But when they work — when the thing catches — the chaos starts to change. You scale. You hire grownups. You get serious about systems. And suddenly, the vibe shifts. The spirit that made it magic starts to fade.

This post is about why that shift happens, what it costs you, and how to scale your company without killing what made it worth scaling in the first place.

Why the Weirdos Leave

Let’s start with psychology.

There’s a personality trait called conscientiousness. High-conscientiousness people are organized, disciplined, and good at getting things done. Low-conscientiousness people… are not. They might be scattered or messy. But they’re also creative, risk-tolerant, and incredibly comfortable in ambiguity and chaos.

You can probably guess who thrives in a startup.

Low-conscientiousness folks, especially the ones who also score high on openness (another personality trait which is great in startups and less competitive in scaling and streamlining), are the ones who say, “We’ll figure it out.” They chase wild ideas, poke holes in sacred assumptions, and stay up late following hunches they can’t explain. They’re allergic to org charts. And reporting frameworks. And maybe even you.

But they were your spark. Your raw energy. Your early magic.

As companies grow, though, high-conscientiousness people take over — as they should. You need them to scale. But if you’re not intentional, the culture starts selecting against the low-conscientiousness folks. And with them, you lose your edge.

Low-conscientiousness types are the ones who thrive on chaos itself. That’s resilience. When things get rocky, as they do in interesting times, a cadre on the lower end of conscientiousness is a bolster: coworkers who don’t freak out.

Our advice? In key creative and leadership roles, aim for at least a 1:2 ratio of low- to high-conscientiousness people. Keep some weirdos around: Not because it’s efficient — but because it keeps your company alive.

Stage Theory: How Companies Grow Up (and Sometimes Outgrow Themselves)

Organizations, like people, grow in stages. Each stage adds a new layer of complexity — and each one brings its own form of magic and its own way of forgetting.

This model draws from something called the Model of Hierarchical Complexity (MHC) — a developmental framework originally built to map how humans reason, but which turns out to offer a pretty fascinating lens on how organizations evolve, too.

We’re using it here in a slightly new way: not as a hierarchy to climb, but as an ecology to layer.

Primary

The beginning. There’s no strategy yet — just vibes, instincts, and maybe a half-drunk whiteboard sketch that somehow contains everything. Decisions are impulsive but real. The name just feels right. The moodboard hits. The energy is raw, reactive, and totally essential.

Concrete

You start building. A few people believe in something. The culture gets tribal, emotional, bonded. Decisions happen in real time. Someone says, “Just trust me,” and somehow, that works. The organization starts to cohere — not in slides, but in relationships.

Abstract

Now you can name what’s happening. Mission, vision, values. Metaphors show up. Strategy emerges. You start speaking in shared symbols. Meaning becomes portable. The work shifts from instinct to coherence.

Formal

Structure arrives. Roles clarify. You get dashboards, workflows, predictable outcomes. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” This is where things scale. It’s the MBA dream stage — clean, legible, and deeply needed.

Each stage builds on the ones before it:

• Primary brings instinct

• Concrete brings identity

• Abstract brings coherence

• Formal brings order and scale

But here’s the mistake: thinking each stage replaces the one before it.

When companies forget their earlier layers — when everything becomes optimized, rationalized, and explainable — they lose the messy vitality that made them worth scaling in the first place.

And some companies? They go even further.

Systematic

This is where the org starts sensing itself. Systems talk to systems. Leaders think in terms of tensions, tradeoffs, and patterns. Culture becomes a diagnostic tool. Feedback loops deepen. You’re not just running departments — you’re stewarding ecosystems.

Metasystematic

Rare, but real. This is where the organization gains reflexivity. It can shift between different games to be played by different rules, goals, and metrics of success. It knows every map is partial. It starts designing how it designs. The company becomes capable of real wisdom — not just intelligence, not just scale, but generative, evolving insight.

But none of this is automatic.

