Introducing Desultancy
As I continue to monitor the design profession and the direction of its evolution, I’m using the opportunity of a new year to publicly introduce a term that I’ve been harbouring for a while now - Desultancy.
You’ll hear me using the term desultant/desultancy quite a bit more in the year ahead as I roll out some cool new projects, but more importantly, I offer it to all of you too — as a way to give identity and differentiation to design consulting work, which is increasingly fused with other types of consulting, but very much distinct from it too.
I’d love to hear about your usage of it amongst design peers and also clients/colleagues who perhaps struggle with design being a fully fledged consulting practice.
Why a new term?
There is a large and still growing community of management consultants that have come into the profession from paths other than business school. Indeed, driven by the acquisitions and alliances of the big firms, designers who are now professional consultants continue to emerge as highly effective (and therefore sought after) advisors by some of the worlds premier organisations.
Designers working in management consulting have made phenomenal progress in showing the potential, power and practicality of their trade when it comes to transformation work. But their professional journey isn’t to become management consultants in the traditional sense. It’s to continue being designers and to use conceptual and applied design to address the problems of organisations differently. If there wasn’t genuine demand and value for this unorthodox type of consulting, design shops would not be acquired by service firms or in-house product teams who prefer to insource rather than outsource creative thinking and application. Nor would designers be shunning agency life to get involved in big picture problem solving through system design, service design, experience design. As a result, these people, approaches, methods, deliverables and even the outcomes continue to disrupt the common conventions of management consultancy; so it needs a new classification to continue to highlight the difference, but also the link.
Many designers who now find themselves working in management consultancies find themselves a little lost. There is an expectation and even pressure to skill-up on the ‘business’ side of things. This is often due to the misconception that designers don’t understand business, in the same way consultants can be stigmatised as not being creative. Of course, neither is a hard truth and nothing more than outdated stereotypes. I certainly know many designers who have proven to be highly effective at designing businesses, operating models, change programmes and commercial technology. I have also met and worked with some amazing talented management consultants who are creative thinkers, people energisers, change makers and problem solvers. They just see the world a little differently to each other. In theory, combining both in the same context can provide a double-whammy of value, although it’s a lot harder to do in reality. Whether each plays to their strengths or dance together in unison, there is skill, knowledge, passion and credibility in both.
Role and rank alignment, especially within larger firms can also create a problem, as a rock-star designer might be confused as not being of the same commercial (and day rate) calibre as an MBA holding director. At the same time, once sucked into consulting life, there is little scope to continue investing in improving design skills. Combine this with the need to democratise the low hanging fruit such as design facilitation, design sprints,ux prototyping, ux research etc, the devastating result can be a one-sided value exchange against design professionals.
There are so many more differences between consulting and desulting, yet both camps typically work on the same problems. It’s no surprise then that desultants are just as keen to find ways to differentiate themselves as traditional consultants are to show they can do design work. Having taken counsel from many of the existing desultants I know around the world, they expect to further differentiate their career paths, titles, income tiers and professional status from the defactos of management consulting. And my management consultant friends tell me they too need to protect their own value proposition in the face of disruption too. So it makes sense that we start to retune ourselves to the subtle but important differences between the two camps, whilst continuing to acknowledge we are all at the service of those who seek our advice and in that we remain united and stronger together.
Happy desulting in 2019.
