art of gig archive

I tweet a daily consulting tip on the @artofgig twitter account and compile them every couple of weeks here as a newsletter issue.

Here are tips 28-44.

Consulting Tip #28: Do not get religious about the indie consulting life. You were probably a paycheck type once, and might be again. Or you might be part-time paycheck, part-time indie. The goal is to steadily increase individual agency over time, not cargo-cult religiosity.

Consulting Tip #29: Accept that you will often be misunderstood and viewed with suspicion by missionary types with a strong sense of belonging to organizations. Mercenaries have value precisely because missionaries suffer from loyalty blindness.

Consulting Tip #30: Google, learn about, and internalize Hirschman’s Exit, Loyalty, and Voice” model. To be an indie consultant is to deeply internalize exit-oriented decision-making defaults.

Consulting Tip #31: Develop empathy and compassion for those with voice-oriented decision-making defaults, and learn to respect how and why they behave as they do, and how they serve as the yang to your yin. It takes both exit and voice types to make a world.

Consulting Tip #32: Turn public celebrations of freedom into private celebrations of your own. Take a moment to reflect on, and update, what freedom means to you. If your understanding of freedom isn’t evolving, neither are you. Happy 4th of July.

Consulting Tip #33: Employees need to get their head in the game, but consultants need to get the game in their heads. A good way to hone this ability is to read sectoral histories, biographies, and historical documents.

Consulting Tip #34: Take business cartoons like Dilbert, and workplace shows like The Office seriously. Your ability to get the jokes without being terminally depressed by them is a measure of your understanding of a work culture.

Consulting Tip #35: Learn to recognize common workplace watercooler versions of transactional games like “Ain’t it awful?” and gently resist being drawn into them. They’re a perk for employees, not you. Read Eric Berne’s classic, Games People Play to learn the basic ones.

Consulting Tip #36: Examples, examples, examples. Your advice is only as good as your examples. Collect examples everywhere, from all sources. Half your value lies in being an encyclopedia of examples, with ready access to greater volume, velocity, and variety than employees.

Consulting Tip #37: Read up on classic/cliched examples commonly cited in your consulting niche, and have something fresh to say about them. Examples: Southwest Airlines (strategy consultants), iPhone (design consultants), AlphaGo (AI), BP futures (futurists).

Consulting Tip #38: Beware obscure, marginal examples unless they seem like portents of future megatrends. Obscure examples are the consulting equivalent of citing practices of isolated hunter-gatherer tribes in anthropology. Go for unfamiliar aspects of familiar examples.

Consulting Tip #39: Do not half-ass statistics as an element in anything you do, whether it’s macroeconomic trends or A/B testing of UIs. Either go deep and do it right, or stick to narrative-mode justifications. Half-assed statistical thinking is often worse than none.

Consulting Tip #40: Try to be higher availability to longer-term clients. The better you know a person, the more valuable spontaneous or quick-scheduled conversations are to both of you (1 hour to 2 days out).

Consulting Tip #41: Stay aware of the tempo of the engagement relative to the tempo of the normal workflows of the client. A weekly standing meeting with a client team that meets daily means up to 5 internal course changes might happen between your own updates.

Consulting Tip #42: Primum non nocere. First, be mostly harmless.

Consulting Tip #43: You are likely just one source of counsel for your client. Learn about the other sources, and do your best to harmonize with them, but if you must pick a battle, do so as openly and directly as possible. Influence undercutting games are rarely worth it.

Consulting Tip #44: Beware the boom-bust psyche, swinging between tactical hustling during cash-flow crunches, and coasting after a few good-sized invoices get paid.

Here is Compilation #2 (14-27) if you want to backtrack and catch up.

If you’re active on twitter, and want to join the conversation there, follow @artofgig, introduce yourself via a reply to this pinned tweet, and follow some of your fellow subscribers on this list.

Into the Yakverse Index

The history of consulting is sadly a very under-studied subject. We modern indie consultants tend to talk and write as though ours is a field of timeless, ahistorical ideas drawn from an eternal platonic realm of aphorisms, perfect 2x2s, pick-2-of-3 triangles, 7-principle lists, and 12-laws lists (these are known as the 5 Archimedean consulting gases by the way). The operating assumption seems to be that history is something that happens to clients, and that we bring perspectives from nowhere and nowhen.

It doesn’t help that much of our own history is shrouded in shadows, secrecy, mystery, esotericism, and the occult. So, since I talk a lot about historical context and ancient consulting traditions in this newsletter, I figured I should do a brief history.

I divide the history of consulting into 9 distinct ages of varying lengths, grouped into three eras of three ages each, forming a neat little 3-act Big History. I will cover the first era, the Pre-Modern Era (which by law is required to be a Fall from Golden Age Act), in this post, and cover the other two in the next two parts.

Here is a visual of the history with some Act 1 milestones marked.

