My year of the hare: 12 months of consultancy
What have I discovered, a year after setting up Purpose in Practice?
Arto Paasilinna’s Year of the Hare is one of those great novels oft-dismissed as “trite and slight”. Like Winnie-the-Pooh, the apparent childishness belies great wisdom: the protagonist discovers himself, through abandoning his old life and thriving in surprising adventures.
I’ve found consultancy similarly mind-expanding: letting go of old assumptions, moving past the judgements of others, bouncing up from mistakes, and discovering new ways to be useful and cheerful. Here are some reflections, at the risk of being as slight and trite as Paasilinna’s critics believe his books to be.
Imperfection
There were two lists when I started off: what I knew and what I didn’t. The latter outnumbered the first by a country mile. I’d never written a consultancy proposal, built a website or done book-keeping; I’d never sought out clients, investigated their needs and positioned a solution. As an leader in the public sector/NFP I had been an expert. But twenty years on the bridge of a ship does not translate to piloting a kayak.
How had I learnt to be good at the Executive work? Peers, staff, mentors, bosses, and doing work that succeeded and failed. So I looked for wise people and things to try.
Following most advice (ignoring some)
Almost everyone will make time for a coffee and share their wisdom and experience. I acted on everything that felt right.
The great advice I followed:
- Marketing strategy is unhelpful at this point, don’t bother. Get a customer, get another customer, then get another customer.
- Stop saying what you can do and describe the problem you’re solving. Your client cares far less about the method than they do about getting their issue fixed (“Do you care how the doctor diagnoses you, or do you just want the medicine?”)
- The company name does not matter.
- Stop trying to find the perfect words for your website. You’ll re-write it in three months anyway.
- Charge for value not time; “do you care how long the chef took to make the risotto? Not if you’re hungry and it tastes good”
- Read “The Consulting Bible”, by Alan Weiss. (x2 people. One said “Ignore the tone of voice, follow the content.”) The best advice was “ask for an onward referral during the assignment, not after.” This works.
The advice I did not follow:
- Decide on one problem you’re solving and sell that
- Start in a sector in which you have credibility
- Get a business coach to set up all your systems
Why not? This is good advice, right? I was very aware of turning 50 and I feared becoming the show-up-and-churn-it-out dead-eyed consultant I’d seen when I had been the client. I didn’t want to trade on past experience; I felt that would be slowly coasting to dotage pushing what was hot in leadership and strategy in decades past. I feared becoming stale.
So setting up alone was as much a creative act as a way to earn-n-serve. I wanted to play, I wanted to think, I wanted the challenge.
Positioning an offer according to skills AND ethics
I had a service to offer, but I didn’t want to position as an expert, rather as an ally. (One friend said I was going for ‘being the clever and kind big sister’.) Traditional consultants say ‘Sell them everything; Bundle it all up.’ But my ethics had to allow for a clear exit if it didn’t work out.
My first true proposal, I proposed a simple diagnosis-intervention-stabilise methodology: ensure I understand the problem, design a fix, bed the fix down carefully with the people. The client appointed me and then I was off, swimming without a float. (one mentor said ‘that was clever’ and I was stoked for a week.)
Learning by doing and watching
Every time I had been networking I’d described my offer. Each time, I got feedback that helped me hone. But even better, and many people didn’t realise they were doing this, they translated their understanding of what I was saying into their own contexts. Which gave me a few things: how I could better pitch, and how I could be misunderstood.
I also took opportunities to work as an associate for two different consultants. I’m very grateful for these because watching them work taught me so much.
- Investment in understanding the client’s true needs (not stated needs) is essential.
- The correct answer in nearly every moment is ‘yes’. Take the extra meeting, do the additional round of revisions.
- The quiet and informal comments delivered 1:1 is more important than anything written down — in both directions.
- Comms preferences: some clients want an email reply within minutes. Others find that weird. Some want a phone call, some want a teams meet. Some want to chat as needed, other want structured weekly 1:1 check-ins. The answer is ‘as you wish’ in all cases.
- As you deliver, lay the groundwork for a clean conclusion.
Another revelation has been working without positional authority. As a CEO or Director, your every act is freighted with authority; everyone you interact with is responding to that authority, to a greater or lesser extent. But as a consultant, I have only influence, and that is entirely earned. It is perfectly possible for the client to say no, and do something different. This is liberating. I am using my knowledge, skills and creativity, and being trusted for their quality, not being obeyed because I’m the boss or the budget holder.
Lightbulb moments
I have had two lightbulb moments that have reshaped my direction. The first was finding focus. I’d been invited to assist on a piece of strategy work. The first meeting with the CEO and Chair was for me to listen and learn, but when I was invited to join the conversation proper, I could almost feel my mind expand. I crested a hill and saw an entirely new landscape before me. I realised this was a field I could operate in. This was the end of the exploration phase for me; I could now understand the niche I wanted to flourish within.