You can’t brute-force your way to Systematic, and you definitely can’t KPI your way to Metasystematic. These stages only emerge when the earlier ones are still alive and accessible — when the organization retains its weirdness, its playfulness, its soul.

The trick isn’t to outgrow each stage. It’s to stack them.

You want systems that hum with early-day energy. Strategies that still feel like stories. Leaders who can run a dashboard and chase a hunch. A culture that holds its complexity without collapsing into consensus or control.

That’s how companies evolve — without erasing who they are.

Play Is Not Optional

So what holds it all together?

Play.

We don’t mean ping-pong tables or team-building scavenger hunts. We mean actual play: a cognitive and emotional openness to uncertainty, exploration, and surprise. A spirit of generosity and experimentation. A culture where you can say something half-formed and not get punished.

Play is where new roles emerge. Where good mistakes happen. Where people metabolize complexity and learn to hold paradox.

As your company scales, the truths get more complex. The tensions get sharper. The stakes get higher. If your culture isn’t playful, it will shrink from that complexity. It’ll revert to what’s safe and legible. You’ll lose the ability to evolve.

In a world of rising complexity, play is not a luxury. It’s your evolutionary advantage.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Here are a few practical moves we’ve seen make a real difference:

• Make space for chaos. Not everywhere, but somewhere — a sandbox, a speakeasy, a late-night Zoom. Designed ambiguity invites emergence.

• Listen at the edges. Who’s thriving? Who’s folding in? Shadow, interview, map the flows. Surface the stuff your dashboards can’t.

• Tell your origin story. Not just in decks — but as a shared memory, a felt vibe, a reason to believe.

• Build soulful systems. Formal doesn’t mean lifeless. Translate your early energy into rituals, interfaces, and team norms that scale without going stale.

• Protect the edge. Find the ones still coloring outside the lines. Give them cover. Let them prototype futures the org isn’t ready for yet.

• Ritualize the weird. Hold space for the half-formed, hilarious, and heretical. That’s where the future sneaks in.

Each of these points rests on deeper patterns — not just what people do, but how meaning flows. That’s where the real shift happens.

If you do it right, your company can grow without calcifying. It can scale without losing its spirit. It can evolve without forgetting where it came from.

You can build something rigorous, wild, and beautiful — all at once.

Magic doesn’t scale on its own. But with care, it doesn’t have to die either. If you’re curious how, or want help keeping your company alive in all the right ways — let’s talk.

VIBE LABS helps visionary teams upgrade their organizational culture by increasing collective intelligence, creative resilience, and the ability to metabolize complex truths. We work with startups, scaled orgs, and decentralized ecosystems.

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These days, the end results of consulting projects tend to be unclear, educational efforts miss the mark, core values work is disconnected from the lived realities of coworkers, DEI programs are often counterproductive, corporate responsibility can look like greenwashing, and leadership development rarely turns out better leaders.

As research has revealed for over a generation—and as consultants themselves often admit anonymously or after leaving the field—the work is frequently described as empty, as hot air and buzzwords, as input for corporate politics, or as an expensive stack of presentation slides. The most profitable parts of the industry tend to be in the realms of mergers, lobbying, and tax planning—services which often benefit the few at the expense of broader society and the planet.

Can we, the consultants, become more than cogs?

Management consulting is so large and powerful that it now generates over a trillion dollars globally each year, growing at about 9% annually—significantly faster than the global economy. In the U.S. alone, the industry brings in more than $370 billion, over a third of the global total. The average consultant’s revenue sits at $212,000 as of 2024.

It’s time to ask what we are getting for all that money. Consulting costs more than what the U.S. spends on police, corrections, and courts combined. The average working-age American spends just under $1,300 per year on law enforcement—while consulting costs nearly $1,800 per working adult, indirectly, through the economy. The EPA, by comparison, is funded at under $50 per adult. With what we spend on consulting, you could fund over 36 EPAs.