1. Age of Wizards (prehistory – 800 BC)

The earliest consultants were also the most adept in terms of their inner game of tennis, as well as other dimensions of adeptness, and their reign is sometimes known as the Golden Age of Consulting.

Consultants from this era were Real Consultants, their clients were Real Clients, and gigs, also known in those times as mythic adventures, were Real Gigs. Various magical divination techniques, astrology that actually worked, and the earliest known versions of various subtle technologies like shtickboxes and strategometers, appear to have been first developed during this era. Sadly, almost all of this early knowledge is now lost.

In popular culture, consultants from this era are generally known as wizards (though there were a few witches as well). They were not indie, but tended to form clan-like memetic lineages, with knowledge, skills, and client contacts passed down from master to student. Their clients were kings and queens claiming divine status. The earliest consulting gigs revolved around creating the CYA scrollwork and tabletwork to legitimate such claims. An early wizard, known as the Great Gartner, who served in the court of an early Pharaoh, appears to have created the first known 2×2, known as the Magic Quadrant. This has now been lost but was apparently used to classify Nile floods into 4 types, and justify the Pharaoh feeding people he didn’t like to crocodiles.

Gartner, the modern consulting firm, was named after the Great Gartner, and they produce a 2×2 also known as the Magic Quadrant in honor of that lost first 2×2. They’ll deny this of course, which is why this is a secret history.

Though wizards and witches had largely disappeared by around 800 BC, a few true wizards and witches can be found in later periods of history. One well-known one was Merlin, consultant to King Arthur and inventor of the Round Table Methodology.

But people claiming the label wizard since around 800 BC have largely been frauds. The end of the Golden Age was brought about by the invention of money.

2. Age of Sages and Seers (800 BC to 400 AD)

During the Age of Wizards, consultants were generally paid in kind, in the form of magical objects, secret formulas, keys that opened mysterious doors, email addresses of important court officials, gems with strange powers, the ability to talk to birds, and so forth. Also room and board. That’s the stuff that was valuable back then, since there wasn’t much you could buy with money anyway. Amazon didn’t even sell Moleskine notebooks back then.

The once-magical objects that survive from that era are mostly duds now, since the thaumic field on Earth has decayed to the point that you can’t do much with it. Many blame this on the invention of money. Money killed the magic in consulting, but it also led to a deeper engagement with the real world, and based on a meta-analysis of several cost-benefit studies of that shift, it has come to be regarded as generally a Good Thing even though it would be nice to have magical powers.

The invention of modern impersonal money and coinage in the first millennium BC led to the rise of consulting in a form we would recognize today, based on the premise of paying a stranger to do unpleasant things it would be inconvenient to do yourself, and awkward to ask of people you have other sorts of ongoing relationships with.

It’s sometimes hard to see this, because money is like water to us consultants, but the existence of impersonal money (as opposed to mutual credit based on interpersonal trust) is actually a prerequisite for the existence of consulting. David Graeber talks about some aspects of this in his book Debt, but misses the connection to consulting.

The popular saying, you don’t pay a consultant for advice but to go away after giving it, dates to this era. You can’t go away if you can’t spend what you’ve earned in the neighboring kingdom.

Money gave mobility to consultants.

Consultants during this period were generally known as sages or seers, and though they generally lacked magical powers, most were in denial about it, and therefore very conflicted and insecure about debasing their high arts and esoteric knowledge by accepting money. As a result, many of them failed to effectively navigate the Consultant’s Conundrum:

Embrace asceticism and poverty as the lifestyle most conducive to generating deep insights and perhaps rediscovering Golden Age wizarding powers?

OR

Embrace shameless commerce as the path to acquiring the worldly knowledge to complement esoteric insights, and thereby make up for the loss of magical powers and astrology that works?

Several events are notable from this era:

• Around 500 BC, Laozi emerged in China as the first known consultant for whose existence there is some historical evidence. He reputedly charged 1 gold coin per day (though sometimes he charged per aphorism). Clocks accurate enough for hourly billing had not yet been invented.

• Around the same time, his contemporary Confucius emerged as the first bureaucrat to sign off on a consulting purchase order (PO), for an employee engagement study of the emerging Chinese bureaucracy (in a related development, the first overdue invoice for consulting work entered the historical record 90 days later). He was the first person to use the phrase, “let me see if I can find money in the budget for this” in a conversation with a consultant.

• Another notable event was the founding of the Order of the Yak somewhere along the Silk Road, in the wake of Alexander’s Invasion, around 310 BC. The Order of the Yak would go on to become the most important steward of consulting traditions for the next two millennia.

• Kautilya, the first known Indian consultant also emerged in this era, as an advisor to Chandragupta, that founder of the Mauryan empire. Kautilya earned an MBA at Nalanda University and wrote the Arthashastra, which is Sanskrit for “How to Make Good 2x2s”.

