This is slightly different (SI/Mgmt consultants vs Strategy consultants) but my experience with SI consultancies was that mid/lower consultants were rewarded ba

This is slightly different (SI/Mgmt consultants vs Strategy consultants) but my experience with SI consultancies was that mid/lower consultants were rewarded based on chaos and fixing chaos not on avoiding chaos. So if you oversaw the build-out of a system and everything went smoothly, good, but nothing to talk about during promotions. On the other hand, if there were difficult issues faced and you fire-fought, sent out late emails with decisions to clients, came up with memos documenting tricky situations, awesome! Promotion material! Of course, sharp consultants figured this out and the sharpest ones looked the other way when design documents had landmines -- just so they had known manageable issues to "manage" and "save the day" with. Bad incentives, bad outcomes.