With consulting's expertise supposedly imparted to leaders and industries worldwide, we might expect serious progress in leadership quality, sustainability, resilience, business ethics, stakeholder value, and long-term profitability. But such progress hasn’t materialized. Many signs point in the opposite direction.

Most damningly, malpractices and ethical lapses at top consulting firms continue to surface. At present, this massive industry too often does more harm than good.

Asking the Hard Question

Let us begin by asking a naive but necessary question: Why is this the case? How can a sector grow so fiercely while its reputation deteriorates—even among its own practitioners?

Given the scale and persistence of the phenomenon—disappointing outcomes paired with striking revenue growth—the answer must lie at a fundamental level.

Here is our answer to the conundrum:

• Global consulting still sells “results” and “impact.”

• What counts as “real results” is defined according to established assumptions within an organization and its culture.

• Because organizations are structured around invisible limitations, only relatively superficial and quantifiable goals tend to count as “real results.”

• Corporate culture often disconnects people from one another, from clear thinking, and from genuine emotion.

• This results in stunted agency: organizations can generate billions and still act blindly, without truly thinking or feeling together.

In other words, consulting succeeds at growing because it fits seamlessly into the corporate logic of today’s economy. And it fails for the very same reason.

Corporate logic, as we define it, is the dynamic between people that focuses on transactions: what each party gains, and how agreements can be simplified and repeated. This logic drives efficiency at scale—but disables other vital ways of relating.

What, Then, Could Hit the Mark?

Our claim is that consulting can—and should—be redesigned to enable, rather than disable, sincere processes of truth-seeking: efforts to discover the plain or hidden truths of an organization’s challenges, tensions, limitations, and unrealized potential.

Unflinchingly accessing truths—not only as facts, but as the unspoken emotions and off-record insights of the people involved—allows interactions to begin striking the right note. Because now, something meaningful is being addressed. Actual concerns are being met. Real hopes and doubts are being heard.

When the right note is struck, organizational life begins to chime like a bell. This is what we call resonance—or more casually, good vibes. You know it when you feel it. Not in individuals, but in shared moments and how people show up for one another within them.

Good vibes don’t come from positive thinking, motivational speakers, or mindfulness breaks. They emerge from the sensitive and precise attunement of people to one another and to the realities they face. Resonance arises when people sense something that is true and feel empowered to act on it. This is the foundation of agency, and of cultural transformation. But it all begins with enabling truth-seeking.

Under such conditions, difficult issues become reachable: social tensions, inequalities, workflow inefficiencies, ethical doubts. This is only possible when an organization can hold what we call the truth about the truth.

That is: organizations can only carry and respond to as much challenging, complex truth as their cultural fabric allows. Too much, too fast, and the organization fragments. This is why corporate culture often defaults to the lowest common denominator.

The status quo disables truth-seeking. Consulting should enable it.

Our Stance: The Right Vibes Can Harness the Creative Strength of the Elephant in the Room

There is always an elephant in the room. But the elephant is not, as we’ve been taught, a threat to harmony—it is an untapped source of momentum and creative potential. With the right vibes, you can invite the elephant in, befriend it, and unleash its power.

Like the Hindu deity Ganesha, the elephant symbolizes wisdom, new beginnings, and the ability to clear obstacles. It’s not a problem to be solved, but a partner in transformation.

There are two levels to this work:

1. The quality of truth-seeking itself—how accurately you’re able to see the organization.

2. The truth about the truth—how emotionally and socially prepared the culture is to handle what it sees.

Without the first, you never reach the real issue. Without the second, you can’t respond. When vibes are wrong, even the truth can become destructive. When vibes are right, even the hardest truths can become transformative.

This is why problems persist despite best efforts. The elephant runs the show until we learn to greet it properly.

Is More Activism the Answer? Perhaps Not.

For over a decade, the default response has been to fuse activism with consulting. DEI, CSR, sustainability, and similar efforts have emerged as ways to address organizational blind spots by bringing moral urgency and external pressure.