India was a major center for the consulting arts during this era. Familiar consultant titles like Pundit and Guru can be dated to the Ashram tradition of ascetic teachers of this period, who lived in conveniently located suburban forests where kings could go seek advice. Sadly, the growing scholastic conservatism of Brahmin traditions led to the decline of this tradition. Consulting activity shifted first to Buddhist court philosophers in the growing urban cores, and then declined in the subcontinent altogether.

In the West, Greece had a conflicted relationship with consulting, with notable figures like Aristotle being more like public intellectuals and teachers than consultants (though some of them took on the occasional side hustle during the summer months). Some say the relatively democratic and public-spirited tone of classical European antiquity made it a somewhat hostile place for the consulting arts, which, let’s be honest, aren’t exactly very democratic in spirit.

Ancient Greece was where the Fundamental Tradeoff of consulting, between a high public profile, based on public speaking and 6-figure advances for tablet deals, and high private influence, based on court intrigues and discreet backroom whisperings in the ears of movers and shakers, was born.

3. Age of Missionaries vs. Mercenaries (400 AD – 1500 AD)

The fall of the Roman Empire led to the shift in the center of gravity of the consulting arts from Asia to Europe and the Middle East. Though the Romans employed mercenaries in their military, and borrowed ideas freely from the lands they conquered, they were not particularly interested in the consulting arts, preferring more concrete ideas. During the decline and fall of the empire, many consultants tried to pitch turnaround strategies (at least one based on Southwest Airlines, according to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) to later Roman emperors, but they were unable to close on the gigs, and as a result, the Roman empire, starved of good ideas, fell.

But with the fall of the empire, Barbarian Europe arose, and proved to be a much more fertile home for the consulting arts than Asia. Despite the general decline and Dark-Agery going on in the rest of European society, consulting began to come into its own at places ranging from early Christian monasteries to the estates of great feudal lords.

This age is marked by the emergence of the great, enduring conflict at the heart of our calling: mercenaries versus missionaries. The mercenary/missionary conflict was actually the outgrowth and institutionalization of the Consultant’s Conundrum from the Age of Sages and Seers. Mercenaries were those who embraced commerce, while missionaries were those who embraced commerce while being very conflicted about what that would do to their Pure Ideas.

Missionary-style consultants continued to pursue a form of the consulting arts that superficially valued poverty and asceticism, but they managed to accumulate power and institutional capital all the same. A key instrument of this evolution was Christianity. Due to the practice of primogeniture, pissed-off younger sons who were sent off to monasteries to join the priesthood figured out all sorts of clever ways to restrict the power of their elder brothers, and claim it for the Church. As a result, the power of the Catholic church grew. Some of this story is told in Matthew Fraser’s book Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom.

(A subplot in the history of consulting is that celibacy of various kinds, both voluntary and involuntary, from Chinese court eunuchs to Christian monks, was a major driver of the evolution of the field throughout the pre-modern era).

On the other side of the conflict, ecosystems of mercenary consultants of all sorts emerged to fill the vacuum left behind by the collapse of imperial Roman institutions. There were mercenary knights, mercenary traders, shady people hawking unreliable maps at farmers’ markets (which back then were just known as “markets”), flavor-of-the-month divination systems, and so on.

The great intellectual advances of the era, such as the 2x2x2 and 3×3 matrices, came from the missionary consultants operating out of monasteries. The great practical innovations, such as detecting the synergy possibilities between the sacking of Constantinople and the liberation of the Holy Land, came from the mercenaries.

The great historical events of that era, such as the Crusades, were as much about mercenaries versus missionaries as they were about the nominal combatants fighting over religions.

Notable events occurred in the Near East as well. Hassan al-Sabah founded the Ismaili Order of Assassins, and the associated Total School of Consulting, combining missionary and mercenary approaches and introducing the smoking of Interesting Substances into consulting practices. Mullah Nasreddin emerged as a prominent Turkish consultant and early pioneer of the business parable. Over in what is now Tunisia, Ibn Khaldun, the Arab philosopher, widely regarded as the founding father of sociology, wrote the first airport bestseller, 12 Habits of Highly Effective Caliphs.

On a global scale, for a century or so around the turn of the millennium, there was intense competition between the Order of the Yak, which was expanding westwards at the time, and the Assassins, for control of intellectual culture along the Silk Road. The competition was inconclusive, but neither managed to expand much into Europe proper. With the advent of the Age of Exploration, the Silk Road ceased to be the main conduit of intellectual exchange between East and West.

The pre-modern era of consulting came to a relatively sudden end with the development of the Gutenberg Press.

Suddenly, your average consultant no longer had to rely on lineages, monasteries or imperial courts to be part of an intellectual tradition. With movable type, the seeds of independence in consulting were about to be planted. The Consultant’s Conundrum and the Fundamental Tradeoff of Consulting were about to be transformed in fascinating new ways by the printed word.

