I’ve always loved learning. That enthusiasm drove my early career in R&D, through commercial roles to being an academic researcher. And now, four decades after leaving full-time education, learning drives my advisory work. Every year, I look back on my consulting projects and compare how they worked out for my clients. Sometimes, I learn ways to improve what I do. This year, it revealed a pattern in my clients’ projects that I really want to share with you.

Although it dents my pride to say it, I’m not the most important factor in my clients’ projects. I try to add value and I turn down projects where I can’t, but in reality the success of a project, whether it’s a launch, a strategy review or an executive coaching programme, depends largely on how the project was defined and the efforts of the client. If my clients’ projects were movies, I might be nominated for best supporting actor but I’d never be the star. That’s fine with me and doesn’t stop me from trying to deserve an Oscar nomination. But it does mean that when I look back and review projects, I don’t just think about how I played my part. I consider factors like whether the client was committed to the project and if there was something that pulled it off track, like one of those restructures that come along more often than peak-time buses.

My projects are very varied, involving pharma and medtech companies of differing sizes, operating in diverse markets and selling dissimilar technologies, so it’s hard to draw comparisons between them. But during this annual review, a clear, stark comparison leapt out of me, as if I’d be doing some huge A B test on what kind of projects work and which don’t. Some of my projects had delivered real, substantial gains for the client; others had met the brief but hadn’t translated into demonstrable improvements in their performance. Characteristically, this worried me and I looked to see if there was something that explained why some projects were more successful than others. None of the obvious factors seemed to and then, comparing the initial briefs, the answer leapt out at me.

I’ve grown used to the clichéd management speak that too many pharma and medtech companies are overly fond of. I look past it, searching project briefs for how they want the world to be different as a result of working with me. But in the projects that had not delivered real change, one fashionable word leapt out: transformation. Every one of them talked in terms of radical change, disruption and overused the T word. By contrast, the genuinely successful projects talked about incremental improvements, adapting current processes and building on past success. The difference in language between the two groups was reinforced by their tone. While one kind of project sought to stride towards their future, the other sought to take leaps. To use the jargon of evolutionary scientists, my clients fell into two groups: the gradualists and the saltationists, with the latter marked out by their love of the T word.

What’s the practical lesson from this observation? It’s not that firms shouldn’t try to make big changes as their market changes around them. It’s not even that they should try to make changes slowly, because the pace of change has to match that of the market. It’s that they should make those changes in many small steps by building on what already works and fixing what could work better. It’s also that transformational leaps, ones that discount and displace what is mostly working okay, tend to fail.

Gradualism is how evolution works and while evolution is always incremental, it doesn’t have to be slow. It achieves the same goals as discontinuous ‘transformative’ change, with more certainty and, often, faster. My review showed this in cultural change, strategy revisions, launch plans, digitally based omnichannel projects and even leadership behaviours. The correlation between success and evolutionary gradualism, rather than revolutionary transformation, is very strong. And the causal mechanism lies in understanding the problem better, using existing knowledge and keeping what already works. In a very real sense, gradual, evolutionary projects learn from and adapt to signals from the environment, like market and colleague feedback, in a way that disruptive, transformational projects can’t.

Evolution beats transformation but it is also, ironically, braver. The culture of many life sciences companies, filled with bright young people with a passion for the new and the latest science, is profoundly pro-transformation and often against evolutionary gradualism, however fast it occurs. To take many baby steps towards your goals takes the bravery to go against that culture. But if my experience, and billions of years of biological evolution, tell us anything, it would be better for life sciences firms to bravely eschew the T word and wisely embrace the E word.