Oh, to occupy the rarified air of a "critical systems thinker", whose outcomes at work include coaching a CEO to have a "better understanding of the need to work at and hold multiple spatial and temporal scales at the same time".
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"How was your day at work, honey?"
"Well, she's got the spatial scales nailed but she's really struggling with the temporal ones."
The absurdity of the CIT's engagement with Mr Hollingworth and his company Think Garden was laid bare at the end of the 300-plus page integrity commission report released late on Thursday that found former CIT chief executive Leanne Cover had engaged in "serious corrupt conduct".
The report deals with the way Ms Cover had steered the institute to sign ever more expensive contracts with Mr Hollingworth and lied repeatedly to avoid the board or the government understanding the expensive thrall she and they were in.
But two documents, the "contemporary organisational transformation report" prepared by Ms Cover and Mr Hollingworth and Think Garden's "CIT strategic review", give some insight into the profoundly baffling nature of what became an $8.5 million relationship.
Mr Hollingworth's work, the CIT said in the first report, involved "guiding, coaching and mentoring" (my emphasis ... word clarity and economy was not part of his remit).
The celebrated "outcomes" of this spending bonanza ranged from the absurdly abstract and unmeasurable, like the CEO's "understanding" of temporal and spatial scales, or the whole workforce "pivoting their approach", to claims of responsibility for a very specific achievement, like being finalists at a training awards.
But the weirdness really kicks in when you go to the Think Garden strategic review, which is pure, unadulterated Hollingworth.
This document reveals how the business managed to step onto the funding gravy train via the "Evolving Together" project and then took charge of the controls. It tells this story in its own words.
"The Evolving Together project was initially conceived as a small component of the [$8 million] transformation, receiving only a small proportion of the funding. Over time the project's funding allocation was increased as both the CEO and Board Chair recognised the project's significance."
'Skin in the game'
It all began with a $198,000 contract and ended with the sixth contract, infamously ten bucks short of $5 million.
So what on earth was Mr Hollingworth selling that was worth turning a relatively minor consultancy into a budget consuming and ultimately reputation-shredding one?
Well, it wasn't a typical organisational restructure, where an organisation might, for example, be delivered a restructure plan for its money.
No, that world be too orthodox and linear.
Instead Think Garden would "impart knowledge and foster experience so the CIT could, over the longer term, create its own solutions".
Talk about teaching a man (or woman in this case) to fish.
"We assume that CIT understands that Think Garden does not do the work on behalf of CIT, but rather, we do it together ... ," Think Garden wrote during one contract pitch.
"Critically, emergent practice can only emerge from within contexts, not from separate contexts. Thus, Think Garden guides and works with CIT in CIT's contexts.
"This means that CIT is as much -and in fact more- responsible for the outcomes of the work as is Think Garden. We call it 'skin in the game'."
Mr Hollingworth and Think Garden were at times a one-man show and at other times a small team of exorbitantly well-paid consultants. In one pricing schedule he refers to himself as "Chief Pioneer", his assisting staff as "Chief Settlers" and one as "Chief Town Planner".
The document boasts that in April 2020 Mr Hollingworth "introduced the CIT board to work of French historian Fernard Barudel". The purpose was to "understand how history is comprised of not just events occurring in sequence, but also the dynamics and structural drivers that lead to events."
For example, the document went on, the Black Summer bushfires and COVID-19 pandemic were examples of "certain processes already set in train by dynamics and structural drivers".
It went on: "Futures are continually unfolding and interacting across systems and across time. They have a duration. They have a thickness".
MORE READING:
'Meaningless' jargon
The integrity commissioner seems wholly sceptical of Mr Hollingworth's brand of consultant talk.
His attempt to convince the CIT a 20-month contract for $1.7m was "ridiculously good value" if you considered it over a decade was "meaningless" and "mere puffery".
Another time he refers to a discussion "replete with the jargon typically used by Mr Hollingworth."
And perhaps the clearest example of his calling bullshit is when confronted with this Think Garden statement: "A basic tenet of complexity theory is that innovation cannot be predicted or designed ex ante; rather, innovation is an emergent property of the novel recombination of a complex system's component parts".
The commissioner's response: "For obvious reasons, this should have sounded a warning".
But it's deeper in the "CIT strategic review" document that Mr Hollingworth moves from the incomprehensible to something you could read as more troubling.
He starts to critique the rigidity of structures and processes holding back the organisation. "On-the-ground realities/events", he called them.
The government was too rigid in its desires for what the CIT should do. Procurement processes lacked flexibility and failed to "recognise and allow for CIT's increasingly variable contexts". The government had denied the board its promised "greater autonomy over its workforce and balance sheet".
The underlying tone - if you can make it through the buzzwords and babble - is someone needed to find the courage to do things their way, not be stymied by a fusty old government or a curious board.
In Leanne Cover, Patrick Hollingworth had a willing pupil.
Willing to accept the extraordinary and ballooning costs of his mentorship, and willing to lie to ensure no meddling minister or board could get in the way of their deals.