The second lightbulb was from recognition. I had a week in June in which I received five seperate pieces of feedback and two referrals. Each one of them positioned me in an ‘ikagi’ sweet spot: they described the skills they saw in me and my value to clients in complete alignment to what I was enjoying and charging for. Now I know that I can flourish in that niche.
I’m pleased the experimental approach has worked so well for me, and I am grateful to all the kind people who offered their advice and networks to me as I worked it out.
Bringing your entire self into every situation
My parents ran a small business. As a teen I listened and watched, and met customers when doing deliveries. Since then, I’ve worked in warehouses, a research laboratory, a design company, museums in two countries, CEO-ed an NFP through COVID, interimmed at a cemetery trust and served on a Board. I’ve written myself to boredom with the lessons I learnt from all of these and applied to the next role. But how I am working now is different.
Consulting is recency-agnostic. This is unlike ‘normal’ jobs, which are quite linear in that your most recently learnt skills are what you most frequently apply. It’s rewarding to draw from the entire toolbox of my career, let alone what I have learnt from friends, parenting, art, gardening...
Identity — fighting the cultural expectations
I turned 50, my teenage kids are on the cusp of adulthood, and I entered new sectors in a new model. Identity shifts abound.
I wrote about identity and career change when I left the museums sector in 2019, including this:
A good friend pushed me towards Herminia Ibarra’s Working Identities, and recently I discovered this Invisibilia podcast — I commend them both to you (though some caveats over little-explored privilege in the book). To simplify, the idea of personality as a stable construct is a myth. We are what we do, a product of actions and environment. When we change that environment, we change our selves
So what did it do for my identity to enter a field? This occasion, I was OK with the idea of the shifts; I had done it before. What I had not expected was my response to being tarred with the assumptions of the sector. KPMG’s ethical and commercial implosion this year has made consultant a toxic label, ascribed with unethical practice and commercial gouging.
I found this really hard; ‘ethical consultancy’ feels to many like a non-sequitur. This happened with friends and strangers: “a consultant huh? fancy powerpoints and a 75k bill?” I developed a slightly tougher skin for nonsense — don’t accept critique from someone you wouldn’t ask for advice — and also doubled down on my personal positions. Am I working for good people? Am I charging fairly? Most importantly, am I creating improvements for the client, or creating dependency? I must answer yes to these to satisfy myself. As Teenager1 said: the fact you stop and ask this means you’re not one of the bad ones. Until our culture can confidently say consultants are ethical and valuable members of society then it is up to me, and the other ‘good’ ones, to demonstrate it consistently.
The title ‘consultant’ does also attract questionable people. I’ve been hassled to hire offshore admin staff “because people in Australia don’t work hard” — which I translate as some people being cross that Aussie labour laws make exploitation harder. And there’s a flood of LinkedIn bros (all the dodgy ones have been male, so far) offering snake oil — “10x your income with this simple trick” — which, oddly, turns out to be paying them to do SEO. I did not get these offers in any other role.
Sense-making, not sense-forcing.
The experimentation this year has been exploratory; responding to what I discovered was far more important than trying to impose my view on the world. I’m not Apple — I can’t force my way of thinking upon you.
My reliance on paper notebooks works in my favour here. I can flick through the books of the last year and find clues in the margins: notes, diagrams and sketches that show how my thinking was, and how it’s evolved.
The most sense I have made from the work I have done in the last year has been to operate within layers of context and know where you are in any given moment. It’s essential to know where you are within the nested interlocking systems of an organisational ecosystem. From strategic thinking with Boards to mentoring a specific leader, understanding your influence on the situation — how to effect positive change in this moment, here, is a very peculiar blend of confidence and humility.
To put it another way: I cannot improve any person or organisation by knowing a lot. It is only by paying attention to the uptake in others that anything can land. That specificity in the service, that attention to what’s happening right now, is the offer.
I joke that part of why consultancy is enjoyable is that I don’t ever have to sit through compulsory intranet training modules. If I need to know something I go and find out in the way that suits me (audiobooks and podcasts in the car!); it is under my control not imposed on me. But this joke hides a deeper truth; it is because I am unencumbered by a corporate compliance admin that I am able to better inhabit the moment and serve the situation in front of me.
The hare
This majestic pest pops up in many Western mythologies. Madness, fertility and an association with spring are recurring themes and that’s why I have bookended this piece with it.
Because this year has been a springtime for me. A flirtation with newness leading to a rebirth of optimism and possibility. Unlike hares, though, it isn’t sunshine and fresh grass that’s nourished me. It’s been the wisdom and kindness of old and new colleagues, and the optimism of new clients willing to give me a go. I’ve thanked you all along the way, and I say thank you again here. It is important to acknowledge that we are all supported and enabled by an ecosystem of insight and generosity
I saw this Barry Flanagan Hare sculpture in the Calouste Gulbenkian collection in Lisbon in the 1990s. I loved its jaunty confidence, and the way it pointed all its senses to the far horizon. I shall hare off into my second year of consulting with the same spirit.
