Imitation Isn’t Flattery it's Knowledge Brokering

A few Fridays ago I found myself four hours deep into a research rabbit hole on a topic I had only heard named for the first time days earlier. The term came up in a group chat, in the context of imitation of my own online course material, and one of the women in the conversation used the phrase “knowledge brokering.” From there my Friday evening was effectively over, and I have not stopped thinking about it since (because clearly I had no better way to occupy myself).

For anyone who hasn’t met the term yet it is the practice of attending someone else’s class, masterclass, keynote or paid session, absorbing the intellectual property they have spent years developing, and then re-presenting that thinking as your own work, usually with a brand refresh, a different colour palette and a sufficiently rephrased title to muddy the lineage. It rarely comes with attribution, acknowledgment, or any return to the originator who developed the thinking in the first place. Once you have seen it, you cannot unsee it.

And that is where my Friday night ended and a much bigger conversation began.

There is a pattern playing out in our industry that most of us have either watched happen to someone we respect, or privately suspected was happening to us. Someone of genuine standing (an educator, a clinical specialist, a strategist who has spent fifteen or twenty years building a body of work) delivers a session. Six months later, a different name with different branding is presenting a thinly rinsed version of the same framework, often using the same case studies and occasionally the same diagrams, redrawn in a new font.

The Brigitte Benge's, Gay Wardles' and Lia Trebilcocks' of our industry have all shared variations of this story. It is not a coincidence that the people most worth copying are the ones most often copied. It is, in fact, the operating logic of an entire layer of our education economy.

So why does it happen, and what does it tell us about the state of expertise in 2026?

The reactive broker (and the self-deception that keeps them comfortable)

There are two archetypes (sitting on a spectrum) with self-deception doing most of the work to keep people on the comfortable side of it.

The reactive broker books the seat with what they would honestly describe as genuine intent. They take notes, they post the obligatory mind-blown story, they leave the room buzzing. And then, in the days that follow, two things collide. The first is the dawning realisation that the educator they paid to learn from has spent fifteen or twenty years arriving at the framework they just absorbed in ninety minutes. The second is the pressure of their own positioning, because they have already told the market they are an authority, they have already charged for their thinking, they have already built a personal brand around being the one who knows.

Closing that gap honestly would require admitting to a learning curve they have publicly cleared. So instead, the framework gets absorbed, lightly rephrased, run through their own brand palette and presented six months later as the natural conclusion of their own original thinking. The internal narrative becomes something like “I would have arrived at this anyway” or “everyone in the industry is converging on these ideas,” which is the kind of language people reach for when they need appropriation to feel like consensus.

The intentional broker (and how to spot them retrospectively)

The intentional broker is rarer but unmistakable once you know what to look for. These are the ones who book the seat with a notebook open and a content calendar already in mind. They are not learning, they are scouting.

You can usually identify them retrospectively because their version of the content appears almost immediately, often before they have had any real time to pressure-test it in practice. They are also the ones who tend to skip the parts of a class that involve nuance, exception-handling, or the educator’s own caveats about when the framework breaks down. They lift the structure and discard the wisdom, because the structure is what’s marketable and the wisdom is what takes years to earn.

Why our industry is particularly vulnerable

Professional hair and beauty is built on an education-heavy economy. So much of the expert layer here (brand educators, BDMs, consultants, distributor trainers, in-salon mentors) is monetised through courses, masterclasses, lunch-and-learns and stage time. The IP being traded is almost always someone’s accumulated practice refined into a teachable system, which makes it both unusually valuable and unusually easy to lift.

Add to that a small, tight-knit market where the same audiences attend the same events, follow the same accounts and reference the same case studies, and you have the perfect conditions for derivative work to circulate quickly with very little friction.

On the ‘imitation is flattery’ defence

The cliché collapses under any real scrutiny. Flattery requires acknowledgment, and the moment attribution is stripped, we have crossed out of homage and into something else entirely. Flattery also doesn’t compete with the original. It elevates it. Knowledge brokering, by contrast, competes for exactly the same audience, the same speaking slots, the same brand consulting budgets, often using the original’s own material as the leverage.

The Picasso line about great artists stealing gets routinely misused in this space. What Picasso actually meant was that great artists absorb influence and transform it into something genuinely their own, not that the work could be lifted wholesale and passed off without acknowledgment.

Does originality even exist in 2026?

I’d push back gently on the framing. Frameworks have always been borrowed and built on each other, and almost no idea in business education is genuinely net-new. The educators we consider greats have all stood on earlier shoulders. What has always been the actual differentiator (and arguably is more so now than ever) is voice, lived experience, the specific data and case studies you bring from your own practice, and the way you synthesise.

A borrowed framework taught by someone who has actually used it for a decade lands completely differently to the same framework taught by someone who heard it six months ago. The audience knows. They might not be able to articulate why a session feels thin, but they feel it.

What AI and the wider content economy have done is accelerate the volume of derivative work, which has the paradoxical effect of making genuine voice more valuable as a differentiator, not less. The market is currently being flooded with frameworks-without-experience, and the educators who have actually done the reps are pulling further ahead, not because the brokers aren’t getting attention, but because the brokers can’t sustain it.

You can rip a session once. You can’t rip a body of work, a decade of client outcomes, or a proprietary data set.

The thing that protects original thinkers long-term is the depth that brokers can’t replicate. Proprietary data, which is one of the reasons we publish the quarterly industry reports, and which most brokers will never invest in producing themselves. Original case studies from actual client work, not borrowed examples. The lived voice that audiences trust, because they have heard it evolve in real time. And the willingness to keep moving past the version of you that got copied.

The brokers are always one cycle behind. The gap widens every time the original moves.