In the next part (which I’ll post in a couple of weeks), we’ll see how the Gutenberg revolution triggered a consulting renaissance and inaugurated the Second Act, which would last all the way through World War 2, to the beginning of the Modern Era.

Into the Yakverse Index

All that talk of kool-aid last week reminded me of a 2×2 from one of my earliest explorations of that topic, a talk I did back in 2012 titled Should You Drink the Kool-Aid? (slides, video). Here is an updated version, transposed from the startup key to the indie consulting key. It is meant to help you think about a very important question: How do you know the core things you think you know?

This is a central question for us students of the art of gig because indie consultants need to be aware of their operating epistemology in order to avoid buying their own bullshit and turning into unconscious grifters.

Startups and Gigups

It is no coincidence that a 2×2 from a talk about startups is easy and useful to transpose to a discussion of indie consulting. The two domains are so similar it can be hard to keep them apart in your head. In particular, startup knowledge also revolves around the same question. In both cases, the answer is the same:

How do you know the core things you know?

Definitely not in a scientific way!

Beyond the obvious surface-level similarities — small scale, financial precarity, cash-flow volatility — both startups and what we might call gigups share a deep feature: their associated modes of knowing are not science. Whatever the shared epistemology of gigology and startupology, it isn’t a scientific one.

If you’re an entrepreneur or an indie consultant, whatever else you might be, you are not a scientist. You may use or do some science along the way, but it will be peripheral to your core way of knowing. And crucially, if you want to succeed, you’ll find you can’t stop at the science. There is no such thing as an evidence-based startup or gigup. In the world of gigups and startups, only failures can be evidence-based.

The core of your real work begins where the science ends.

A strictly scientific self-image is self-limiting for an indie-consultant or entrepreneur, and can only hurt you. Looking for the secret sauce of a startup idea or an indie consulting offering only where the light of science can shine is to act like the drunk in the parable, looking for his keys where the street light is shining rather than wherever in the dark he dropped them.

This does not mean the native modes of knowing in startups and gigups are illegitimate or useless. In fact, thinking that, developing science envy, and trying to put a scientific gloss on non-scientific modes of knowing, is the surest way of destroying the kinds of legitimate value they do produce.

The 2×2 captures 3 possible good answers to the question How do you know the important things you think you know? — through fiction, through simulation, and through thick description (a fancy word for anthropology). None of these is science, but all of them are valuable modes of knowing.

Science, loosely speaking, is a conservative, data-driven mode of knowing. Indie consulting is speculative and/or story driven. The science quadrant of the 2×2 is ??? because there is, in a sense, nothing there that can be a core part of what you know as an indie consultant. This took me a few years to realize. In the original version of the 2×2 (which you can find in the slides linked above), I had some stuff in that quadrant that I was giving the benefit of doubt and labeling “science”. Now I’m convinced there is no there there. Just people performing various forms of science envy.

If there is science to it, it is not part of your core. If it is part of your core, it isn’t science.

If it’s a real science, there will be “pure” scientists working adjacent to whatever you’re doing (setting aside the parlor game of “who is the real scientist”) to whom your use of their output will seem like a profane “application”.

When it comes to gigups and startups, nothing important that you think you know is known in a scientific sense. In the process of going from:

The ball bounces this way because physics

to

Calculating how the ball bounces is valuable for Great Yak Enterprises because….???

you inevitably, and inexorably, go from science to something else. Whatever that is, to call it “science” is a distortion of it, and a disservice to it.

But in that ??? lies the core of how you do know things and add value.

The Price of Integration

Why is science lost in going from pure bouncing balls to applied bouncing balls? What is gained in giving up a purely scientific posture in what you’re doing?

In the simplest terms, science is “lost” because startups and gigups both require integrative modes of knowing, and the price of achieving effective integration is that you must necessarily go beyond the limits of scientific modes of knowing.

This may be a cliche, but science is reductionist by design, and this is both a good thing and the strength of the scientific mode of knowing. You take an ambiguous phenomenon, and carve out a piece about which you can make relatively unambiguous assertions. The reduction is not a bug or flaw: it is what makes ambiguity reduction possible at all. Ambiguity reduction is the point of carving out a piece to work with.

When you try to “science” a system, you don’t carve out pieces that are important, interesting, or useful. Those are merely nice-to-have features you can hope for in a carved-out piece, but essentially unrelated to whether or not you can “science” it well. The chances that you can “carve reality at the joints” in ways that conform to the contours of practical concerns are low.

You carve out a part that offers potential for systematic ambiguity reduction, and hope that when you go back (if you can go back) and integrate it into understandings of the whole, some of that lowered ambiguity will pay dividends in some unpredictable way. To bring science to a party is to take a leap of faith that you’ll be able to go from holistic to reductionist and then back to holistic. But “going back” is not guaranteed. It’s a bit like killing yourself, hoping to be resurrected in a stronger form.

