I was speaking to someone the other day who described me as ‘the consultant’s consultant’ which is a description that I was hugely flattered by (and if I’m honest not sure I deserve). But I suppose I’ve been on this path for almost 15 years now so that must count for something.
There are of course many different types of independent (a point I noted when I wrote up some advice on doing your own thing) and my particular brand has seen me stretch across multiple areas from digital strategy and marketing, AI, data, e-commerce and advertising to leadership, transformation, organisational change and agility. On occasions this stretch can be, well, pretty stretching and pretty challenging. But I wanted to talk about one particular benefit (for me at least) of pushing the boundaries in this way – the cross-pollination of ideas, principles and concepts.
Whilst spanning different specialisms can be tricky (not least because of the risk of almost continuous context switching) I’ve lost count of the number of times that a principle, framework or way of thinking from one domain can be usefully applied to another. I often run with multiple projects and project types simultaneously – something that Zoe Scaman once called ‘layering’. And whilst you can think of layering as working concurrently on different projects and trying to manage the flow of work between them, it’s also useful to think of it in terms of the flow of knowledge between different domains and the connections that you can make that simply weren’t there before. Different types of work can complement each other but there’s also useful connections between approaches, ways of thinking, philosophies and expertise to be had.
The knack to getting it to work (for me at least) is the classic ‘T-shaped’ approach of having sufficient depth of expertise to truly understand something while also having enough of a generalist perspective to cross-pollinate effectively. When this works really well it creates a compounding effect where connections can enable both more efficient but also different thinking and learning.
I guess it’s an approach which is not for everyone, but it’s something that I find fantastically useful.
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Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash
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