Be bolder, do it earlier: A managing director's career advice

In our Meet the Member series, we chat with consulting alumni who've transitioned to high-impact roles. This time, we sat down with Jamie Woodhouse, founder of the Sentientism movement, to discuss his journey from Managing Director at Accenture to developing a new worldview focused on evidence-based thinking and expanding moral consideration beyond humans.

To start, what attracted you to consulting back in the day?

My dad had set up and run his own business. In fact, my mom ended up setting up and running three of her own businesses too, eventually. So there was something in our family about that entrepreneurial excitement and the sense that business can play a positive role in the world.

Consulting was a sort of safe way to access the entrepreneurial life. It wasn't quite like putting your money and your life on your own business idea, but it had a really entrepreneurial, innovative feel to it. At the same time, you're working for a big company that has all the skills, capabilities, and backup to get almost anything done. I also loved the idea of just never being bored, constantly learning, working hard, driving change, and making things happen. And the idea of impact was always there—the sense I had in consulting was that the whole point of our work was to make something good happen. Otherwise, why would people pay those fees?

And you stayed at Accenture for 23 years, with 13 years as a Managing Director. Why? 

Going back to the early days, I probably went in thinking I'll do this for a few years and then move on to something else. But what kept me there? One thing was the people. I found I was working with an amazing range of people from all sorts of different backgrounds. They were driven, they were learning alongside me, learning from each other, and the buzz and the intensity of the work were addictive.

Even as a reasonably junior consultant, I found myself almost accidentally selling bits of work because I was working with a client, they had needs, and we were trying to help them. I really liked the feeling of helping clients. This cuts against the impression that many people have of consulting from the outside—that it's a bit rapacious and brutal and sharp-edged. But actually, developing relationships, using empathy, genuinely understanding not just where a company is but also the people within it and what they're trying to achieve, and then trying to help them in good faith—helping people get stuff done felt better to me than just sorting out my own problems.

We’re curious – at what point did you first seriously consider leaving consulting?

It was a gradual process. There were negative aspects to my role, some push factors, and there were positive aspects and pulls that drew me to move on. The negative elements were that at the stage I got to in my career, things just started to feel a bit more corporate. A little bit more fixed, a little bit more about your management leadership role, a little bit less entrepreneurial, with some shifts that took me further away from working directly with clients.

The thing I'd always enjoyed about consulting was that fast-paced, innovative dynamism, that client-focused, continuous change, whereas it began to feel like a more standard corporate role that was a bit more fixed, a bit more well-defined, a bit more political.

On the other hand, there's something about the nature of work as a consultant that drives intensity. The sort of people we are makes us want to focus, want to drive, want to be relentless, want to push, want to make stuff happen. And when you consider time for family life and friends, consulting doesn't leave much space for anything else. In terms of time, intellectual effort, and emotional labour, work was the overwhelming, dominating core of my life. It left some space for family and friends around the outside, but not much beyond that.

I'd always had this interest in philosophy, worldviews, and humanitarianism, and just the state of the world broadly. But I had little space for that type of thinking. It was all really squeezed around the edges. So the main pull to leave consulting was the chance to take some of the stuff that I'd been squeezing around the outside of my busy life, those things that I felt were most impactful and most meaningful, and bring them right into the center.

That couldn’t have been an easy process. Which parts of the transition were most challenging?

Probably the biggest challenge was to do with status. I'd been in a position where if I met someone at a party and they said, "Oh, what do you do?" I could say, "I'm a managing director at Accenture." It was so easy. I'd immediately ticked a box. They had no idea what it meant, but they knew it was important. They knew it was high status.

So, to move to a position where you don't have that easy answer anymore, where the answer becomes more complicated, where there isn't a simple way of describing what the hell you're doing, and where it's absolutely not clear that the thing you're doing now is classically high status, that's been quite weird to get used to. That's been one of the strangest transitions.

It was a gradual process of recognizing that this is how our minds work, this is how we're socialized, and then working out whether I wanted to be driven by that sense of status or whether I wanted to try not to care so much—so I'm just going to choose not to care, be upfront about it, and work through it.

