Weeknote #685: Consultant life
Working as a consultant can be something that people love or try to avoid. But those who get used to it will definitely experience a lot of fascinating challenges.
Quite often people are saying that changing a job is exciting and but also exhausting. How about if you’re changing the job every quarter? It’s quite normal for the consultants to start new projects several times a year with different clients. This week I was starting on a new project with a new client, which made me think about what does it take to work as a consultant.
High tolerance for ambiguity
The first day and week at the new job are always confusing because everything is new and unfamiliar. And that’s how it goes also when you are working on a new project as a consultant. But when you are hired in the project, you need to show your productivity and value what you can deliver since day one even you might not have a clear vision on your head yet. Especially when the projects are quite complex ones it means that you need to work in uncertainty and piece by piece find the relevant information and ways to understand the challenge in the hand. This is not something that most people are used to.
Trusting the process as your friend
In the obscure phase at the project with numerous variables, the process is the best friend for handling the situation. Trusting the selected methods and time itself will obtain enough clarity to have a chance to determine the next move. By moving forward, learnings and insights will gain, and eventually, the vagueness will disappear.
Being curious to connect the dots
Thrive to learn new things and hear what people are actually meaning with their words and actions is a good ability to have in life, but also in the project work. It will help you and the team to find valuable insights that build up as better outcomes for the project.
What else happened this week?
Topias has been diving into details.
Valeria has been developing her facilitation skills and diving into usability testing.
Eero has been closing a project phase and is helping out with new ones.
Sami: This week sees some fruits of long labor coming to light — really proud of the work done for the city of Helsinki’s marketing arm with my dear colleague Jutta. Future directions and opportunities are created together — especially in these volatile times. This particular piece of strategic foresight work facilitates resilience by co-creating the post-covid19 futures. Definitely a good start. More to come! Check it out here
Satu has started a new project with insight gathering.
Shakti’s had a busy week with video production, branding and visualising complex data.
Five things we read this week:
- How Facebook wants to avoid the next AR/VR backlash from Protocol — Facebook is adjusting the strategy in the AR/VR market by killing the Rift and focusing on the Quest.
- How to Reimagine the Second Half of Your Career from Harvard Business Review — Jeff Gothelf describes five concepts, which can help you to realize what to look after from your second half of the career.
- Introducing Spotify’s New Design Principles from Spotify Design — Spotify has released new design principles that serve as a framework to make design decisions and shared language for design critique.
- Config Europe from Figma — If you missed Figma’s user conference from this week’s Thursday, watch out their Youtube channel where all the sessions will be published soon.
- With the next console generation, buying digital looks better than ever from Verge — Collectors might not like it, but the next generation consoles will be more digital than ever by offering disc-less versions with a reduced price tag.
Weeknotes are what happened at our studio this week. This week’s weeknote was curated by Joni Jalkanen.
Joni is a lead designer at Nordkapp, who is quite used to work in ambiguity.