Simulation, storytelling, and thick descriptions are integrative modes of knowing. When you’ve taken something apart and scienced what you can science (and that subset might be “nothing”), the real work of a startup or gigup begins (also, leadership in general).

Are all gigups startups? Are all startups gigups? Is one a subset of the other? We’ll look at that question in a future episode of Art of Gig.

Teaser: they are not the same, except in the ways they can fail. What makes them distinct is differences in how they succeed.

<< The 12 Eigenconversations | Into the Yakverse index | The Medium is the Client >>

A shtick, in the traditional Yiddish sense, is

“a comic theme or gimmick derived from the Yiddish word shtik (שטיק), from Polish sztuka and German Stück (Proto-Slavic *ščuka), meaning “piece” or “thing”.

Shticks are ubiquitous in the indie consulting economy, so in order to truly cultivate the Art of Gig, you must gain a true understanding of shticks, and in particular, learn to tell them apart from genuine systems. Let me tell you about a very instructive case that drove this distinction home for me a few years ago.

I got involved in the case thanks to my friend Agent Jane Jopp of the FBI G-Crimes division, whom you met a couple of episodes ago, in The Two Shadows of the Hero. The case I want to tell you about unfolded almost immediately after that one, and really gets at the essence of shticks.

It all began with a text and photograph from Jopp popping up on my phone one balmy afternoon, as I was relaxing at my local Starbucks, trawling through Twitter for gig leads, and trying to @ known millionaires into giving me money. 

She called a few minutes later, launching right into it without a preamble, as she usually does. Her manner’s only gotten more peremptory since I’ve known her, though becoming a grandmother recently has mellowed her out a bit.

“Did you see the picture? Look familiar?”

It’s tempting, as a consultant, to pretend you’ve heard of everything, but long-term, it saves time, and makes it easier to build credibility, if you make it a habit to be blunt about what you know and don’t know.

“Not a clue.”

“Ever heard of Scorpion Arts Software?”

“No, should I have?”

“No reason you should have. Boutique security systems contractor, couple of miles north of downtown. Get your ass up here, Rao. You’re gonna want in on this I think. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

***

I was there in 15 minutes. Scorpion Arts was an unremarkable single-storied building within a premium-mediocre business park. It had been cordoned off. Several cop cars and unmarked black SUVs were parked outside. 

In the parking lot, I noticed familiar dark blue BMW as well. My old frenemy Guanxi Gao was on the scene as well! 

As you may recall, I had introduced Gao to the G-Crimes division following the events of the Bermuda Triangle case only a few weeks earlier, and it had taken Gao no time at all to get cozier with Jane Jopp than I myself am.

I’m used to that sort of thing. One thing you’ll learn in the gig economy is that people vary in their ability to get close to, and comfortable with, important professional contacts, and you have to learn to accept your own natural operating distance with different sorts of people. Gao quietly gets very close to all people, and before they know it, he’s turned into their closest confidant. I talk a lot more but tend to maintain an arms-length distance with all professional contacts and clients. To each their own, so long as it works for you.

Jopp was outside talking to Gao. She motioned to the beat cop guarding the perimeter, who nodded at me and raised the crime-scene tape. I ducked under and joined them. Gao gave me his usual sleepy nod.

“Agent Jopp. Gao. How’s gigs?” I said.

“Hey Rao, I just got here,” said Gao.

 “Come with me, both of you,” said Jopp, in her usual peremptory way.

We followed her into the building. It was just a few rooms. A dozen or so people were visible in the main conference room, behind the reception area, through the glass. Several agents and uniformed cops seemed to be doing various things all over the premises.

Jopp said, “The ones in the conference room, that’s all the people who work here. The guy presenting is the VP of Product. Notice anything unusual?”

Gao and I peered into the room through the glass. It seemed like a normal business meeting in progress. Almost normal.

Gao was frowning.

“Something’s off, but I can’t put my finger on it,” I said.

Gao nodded, “Yeah. They look a little tired maybe?”

Agent Jopp seemed pleased with herself at having stumped us both. 

“It was the night janitor who called in the cops. We got called in this morning. Apparently, they’ve been having exactly the same 55-minute meeting, over and over in a loop, for almost twenty four hours straight, including through the night.”

“What do you mean?”

“The same presenters talk through the same slide deck, and the others in the room make exactly the same remarks. They go on for precisely 55 minutes, then they take a 5-minute coffee break, come back in, and start over. Watch, they’re due to break now.”

As if on cue, the people in the conference room got up, and filed out, and headed across to the break room on the left, ignoring us.

“It’s Thursday now, they’ve been at it since yesterday afternoon as far as we can tell.”

Gao frowned, “when you say the same, do you mean…”

“Exactly the same, yes. Word for word. Gesture for gesture. Like a clockwork menagerie. Watch. That one over there is going to mention her kid’s soccer game.”

