How great designers can become great consultants

You can be the best designer in the world but if you don’t know how to connect and collaborate with clients, you’ll never make a great consultant.

Last week I had the pleasure of hanging out with the latest intake of the Sparck Academy. One of my responsibilities is to help new designers like them understand what it means to be a consultant in practice.

Knowing how to respond to clients on a project isn’t instinctive for most people. It’s a skill that needs to be taught.

Luckily, most people who join a consultancy have the basic understanding and the necessary skills.

They just need contextualisation to take it to the next level that our clients have come to expect from us.

Here’s what I’ve learned about design consultancy in the course of my career.

First things first: no ego

‘Leave your ego at the door’ might sound like a cliché but it’s an important reminder that consultants are in the business of human relations.

It’s a statement that reminds us to treat people with respect, kindness, empathy and appreciation.

We know our consultants have this in abundance because we identify this in each of the people we hire during recruitment – and that we consistently hear in positive feedback from clients.

Being positive, growth minded, passionate and inquisitive are also qualities we nurture and celebrate within Sparck/BJSS.

There is, however, much more to being a great consultant than this basic foundation.

Consulting competencies, not skills

A term most of our industry is familiar with is ‘consulting skills’. These are the so-called soft skills (a term I hate – grrr!) that experts say you need to work effectively with clients.

They include things like stakeholder management and presentation skills, to name just a couple of examples.

And, yes, while being skilful in these is a definite asset, lumping them together and saying you need to be good at them is not very practical or useful.

To evolve this thinking and develop my training programme, I took advantage of the Sparck Competency Framework we created a few years ago.

This was a list of 30 behaviours, skills and knowledge elements we identified as key traits to being a successful Sparck consultant. Together we referred to these traits as competencies.

This was great for identifying new hires and developing the abilities of our existing people.

However, something was missing that didn’t quite encapsulate the consultant experience as I knew from my 10 years with Sparck/BJSS.

We’re not all management consultants

That experience showed me that there was not a single definition of what a consultant was.

There is of course the stereotypical management consultant who will be involved in the highly valued recommending-and-advising side of the business.

But most consultants in organisations like ours are actually skilled practitioners labelled as consultants. They actually do the bulk of the designing, creating, building, and delivering of products and services.

I refer to these two roles as the consultant and the practitioner.

What these two types of consultants share is that both deal with clients, act in their best interest, and follow the agreement we have with them to deliver to their needs.

Our consultants wear two hats

We can all find ourselves playing both consultant roles on our projects.

To help our new designers manage the different mindsets associated with these two roles we say that they will wear different hats for each role, in a nod to Edward de Bono.

Most of the time Sparck designers will be wearing their practitioner hats. They’ll naturally gravitate to that role, adopting a task-based mindset aimed at delivering high quality user-centred designs.

However, often they will need to put on their consultant hats for various reasons throughout their project.

The trigger for this might be a client starting to ask challenging, probing, and exploratory questions. When clients do that you need to reorient yourself to be focused on their needs, temporarily putting aside our typical user focus.

5 stages of the consultancy lifecycle

This pendulum swinging between these two roles and related mindsets will alternate frequently as you progress through the lifecycle of your project.

As UCD designers wearing our practitioner hat, we are well familiar with the design thinking or double-diamond approach to traversing our projects effectively.

There is also a parallel lifecycle we go through as consultants. This is where I focus most of my time when training our new designers. The five stages are as follows.

1. Commercial awareness – the pre- and early parts of the engagement. Time to dissect the brief; learn from the work already done to get us to this point with the client; understand the drivers, expectations and constraints; meet the team and stakeholders.
   
   
2. Problem-solving – as we explore the problem space, we need to understand what the client sees as the problem, the problems we have found through our discovery, how these relate, and who has influence over them. Remember, a client often has more problems than they described from the outset; exposing problems can mean difficult conversations; determining the right problems to solve will be the key to success.
   
   
3. Persuasion – helping the client and stakeholders decide which problems to solve, which solutions to adopt, and which approach will lead to the best outcomes. For designers, this may mean demonstrating the value of design while using an evidence-based approach to reduce risk and apprehension in decision-making.
   
   
4. Delivering value – we need clarity on measures of success and which outputs and activities will lead to the outcomes our clients are seeking. In design we often come across clients with varying levels of understanding and appreciation of the user centred design process and how it accrues value back to the organisation.
   
   
5. Getting to done – Getting the delivery ‘over the line’ can take extra effort, our coordination as a multi-disciplinary team needs to work especially hard to ensure we do all the things needed to meet the expectations of the client, their users and their staff, while delivering on time, on budget, and with a proper handover.

A consultant’s journey

This framework and training have become a useful starting point for our designers on their consulting journey.

Once they’re on a real project, with an effective support network around them, they come to understand the situations they’re in and can respond effectively wearing either their consultant or practitioner hats.

This has helped our Sparck/BJSS consultants build a reputation for responding to the needs of clients, and to any complexity that might get thrown their way.