I feel compelled to add a disclaimer: Long-winded philosophical rant ahead! I have a long flight tonight--I'm giving myself permission. Read on if you're up for that.
Where do you fit on this graph? In more than one place no doubt. The question is probably more about your tendencies and your preferences, and maybe your thinking, learning, and communication styles. Here's my best guess about where I personally fit:
Hmmm.... This suggests I should look into consulting! Oh wait--I already am a consultant. Good. I would be a terrible client!
But maybe I'm taking this work-style personality typing a little too far.
A smart person pointed out to me recently what I think is one of the core truths of good consulting: That a consultant is not the same thing as an enthusiast. I've been chewing on that for weeks, and I'm still really struggling to put it into words that express why I think it's kind of a big idea. It's one thing to recognize the difference between a consultant and an enthusiast, and it's another to say what it is exactly about a consultant that's different.
The thing is, if there's one thing the good and great consultants I've known have in common, it's enthusiasm. Consultants, when they're doing it well, do what they do out of passion. But there's also a quality of fair-mindedness providing balance within that passion. Otherwise the consultant is what my colleague Pam Shales calls "A solution looking for a problem."
Most basically, there's a simple quality among good consultants of integrity--you can't assume your preferred solution, or even a solution you're selling, is the right one (see my post on tendentiousness).
But there's more to it than that. Let me illustrate: Being a passionate user of and enthusiast about social media doesn't make you good at developing social media strategy. You can use every social network on the web and not necessarily have a clue how to think about the functional elements of social networks, let alone know how to design one--especially a successful one, and especially ESPECIALLY a successful branded one aligned with overall corporate marketing objectives.
You could be a hard-core user of social networks, a blogger, a Twitter maniac, have an iPhone AND a G-Phone, use Pownce and Brytekyte for goodness sake, and Jaiku, and Reddit, Ma.gnolia, and so on, without knowing how to create a plan to engage customers online.
See what I mean?
Here's what I think I'm getting at: Having a strong capacity for abstract thinking is a key consulting skill. You need to be good at digesting experiences, abstracting them into concepts, and adapting the concepts to new situations. You need to build an understanding of broad principles from the accumulation of narrow experiences.
So here's one way to tell a good consultant: Ask about mobile design, and they should mention location-awareness. Ask about social networks, and they should mention trust. Ask about product reviews, and they should mention affinity. But that's not enough: They should be able to talk about how exactly to apply the concept, tell you when it is and isn't important, and give you some specific examples to illustrate their points of view.
I think that's one of the differences, and maybe it's the key difference, between enthusiasts and consultants--or for that matter between users and designers. It's how they add value. It's the skill the designer uses to create something better than the user could have asked for, and it's the skill that enables the consultant to understand the challenge the client needs solved and find a solution the client isn't in a position to see.
What do you think?
Comments