How did you find your way to your current work promoting Sentientism? 

Even as a child, I'd had a real interest in deep philosophical questions. I had my own personal journey through various worldviews—starting out being brought up Christian, becoming an atheist as a teenager, then exploring Humanism, which says let's understand the world using a broadly scientific approach, using evidence and reason, rather than basing it on supernatural beliefs. It also insists we can be “good without god,” committing to universal human rights, for example.

The reason I think worldviews are important is that they feel to me like the ultimate meta-intervention. These worldviews are what sit underneath every single human decision. Given that humans have so much power, if there's something that underpins and steers every decision humans make—institutionally or individually—and that thing is our worldviews, then it's got to be important to focus on.

I had this increasing sense of frustration that Humanism, which seemed to be my main option if I wanted a worldview based on broadly scientific understanding and compassionate ethics, seemed quite focused on humans. Humanism doesn’t insist we should only care about humans, but at the moment, that’s where most of the movement’s focus lies. Through my own process of thinking about non-human animal ethics—I'd been a vegetarian since my early twenties and went vegan about seven years ago—I felt this tension with the human-focused centre of gravity of Humanism. That ultimately led me to Sentientism, which, in a sentence, is “evidence, reason, and compassion for all sentient beings.”

A sentient being is anyone who can feel or experience things. I thought, there's this menu of different worldviews, religious and not, but there seemed to be a gap where I and many others sat: something that was naturalistic and humbly rational that insists on a serious moral concern for every sentient being. Sentientism fills that gap – it’s another worldview option on the menu for people to consider. Although it’s a distinct worldview, it also has rich areas of productive overlap with many other worldviews, both religious and Humanistic. I hope those positive areas of overlap will just get bigger over time as we converge on better ways of understanding the universe and on ethics that ensure no one who can be harmed is excluded or discriminated against.

How would you describe your work on Sentientism, and what sort of impact do you hope it will have?

I summarise the practical work of developing and normalising the Sentientism worldview as content, community, and collaboration. On the content front, I publish articles, present at conferences, have a book underway, and, to the embarrassment of my kids, I run a Sentientism YouTube account and podcast where I’ve interviewed hundreds of deep thinkers about their worldview journeys.

We also work in the education world, both directly in schools and through training teachers, helping to bring Sentientism into philosophy, civics, and religion, and worldviews education classes, and more broadly across the curriculum. Working with classes of young people is probably the purest fun “work” I do now. It restores my hope for our shared future.

It’s hard to quantify the impact of working on worldviews like Sentientism, precisely because their influence is so foundational and often goes unexamined. But that’s exactly why I believe they matter. To my mind, the more that decision-makers use good quality evidence and reasoning to understand the world, the better they’ll understand how to improve it. And if they extend moral consideration to all sentient beings, we stand a much greater chance of creating a better, if not less harmful, world for everyone.

Looking back at your time in consulting, we’re wondering: if you could send a message back to your Managing Director self, what would you say?

I think I'd say be braver and do it earlier. As I've gone through this transition, it hasn't always been easy. It hasn't always been smooth. It's often felt deeply strange. In a way, I've moved from a world where I was secure, I was high status, where most people around the world would look at you with envy. And I've moved into a radically different space and built a completely new network.

On the one hand, it seems like a bizarre thing to have done, and I guess it is, but I have no regrets at all. There hasn't been a single day where I wish I'd kept going, or where I wish I'd switched into another consulting career, or I wish I'd gone to work for a client, or I wish I'd gone into private equity. There hasn't been a single moment where I've thought, I wish I'd taken a different path.

What advice would you give to consultants considering a similar transition?

One of the difficulties is - and this becomes self-fulfilling - you don't have time to think about this sort of stuff. You reassure yourself that you don't have time to think about this sort of stuff, which becomes a reason for never having to think about it, even though part of your mind would really like to.

So that's part of the boldness. It's not just about making the decision. It's carving out some time to think about what you want to be doing and give yourself that gift, and then see where it leads. Often, the intensity of a consulting career is the reason that you never think more broadly about where you want to go and what you want to do. And then you turn around, and a decade or more has gone by.