.
Why the failures were never examined
When the advice failed to produce the promised advantage, neither side had any incentive to say so publicly. Legal action would have required the organisation to admit strategic failure, damaging markets, alarming investors, and exposing the executives involved as having exercised poor judgement. Blaming the consultancy publicly would have revealed that strategic thinking had been outsourced and the output had not been sufficiently scrutinised.
So the failure got attributed to something else entirely. Market conditions moved unexpectedly. A competitor made an unanticipated move. Geopolitical events intervened. Anything external, unforeseeable, and beyond anyone’s control that absolved both parties simultaneously. The consultancy moved on to the next engagement. The executive survived to approve the next one. The structural failure of the model was never examined because examining it served nobody’s immediate interest.
The feedback loop that would have corrected the model was suppressed by the same dynamic that made the model attractive in the first place.
The organisations that actually won
The organisations that generated genuine competitive advantage during those same decades almost never credited the consultancies. Some of the more sophisticated ones almost certainly used the engagements differently. Listening carefully to what the consensus recommended to every major competitor in the sector, and then deliberately choosing a different path. Using the advice as intelligence about where everyone else was heading, and then finding the angle none of them would take.
That is conscious navigation of the Galileo Dilemma. Hearing the consensus, understanding why it exists, and then finding the original thinking it cannot produce.
The organisations that disrupted entire sectors were rarely the ones with the largest consultancy budgets. They were smaller, faster, and had no choice but to think originally because they could not afford to think conventionally. Their resource disadvantage became a thinking advantage. They navigated Galileo Dilemmas their larger competitors could not even perceive because the larger competitors had outsourced their strategic thinking to systems structurally incapable of producing original ideas.
The large incumbents faced an additional constraint. Radical thinking risked destroying the market dominance they had already built. The more they had to lose the less they could afford to risk. Success itself became a barrier to original thinking. They were trapped by their own position as much as by the advice they were receiving.
What is changing now
The cost of accessing the same analytical frameworks has collapsed. What was once available only to organisations with significant budgets is now within reach of almost any competitor. That appears to be an equalisation. It is not. It is an enlargement of the problem.
The Galileo Dilemma does not respect organisational size. Original thinking has always been rare. The consultancy era concentrated conformity at the top of sectors. What is emerging now risks spreading that conformity across the entire competitive landscape.
The Galileo Dilemma does not respect organisational size. Original thinking has always been rare. What is emerging now risks making it rarer still across the entire competitive landscape.
See also: The Galileo Dilemma: a system condition that threatens radical transformation.
Colin Gautrey, May 2026
Colin Gautrey works privately with senior professionals who have stopped looking for advantage in the places everyone else is looking.