Rory Sutherland told a story this month that I have not stopped thinking about. Old world vultures and new world vultures look almost identical. Bald necks, acidic stomachs, the same grim table manners. They are barely related. One line descends from hawks, the other from cranes. Nobody copied anybody. They just spent a few million years being marked against the same narrow test, sticking your head inside a carcass, and converged on the same answer.
Business has a duller name for it
Biology calls it convergent evolution. Business calls it corporate isomorphism, and the cause is duller too. Measure every company in a sector on the same metrics, over the same timescale, for the purpose of comparison, and they stop resembling themselves and start resembling each other.
If you work in managed services, that should feel uncomfortably familiar. Same response targets. Same CSAT question. Same cost-per-ticket maths, same utilisation logic. Partly our own doing, partly what the scoring matrix demands, because comparability is the whole point of one.
And it has worked. Everything is comparable now. I read a lot of service propositions and I could not pick most of them out of a line-up. Mine included, on a bad day.
The brief was never meant to be tight
Sutherland's explanation comes from Stephen Wolfram. Evolution produces its extraordinary variety because the brief is loose. Survive, any way you like. Sharks and moss are both compliant.
Tighten the brief and you get monoculture. A market where every provider has been optimised into the same provider, and the only differentiator left standing is price. Everyone loses except whoever runs the comparison.
The shared metrics are hygiene. Meet them. But if everything you measure is also measured by your competitors, your strategy is being written by the scoring matrix. Somewhere in what you deliver is a thing customers feel and nobody counts. That is the part worth protecting, and it is the first thing a comparison exercise will talk you out of.
This is the same argument I make about selling confidence rather than time, approached from the other end. There, the problem is what you price. Here, it is what you are measured on. Both end in the same place: a proposition nobody can tell apart.
The vultures had no choice. We volunteer.