I wrote this about six weeks ago. In the last few days, I’ve encountered quite a few people who would fail the One Month Rule, and I’ve felt almost compelled to finish it.
I am writing this from a hotel room in Gangnam, on doctor’s orders not to speak a single word, which my regular readers will recognise as the cruellest possible prescription. Yesterday a surgeon called Dr Kim took my vocal folds apart and rebuilt them. At some point during the operation, he found a fault nobody knew existed, a congenital imbalance I had been unconsciously correcting my entire life, and he did something that has been on my mind ever since.
He just fixed it.
No 20 utterly useless meetings. No stakeholder alignment. No design authority. He found the fault, repaired it, then carried on with the procedure he had planned. When he showed me afterwards, through the fog of anaesthetic, my first thought was that I was about to receive a supplementary invoice. My second thought was that I have spent thirty years working inside organisations where repairing an unexpected fault would have required three workshops, a risk register entry and a revised statement of work, all involving people who genuinely would confuse their arses and their elbows. and here was a man who simply noticed a problem and made it not exist.
And that brought back a theory I have carried around for years. I have never written it down. I am mute, I have time, so here it is.
I call it the One Month Rule, and I will give you the conclusion first, because the conclusion is the part worth arguing with.
Any role that can be populated by a bullshitter will fill up with bullshitters.
Not might be. Will be. That is not cynicism about people, it is a claim about structure: where the work cannot check the worker, the people who cannot do the work have an advantage over the people who can, and given enough time they win on volume.
The rest of this is working out how to tell which roles those are.
The rule
Take any professional role. Now imagine a complete impostor walks in on Monday morning and announces themselves as the thing.
“Hello. I am a voice surgeon.”
“Hello. I am an airline pilot.”
“Hello. I am a management consultant.”
Nothing but confidence and a lanyard.
Now start the clock, and ask one question: how long do they survive before the job itself exposes them?
That number, the impostor survival time, tells you almost everything you need to know about the role. Not about the person doing it. About the role itself, and what it is made of.
The spectrum
“I am a voice surgeon” survives until the first patient. Hours. There is no meeting Dr Kim can convene, no framework he can cite, no journey he can champion, that substitutes for the vocal fold being correctly sutured. The scalpel is a reality-delivery mechanism. The work audits the worker, continuously, on a cycle measured in minutes.
“I am a pilot” survives until the runway.
“I am a plumber” survives until somebody turns the water back on.
“I am a chef” survives until the first service. Confidence may get the apron on, but it cannot get forty dinners through a kitchen.
Finally my own world. “I am a software developer” survives a little longer, perhaps days, because you can nod along in meetings for a while. But the code either runs or it does not. The build either passes or it fails. Sooner or later somebody says “can you just show me”, and the clock strikes midnight.
Now let us move along the spectrum.
“I am a management consultant” can survive indefinitely.
The output is advice, and advice is a marvellous professional material: solid enough to invoice for and weightless enough never to bear responsibility. The consultant arrives, interviews the people who already work there, rearranges what they said into a presentation and returns it to senior management in a more expensive font.
If the organisation improves, the advice was visionary. If it does not, the organisation failed to implement it properly. By the time anybody could know which it was, the consultant has left, the invoice has been paid and the presentation has become somebody else’s problem. Every success travels back to the recommendation; every failure stops at the client’s front door. The impostor does not survive a month. The impostor survives an entire career, possibly being promoted to partner along the way.
Why the bad roles fill up with exactly who you would expect
Here is the part of the theory that took me longer to work out, and it is the part that matters.
The One Month Rule does not just measure how easily a role tolerates bullshitters. It predicts who ends up in the role.
The population sorts itself. If you are genuinely capable, a role with no reality-contact is quietly maddening because capability itself becomes invisible. You migrate towards the places where the thing either works or it does not. If you are optimising for survival without substance, you drift the other way, towards the roles where exposure is structurally impossible.
The referent-free zone is not just habitable for you. It is paradise.
