The biggest lie of our time? "One size fits all"

I read a lovely article commenting on a Big Issue article this week, talking about a new, and so far, successful housing scheme (the Harbour Project) for people previously struggling with homelessness, and one comment struck me “We can’t just keep churning people through sausage factories. It works for some people. It doesn’t work for everyone. You know, no model works for everyone. But this seems to be a new model which is working for, you know, a group of people right across the capital for whom other services have failed time and time again.” and I thought "Yeah. You’re not wrong" — and honestly, that quote nails something we collectively keep pretending isn’t true.

“One size does not, and will not ever fit all.”

That’s not radical. That’s just… reality.

But we keep acting like it’s a controversial opinion because admitting it forces responsibility.

“Efficiency” and “cost-effectiveness” are often just polite language for simplification. Systems love tidy categories. People are not tidy. When the two clash, we don’t redesign the system — we blame the people who don’t fit. That’s how you end up with phrases like “hard to reach” or “non-compliant” instead of “this model doesn’t work for them.”

What really struck me in the article was this bit:

a group of people for whom other services have failed time and time again

That flips the script. It’s not that people “failed the system”; the system failed them. Repeatedly. And yet we still act surprised when pushing them through the same sausage factory again doesn’t magically work this time.

Why do we allow the myth to continue?

A few uncomfortable reasons:

Uniform systems are easier to fund and defend politically. Variation looks messy on a spreadsheet.

Admitting “one size fits all” is false means admitting harm was preventable. That’s a hard reckoning.

There’s a quiet moral comfort in standardisation. If everyone gets the same thing, we can claim fairness — even when outcomes are wildly unequal.

And, frankly, listening properly costs time, imagination, and humility. Those don’t scale neatly.

What’s hopeful about the scheme I mentioned — and why the Big Issue piece matters — is that it doesn’t pretend to be the solution. It’s a solution. For some people. And that should be enough to justify it.

Real intelligence isn’t about forcing complexity into straight lines. It’s about designing systems that bend without breaking the people inside them.

So yes — this is exactly something we should all be looking at. Not because it’s perfect, but because it finally starts from an honest premise:

People are different.

Needs are different.

And pretending otherwise is neither efficient nor humane.

Honestly? The truly irrational thing is how long we’ve kept calling the myth “common sense.”