Why Scinition: When "That Won't Work Here" Meets the Evidence

Consultants are paid to know what works. This is awkward, because quite often they do not.

They may have experience, frameworks and an impressive collection of slides. What they do not always have—particularly when standing in a meeting and facing a sceptical client—is accessible evidence.

I have worked as an IT consultant for more than ten years. Moving between organisations has taught me that "better" and "worse" are often less objective than they sound. One company's best practice is another's bureaucratic nightmare. A process considered indispensable in one workplace is dismissed as corporate theatre in the next.

Organisational culture has a habit of presenting its preferences as facts.

Consultants are hardly immune. An approach that succeeded with one client can quietly become a personal doctrine. Soon, "this worked there" turns into "this is how good organisations operate". The transformation is subtle, comforting and potentially expensive.

The safest response is to stay close to the evidence. But that requires the evidence to be reachable when it matters—which it usually is not.

The meeting-room problem

Consider a development team that does not hold retrospectives. I might recommend trying them: give the team regular opportunities to examine how it works, identify problems and agree on improvements.

Then comes the objection:

"We can't spend time talking about feelings."

This is not necessarily an argument against retrospectives. It may be an expression of the organisation's culture, its previous experiences or a particular understanding of what a retrospective involves. But unless I can respond with something more substantial than professional conviction, the distinction hardly matters.

I could say that retrospectives improve team learning. The client could say they waste time. We would then have two beliefs sitting opposite each other at a conference table, both dressed as conclusions.

What I need in that moment is a fast way to answer several questions:

Finding those answers later is useful. Finding them while the decision is being made is better.

Advice is not evidence

Consulting recommendations frequently emerge from a mixture of experience, convention and instinct. None of these is worthless. Experience can reveal patterns that formal research has yet to examine. Practitioners also operate in messy environments where controlled studies may offer only partial guidance.

But experience has defects. We remember successes more clearly than quiet failures. We mistake correlation for causation. We favour practices that suit our personalities. And once a technique becomes part of our professional identity, challenging it can feel uncomfortably like challenging us.

Research is imperfect too. A study may be weak, narrow, outdated or irrelevant to the organisation at hand. "Science says" is not a magic phrase that ends a debate. Sometimes the literature is contradictory. Sometimes it has nothing useful to say.

That absence is itself valuable information.

The purpose of evidence is not to replace judgement. It is to make judgement better informed—and more honest about its limits.

The cost of deciding by culture

When evidence is missing from a decision, clients face two symmetrical risks.

They may adopt a poorly supported idea because the consultant presents it confidently. The result can be months of implementation, substantial expense and yet another process employees learn to perform without believing in it.

Or they may reject a useful idea because it conflicts with local habits. An improvement is lost, not because it failed, but because it never received a fair hearing.

Both outcomes damage trust. If recommendations repeatedly disappoint, the client stops trusting the consultant. If promising suggestions cannot survive the meeting in which they are proposed, the consultant becomes little more than a supplier of opinions.

Confidence is persuasive. Evidence is preferable.

A place for connected knowledge

That is why I am building Scinition.

Scinition is a place where people can share ideas and notes openly, then connect them to existing or emerging research. Its aim is to make it easier to discover whether a proposed solution is:

The goal is not to create a catalogue of approved answers. Organisations are too complicated for that, and research rarely offers such tidy certainty. The goal is to expose the relationship between claims and evidence so that both can be examined.

A consultant should be able to show not only what they recommend, but why. A client should be able to challenge the recommendation without the discussion collapsing into competing anecdotes. And both should be able to discover alternatives they had not considered.

In the best case, Scinition helps a client choose an effective solution with justified confidence. In the less convenient—but equally useful—case, it reveals that a fashionable idea rests on weak foundations.

Either result is progress.

Organisations will never stop having beliefs. Consultants will never stop relying partly on experience. Nor should they. But when an important decision is being made, it ought to be possible to invite evidence into the room before culture occupies every chair.