A few months ago, I caught up with a former colleague, one of the sharpest market access minds I’ve ever worked with. She’d just walked away from her role at a top-tier consultancy. No drama, no scandal, no big career pivot. Just… done.

“I still loved the work,” she said. “But I hadn’t actually done the work in months. I was just reacting. Chasing. Fixing. Delivering.”

It wasn’t the hours that broke her. It was the slow erosion of thinking time. The daily trade-off between speed and depth. The constant pressure to get something out the door, knowing it could’ve been sharper if she’d had more than 10 minutes to think.

And she’s not alone.

You’ve seen the signs. Brilliant consultants who slowly disengage, teams who used to love solving problems now stuck in a fog of rework, reformatting, and rush jobs. People stretched so thin across projects they no longer know where the value actually lies.

It’s about resilience. It’s not about hiring more people. It’s a system problem.

And it’s quietly bleeding the best out of the industry.

Let’s talk about why it’s happening and what needs to change.

The myth of the high-performing grinder

In consulting, there’s a long-standing myth: the best people are the ones who can take on more. More timelines. More fire drills. More deliverables.

But what we’ve really done is reward people who can survive broken workflows. Who can thrive in chaos. Who can spin insight out of spreadsheets, Zoom calls, and version 17.2 of a GVD update without flinching.

Eventually, they burn out. Or worse. They stay, but flatline.

Not because they’re weak. But because the job became less about thinking and more about chasing.

The thinking time is gone

The root of the problem is simple: we’ve systemically removed space for deep, strategic work.

Time that should be spent shaping launch narratives, pressure-testing pricing models, or aligning clinical value with affiliate needs is now spent on:

• Hunting for the right version of a slide
• Copy-pasting insights from one project to another
• Manually stitching together payer or competitor data
• Formatting deliverables late into the evening

Consultants aren’t underperforming.

They’re stuck in a loop of admin dressed up as insight.

When the smart people check out

Good consultants don’t mind being busy. They mind being busy with the wrong things.

Burnout isn’t just about long hours. It’s about disconnection from the craft. The gradual erosion of pride in the work. The shift from “I delivered something valuable today” to “I ticked off enough tasks to survive the week.”

And that shows up in the outputs: decks that lack edge. Insights that feel recycled. Strategy that plays it safe.

The system is wasting their brilliance.

More headcount won’t fix it

You can’t hire your way out of this.

Adding another analyst won’t fix structural inefficiencies. It just spreads the burden thinner.

Eventually, you’re left with an army of people doing low-value work with no time to think.

To fix burnout, you need to fix the way the work works.

What structural change looks like

This isn’t about replacing people. It’s about removing the parts of the job that get in the way of people doing what they do best.

That means:

• Centralising internal and external knowledge so it’s easy to find and reuse
• Using AI not to generate more noise, but to prioritise and surface only what matters
• Turning research into a springboard, not a swamp
• Automating the tasks that add no strategic value, so consultants can focus on the thinking that does

It’s about creating more time for insight, and less time on maintenance.

If you want better work, protect the people who do it

Consultancy has always been a people business. But if you want high-performance teams, you need a high-performance system behind them.

Burnout isn’t a badge of honour. It’s a warning sign.

Fix the system and you unlock your team’s best work.

Ignore it and you keep losing good people for all the wrong reasons.

Let’s stop rewarding survival.

And start designing a model that actually supports brilliance.