We watched them for a few minutes. The scene looked almost normal. They were getting coffee, a few headed to the bathrooms at the far end. There was the normal sort of office banter.

Normal that is, except that Jane Jopp was whispering to us in an undertone exactly what they would be saying, before they said it. It was eerie.

“Has anybody tried, you know, asking them what they’re up to?” I asked.

Jopp shook her head. “They just ignore everybody outside their own group and carry on. It’s like we’re not even here.”

“Have you tried breaking up the meeting?” asked Gao.

“We tried holding one of them — that man in the black turtleneck, we think he’s the CEO — back after their coffee break one time, and he began this unearthly screaming. You don’t want to hear it, trust me.”

“What about the rest?”

“They went on as before. When they got to the part of the meeting, about 15 minutes in, where black-turtleneck guy makes one comment, they all just froze. So we let him go. He stopped screaming, went back to his chair, made his comment, and the meeting continued.”

Gao and I looked at each other and shrugged. Neither of us had seen anything like this before.

“Why is G-Crimes here? Is there a gig-economy angle? Are any of the people in the room consultants?” I asked.

“All employees as far as we can tell. Most of the executive team, plus a few middle managers. About a dozen in all. No consultants around as far as I can tell, but G-Crimes gets all the weird cases dropped in its lap these days. The whole corporate world is getting weird these days, and G-Crimes is in the middle of it.”

“What about other employees?” asked Gao.

“This is everybody who works out of this office. We are tracking down the head of the New York office. Lestrode’s in New York right now, working another case, so I have him running that end down on the side.”

“What about the slides they’re reviewing, the content of the meeting?” I asked.

“The techs got those off the presentation laptop the last time they were in a coffee break, we’re looking at it now. Nothing unusual as far as we can tell, some sort of product-roadmap discussion. Probably make more sense to you two than me.”

“Can we see?” asked Gao.

Jopp shrugged and motioned to a junior agent, an IT-nerd type, who brought over a laptop with some slides showing.

I flipped through them. A Gantt chart, some spider charts, a Pugh matrix. Some bullet-lists. All-in-all, a fairly routine-looking product roadmap deck for a software company.

Still, there was something off about the deck.

Gao was the one who spotted it.

“The names are all weird. They’ve labeled that Gantt chart Core Activity Tracker™”

“Ah, you’re right. And those spider charts are labeled, Product Shape Charts™ and the Pugh matrices, they’re labeled Feature Attribute Model,™” I said.

“Very designed look too. These came from a template.” added Gao.

Jopp interrupted, “Fine, so people make up different names for the same ideas all the time, what’s significant about that?”

“Coupled with a consistent, hyper-coherent presentation aesthetic, it’s a telltale sign of an active shtick, and this one is particularly brazen,” I said. “There may be no consultants in the room, but they’re in the room. A ghost, or ghosts, in the machine.”

“‘Shticking in the first-degree, by ghosts or ghosts in the machine, unknown,’ huh?” said Jopp.

“There will be a bad acronym in here somewhere,” said Gao, reaching over to flip through the slides again, “Here it is. In all the footers. CAPSFA-4 Review.”

“That mean anything to either of you?” asked Jopp.

Gao shook his head.

I said, “I’ll take a guess. Core Activity, Product Shape, Feature Attribute. CA-PS-FA. The 4 probably indicates it’s some sort of 4x formula.”

Jopp looked annoyed. “So? Where does that get us?”

“A shtick in the gig economy, especially on the management side, is a bunch of familiar, warmed-over, formulaic elements of cookie-cutter analysis and procedural synthesis, rebranded and packaged into a ‘comprehensive step-by-step system’ of some sort,” I explained.

Jopp frowned. “What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that what all you guys do? Sell color-by-number management systems to companies? Some of it is bullshit, some of it is not, right?”

I sighed. “Nothing wrong with it per se. It’s all about context and situation. Deployed one way, a system is just another tool. Adapt and apply as needed. Deployed another way, though, as a sacralized, mystical panacea, it becomes a shtick. Generally the mark of a second-rate operator who has found a lucrative vein of third-rate clients to mine.”

“Sounds like a precious-snowflake distinction to me. Or am I hearing some sour grapes here? You two don’t have shticks, do you?”

I ignored the jibe. “It’s hard to explain. It’s like the difference between artistic nudes and porn. You’ve heard the term productivity porn, right? A shtick is a system with porn-like characteristics.”

“Culture porn, meeting porn, strategy porn, chart porn, efficiency porn, negotiation porn, sales porn, you’ve got all sorts. Name it, there’s consulting porn of it.” Gao sniggered.

I elaborated. “Systems that work are evolved from — systematized from — wild local patches of behavioral effectiveness. What we call Gall’s Law. Shticks on the other hand, are made up from whole cloth to fuel a theatrical performance of some sort. To look good…”

“…in a pornographic sense.” Gao finished delicately.