But this approach has had limits. At best, it complicates relationships and creates tension. At worst, it is co-opted by corporate logic and becomes yet another set of rituals to be performed.

Activist-consultants have brought vital knowledge and sincere intentions. But they have often entered with their own perspectives and goals, rather than beginning with the needs and truths of the organization itself. The result can be friction, blurred roles, and diminished trust.

Instead of importing agendas, we propose something more grounded and generative: a process of context-sensitive truth-seeking, followed by carefully calibrated design interventions that reshape the organization’s cultural fabric.

Too much truth, delivered too bluntly or too soon, often backfires. It destroys trust, overwhelms systems, and creates backlash. That’s the truth about the truth. It is also the truth about therapy, about healing, and about change.

Cultural Design for Collective Intelligence

At VIBE LABS, we take up the core challenge of contemporary consulting—and respond not with new slogans or surface-level interventions, but with what we call Cultural Design.

We don’t offer quick fixes or mass-produced solutions. We offer something slower and deeper: an ongoing, supported process of truth-seeking, resonance-building, and emergent cultural transformation.

We begin by sensing the culture, improving its relational field, and offering tools for resonance. From there, we begin to go deeper, always matching the truth to the organization’s capacity to hold it.

Cultural Design increases a team or organization’s ability to understand, reflect upon, and ultimately co-create its own local culture. The results are not just improved performance metrics, but social resilience, trust, long-term ethical consistency, creativity, and what we call collective intelligence.

This doesn’t eliminate bias or resolve inequality overnight. But it builds the capability to face such issues together, over time, with nuance and maturity.

The Three Forms of Consulting

In Summary: New Methods in Consulting, for a World in Resonance

Once upon a time, consultants met the challenges of their age. Through the turn of the century, they helped transform rigid bureaucracies into nimble, digital-first enterprises. They brought analytical clarity to industrial complexity. They earned their fees.

But today, the challenge is different. The world is more connected, faster-moving, more emotionally complex. Our problems are systemic and interpersonal. Our people are more psychologically aware and expect more meaning from work. In this new context, consulting is once again in a position of unique opportunity.

With personal client relationships and global reach, consultants sit at a leverage point: uniquely positioned to help organizations – and thus the world – evolve. But the method must change.

We believe that consulting is currently too constrained by corporate logic to support sincere truth-seeking and resonance. And while activism-based consulting has brought insight, it has not transformed the deeper patterns.

Cultural Design offers a third path.

It is not a playbook, but a methodology. A way of coordinating practices, listening deeply, naming what is true, and cultivating the cultural readiness to respond to that truth. At its best, it makes the elephant playful. And in doing so, it makes your organization more itself: more aligned, more adaptive, and more alive.

Imagine if the trillion dollars spent on consulting each year went toward cultivating organizational coherence. Toward building our collective ability to face difficult truths—and respond creatively.

Most of our global challenges are self-inflicted. They can only be addressed through shared, emotionally intelligent, socially attuned truth-seeking. This is hard work. It is human work. And it must begin with deep respect for how fragile—and how powerful—truth really is.

At VIBE LABS, we believe consultants can be stewards of this transformation. Without discarding past wisdom or critique, we can realign our practices to serve resonance, coherence, and life.

Our vision is simple: a global consulting sector in the service of a world in resonance.

Thoughts or questions? Email us at word@vibelabs.co, or use the message button below.

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Despite decades of effort, recent data shows that a significant portion of the U.S. population—particularly white Americans—now perceives reverse discrimination as a greater problem than systemic racism. This perception, however misaligned with the data, points to a cultural polarization that DEI has not resolved—and may, in some cases, have inadvertently amplified.

Academic research is beginning to underscore these limitations. Many DEI programs have not demonstrated sustained positive impact, and in some cases, have even correlated with increased workplace bias. Clearly, while the goals of DEI remain vital, the strategies require reevaluation.