So the long-survival roles do not merely permit impostors. They select for them. Over time, the people who can actually do things cluster where doing things is checkable, while the people who need to avoid the audit move further away from it.
Tracy from Accounts
That is the migration. But there is a second mechanism, and it is more innocent than you would like.
A project needs a project manager. There is no budget for one, or no time to recruit one, so the job lands on whoever is nearest and cheapest. Tracy from Accounts, who has never run a project, starts forwarding the meeting invitations.
And the project ships. Of course it does. The builders build, the analysts analyse, the suppliers supply, the people who know how to do the work carry on doing it. Tracy arranges the meetings, asks everyone for an update and moves the dates around when the dates move themselves.
Crucially, she does not wreck it.
Nobody can say whether her contribution caused the project to succeed. All anyone knows is that the project survived her involvement. But nobody records that it shipped despite the arrangement rather than because of it. There is no line on the closure report for that.
What there is, six months later, is a CV. It says: successfully delivered a complex workflow system, budget £1.2m, team of fourteen. Every word of it is true. And Tracy is now, permanently and irreversibly, a project manager not because she learned to be one, but because a project happened in her vicinity and did not fail.
That first project qualifies her for the second. The next organisation cannot see that she mainly forwarded invitations; it can see only that the project was delivered. So it gives her a larger one. Another capable team does the work, Tracy once again does not prevent it, and another success attaches itself to her CV. After three or four repetitions, proximity has hardened into experience.
Do this ten thousand times across an economy and you have manufactured an entire class of useless grifters. Tracy is not the villain. She did not invent the mechanism; the institution minted her.
Underneath it sits the acid test: could the role be quietly deleted without the output changing? For the surgeon, the pilot, the plumber and the chef, the question is absurd. For a striking number of roles in the modern economy, the question is dangerous precisely because everyone already suspects the answer.
Coordination matters, and a good project manager feels like tailwind because she attaches herself to real dependencies, dates and blockers. Once the role detaches from those referents, it becomes weather: present, occasionally loud, and nothing to do with whether the crops grow.
The contractor’s corollary
There is a practical edge to all this, and it is the reason the theory has given me a nice life.
If you sell your labour in the open market, as I have for most of thirty years, the One Month Rule tells you exactly where to stand: as close to the referents as possible. A permanent employee can shelter inside institutional ambiguity for years. A contractor is re-audited at every renewal and every new engagement.
For me, the referent has usually been software: the system runs in production or it does not. If your answer to “what did you do?” is a list of things that demonstrably exist and work, the market keeps buying. If it is a list of journeys championed, transformations enabled and strategic conversations facilitated, you are one budget review away from the void. You were always decoration, and decoration is the first line deleted.
That is the question. Not what happened while you were present. What happened because you were present?
A little aside
I really wanted to fit this anecdote into the article, by the way. It does not really fit, so I am going to tell you anyway. It made my chuckle.
Once upon a time, I went for a job interview. The interviewer said, “We don’t normally discuss people’s references with them, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to mention something from yours.”
“Go on, then. Fire away. What is it?”
“Two of your references contain exactly the same line.”
“Really? What’s the line?”
“Steve really doesn’t suffer fools gladly.”
I burst out laughing.
“I’m sorry is that supposed to be a negative thing?”
Back to Dr Kim
Which returns me, throat aching, to the man who rebuilt my voice.
The professions we trust with our bodies, our aircraft and our plumbing are impostor-proof for one structural reason. Not because the people are morally superior, but because reality audits their work continuously. It cannot be captured, charmed or presented to.
Everything else is a choice. Every role where reality never gets a look in was designed that way by somebody, signed off by somebody and budgeted by somebody, and they are all still surprised at what those roles fill up with. They should not be. The rule told them at the start.
Meanwhile, I shall be here in Gangnam, silent, healing, and reflecting warmly on the one professional who worked on me this year whose impostor survival time is measured in minutes. He found a fault, and he just fixed it.