“Rule of thumb. If you can buy it, it’s a shtick. If you must grow it, it’s a system.” I finished my little mansplaining lecture.

Jopp waved us away impatiently. “Well, I don’t know where that gets us, but I haven’t shown you two the other thing yet.”

“Ah the picture you sent,” I said, and turned to Gao, “did you recognize it?

Gao shook his head. Well, at least we were even on that score.

“It’s over there in the break room,” Jopp motioned us to follow.

We followed her. The device was in a corner, plugged into an outlet.

“We originally found it inside an air vent behind the snack machine, oozing that green fluid. The techs ran toxicity tests, and it seems safe. We’ve plugged it back in because it seems to be transmitting an encrypted telemetry signal somewhere. We’re trying to trace it. It seems to periodically ping a server somewhere in Asia and then send a burst transmission.”

Gao frowned and sniffed, “what’s that smell? It’s like lemon-and-mint-flavored ass.”

“It’s the green oozing stuff. The lab says it is some sort of custom-formulation kool-aid concentrate. They’re analyzing it. Not toxic…So neither of you has seen anything like it before?”

“No. Apart from the fact that it looks like a broken box with green stuff oozing out, I’ve got nothing,” I said.

“That logo… Microsoft?” asked Gao.

“No, the colors are in the wrong order. Obviously designed to look almost like Microsoft though,” said Jopp.

“Looks Chinese-made,” said Gao. “Want me to send a photo out to my contacts in Asia to see if they can identify it?”

Jopp, shrugged. “Why not, go ahead.”

Gao took a picture and sent it off to whatever mysterious contacts he thought might help.

“Let’s look at this logically,” Jopp said, “We have two unusual things in the Scorpion Arts building at the moment: a roomful of zombies stuck in an infinite-loop meeting, and a mysterious broken device leaking some kool-aid. They must be connected.”

“Three,” I corrected, “you’re forgetting the ultra-shticky slide deck they’re reviewing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite that shticky in my life.”

“Fine, if you think that’s relevant. Three weird things. What’s the connection?”

Gao, who had been stooped over, examining the broken device, straightened up.

“I think this thing is an aerosolizer. Like some sort of beefed-up air freshener.”

“Yes, the techs figured that out. As far as we can tell, it’s supposed to dilute and inject microdoses of that kool-aid into the air at set times. There’s a water lead too, which we disconnected. It looks like the canister ruptured and spilled the stuff.”

“What times?” I asked.

“The timer is set to release a dose every week, Wednesdays around 3 PM.”

“Do we know what’s on the corporate calendar at that time?”

Jane leaned out of the break room doorway and yelled for the IT guy, who scurried in with the laptop.

She barked at him, “Are we into the Intranet yet? Can we access their calendar? Look up what they have going on at 3 PM on Wednesdays.”

“There’s a second canister in there, with some red fluid,” said Gao, still examining the device. “This one seems intact.” He sniffed it. “Smells like tomatoes…Bloody Mary mix maybe?”

“Yes, we’re analyzing that too. That one’s not kool-aid, it’s set to go off at 9 AM on Thursdays, but we had the machine unplugged this morning, so it didn’t go off. That’s not toxic either, but we don’t know what it is yet.” said Jopp.

Inspiration struck, “I think I know what’s going on here,” I said.

Jopp and Gao looked at me inquiringly.

“I think it’s a shtick box. I’ve never seen a high-tech one like this, and I didn’t think anyone used them anymore, but I’ve seen traditional versions that work on incense in museums. Court consultants in the Middle East used them till the 15th century. They called it dabba al-khwarazimi, literally, algorithm box. The traditional kind is a wooden box with two compartments, each with an incense holder. You burn one kind of incense stick when you want to increase suggestibility and reinforce an idea, and another kind when you want to increase skepticism and encourage challenging of ideas. Fell out of use in the sixteenth century I believe.”

“Reminds me of something,” Jopp said, frowning, “Something about making decisions while drunk.”

“You’re probably thinking of that bit in Herodotus about the Persians making important decisions when drunk and then revisiting them in the morning when sober.”

“Yes of course. So the timer is set to release the first kind of chemical during a specific meeting, and the other kind on the morning after?”

“Yes, and since the canister broke…”

“…they got an overdose.”

“…and they’ve gotten themselves trapped in a procedurally generated kool-aid escaped reality based on a particularly powerful shtick, yes. That’s my theory.”

The tech looked up from his laptop.

“I can access the intranet now. They seem to have a standing meeting Wednesdays at 3. Subject line says CAPSFA-4 Review.”

Gao’s phone dinged. He looked at it, typed briefly, and looked up. “Looks like Rao was right. My friend Ohno in Tokyo recognized it. He says these are popular in Japan. They call them shtikuboxu over there. They’ve apparently gotten popular recently for instilling new management ideas.”