An Elephant in Every Room

The persistence of inequity, conformity, and exclusion in organizations demands ongoing attention. The dissolution of certain DEI programs does not mean the underlying issues have been solved. Instead, they continue to surface—subtly and not-so-subtly—in every workplace, every boardroom, every team dynamic.

There is still an elephant in every room. And there is a price to pay for ignoring this fact.

What’s needed now is not a retreat into silence or avoidance, but a new framework for meaningful, inclusive culture-building. One that acknowledges past efforts without being bound by their limitations. One that invites fresh energy and broader participation.

Understanding where DEI Went Wrong

To build more effective approaches, it’s essential to understand why many DEI programs have struggled. Four interrelated issues often emerge:

1. Overly narrow categories: DEI efforts often focus on a limited set of identity categories—typically race, gender, and a few others—while neglecting many lived experiences of marginalization or exclusion. This can alienate individuals who don’t see their challenges reflected or acknowledged.
   

2. Rigid identity frameworks: By centering fixed identity categories, DEI programs can unintentionally reinforce stereotypes or encourage reductive thinking. In emphasizing difference, they may undercut the recognition of shared complexity.
   

3. Excessive burden on organizations: While systemic injustice is a legitimate societal concern, placing the weight of redress on individual workplaces—often without adequate support or clarity—can overwhelm teams and diminish efficacy.
   

4. A deficit-based tone: Many DEI efforts focus on diagnosing problems and identifying faults. While necessary, this emphasis can lead to defensiveness, compliance-based behavior, and a culture of blame, rather than open engagement.
   

A New Approach: Cultural Design

To move forward, we propose an evolution: from DEI to Cultural Design. This is not about abandoning the values of fairness, inclusion, and equity—but about pursuing them through a more adaptive, creative, and locally grounded methodology. Cultural Design prioritizes co-creation, listening, and experimentation over compliance and correction.

Here’s how Cultural Design responds to DEI’s key challenges:

1. Starts with listening: Rather than assuming which categories are most relevant, Cultural Design begins with deep, qualitative exploration to identify the real tensions, patterns, and unmet needs within a given workplace. It is grounded in context, not preconception.
   

2. Embraces identity ecologies: Cultural Design acknowledges that people carry multiple, intersecting identities. By de-emphasizing fixed labels and instead inviting whole-person engagement, it helps reduce stereotyping and supports more authentic connection.
   

3. Focuses on local agency: Instead of asking local organizations to solve global injustices, Cultural Design empowers teams to improve the specific cultures they inhabit. This makes the work feel more actionable, meaningful, and sustainable.
   

4. Builds on what’s working: Cultural Design emphasizes generative change—what can be created, not just what must be dismantled. It promotes psychological safety by encouraging curiosity, creativity, and even humor, helping participants feel more ownership over cultural evolution.

From this perspective, culture is not a static structure to deconstruct—it is a living system to be shaped. When organizations move from correction to co-creation, they tap into deeper motivation and broader engagement.

Cultural Design is not a repudiation of DEI, but a next step. It is an invitation to organizations that value inclusion but seek a framework better suited to today’s complex and fast-changing social landscape. By focusing on lived realities, shared aspirations, and local agency, Cultural Design helps teams not only address bias but build cultures of belonging and vitality.

Because ultimately, the goal is not to fix people—it’s to design environments where people can thrive, together.

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This essay is from VIBE LABS: Resources for Resonance

We take on elephants – there’s one in every room

We are:

Robert Kelley Ayala, strategy consultant, executive coach, and writer with a background in technology, venture capital, and organizational design. He holds a B.S. from Duke University, an MBA from HEC-Paris and an M.S. in organizational psychology from Birkbeck College, University of London.

Daniel P. Görtz, Ph.D. in sociology at Lund University, Sweden. Daniel’s doctoral thesis was a close study of on-the-ground police work, decoding racial and ethnic biases and practices in the highly multicultural city of Malmö. He is the co-author of several books on the cultural sociology of “metamodernism”, including The Listening Society.

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