Gao looked thoughtfully at the shtick box. “The other fluid is supposedly the antidote; a sort of hangover cure. So in theory, if you hit them with an extra stiff dose of that, they should wake up… or break out of the infinite-meeting loop.”

Ten minutes later, we were ready to test the theory. We were gathered outside the conference room where the zombie meeting was still in progress. We had masks on.

“The techs don’t think the stuff is toxic, but they want to make sure.” Jopp had explained.

A technician entered the conference room in a hazmat suit, shut the door behind him, took out a plastic spray bottle with the diluted red fluid in it, and carefully sprayed a generous amount around the room.

For a minute nothing happened. The meeting seemed to continue along on its zombie track.

Then the people in the room began pausing and looking around uncertainly, like they were slowly waking up from a trance.

The man in the black turtleneck was the first to speak.

“What’s going on?”

I suppose that’s why he was CEO. First one to get back to reality is the biggest sociopath in the room.

***

It took a couple more weeks to wrap things up. Gao and I learned later from Jopp that the shtick box had been installed without permission from the Scorpion Arts.

The CAPSFA-4 system was traced to a web-based virtual consultant operating out of Bali under a false name. The trail ran cold there. Nobody at Scorpion Arts seemed to recall who had first hired the consultant.

Juicy recurring subscription payments had been set up to be routed to a bank account in the Caymans (which Scorpion Arts suspended immediately, so there was that at least). The only other clue was a glossy website with what appeared to be stock photography, and a signup process for downloading training materials and templates. The instructors in the various training videos turned out to be actors who had been paid to record the material, working off canned scripts. There was, we discovered, an entire membership forum of affiliates who had paid good money into a train-the-trainer program, to learn how to sell the CAPSFA-4 system to their own clients. Few, it turned out, had made any of their money back.

It was the purest case of a passive income front-end for a purely shtick-based consulting business I had ever encountered. A true work of art. Despite myself, I was impressed with the details, as they were uncovered.

The thing was a true machine; a machine parasite. Inhabited by ghosts or ghosts unknown, raking in passive dollars.

G-Crimes shut the whole operation down, filed it away as a cold case, and lost interest. But not before I’d gotten a copy of all the material — website, templates, and so on. I was convinced there was something deeper going on, and I was determined to dig.

***

Gao and I got drinks shortly after that.

“G-Crimes,” I remarked, nursing my Manhattan, “is very good at shutting things down after most of the damage is done, and losing interest before things are actually figured out.”

Gao seemed to be in an unusually reflective mood. He’d done some of his own post-case digging, and turned up nothing further, which annoyed him. Gao prides himself on knowing what was going on better than everybody else.

Apparently, several small bespoke engineering shops in Japan and China make shtikuboxus to order, and much of the market is for relatively benign magical thinking. Harmless euphoria boosters for strategy retreats.

The kool-aid and antidote in the Scorpio Arts case though, turned out to be potent custom formulations. Not illegal exactly, but definitely not the standard stuff you could get off the street in Tokyo. This was inception-grade stuff. G-Crimes was unable to trace the source.

“Lots more shtick activity in the last few years,” Gao said, after a long silence.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve noticed it too.”

“I don’t think your friend Jopp gets it.”

I noted the your friend with amusement. Gao might be a network inveigler par excllence, but he has his own weird code of ethics about credit apportionment, when it comes to network capital.

“No she doesn’t,” I agreed. “It’s not that she’s unimaginative. It’s just that she doesn’t appreciate intangibles. Especially when there is competition from tangible stuff like aerosolized kool-aid and encrypted telemetry to track down. She still thinks the case was about the shtick box.”

Gao said, “Did you know she’s calling this the Shtickbox Affair in the G-Crimes database? She’s decided the CAPSFA-4 stuff is just peripheral bullshit. She’s calling this a case of Unauthorized Chemical Environment Modulation. UCEM. They think they can work with local law enforcement to file criminal charges next time something like this happens.”

I said, “But you and I know the template material is the main act. I looked at those templates and training videos.”

“I did too. Whoever made those knew what they were doing. The shtick box was just a finishing touch.”

“And they’ll strike again. The abstractions are mediocre, but as leakproof for weak minds as the shtick box was not. Sufficiently bureaucratic companies could spend years trapped in them…”

“…while imagining themselves to be cynically above the influence of flavor-of-the-month systems. Yes we’ve both seen that syndrome too many times. Sell the cynicism, not the system,” said Gao.

“Good line, very Žižek, I’m going to steal that. Sell the cynicism, not the system. But to return to this case, I think the accident actually saved Scorpion Arts. That CAPSFA-4 shtick is a death-march autopilot. If it gets into, say, a major Fortune 100 company, it could have disastrous effects if not defused in time.”

We lapsed into silence, sipping our drinks.

The most pernicious shticks I know of are peddled with a knowing wink, and a suggestion of complicity in an associated kind of above-the-shtick cynical enlightenment. Of course this is a shtick, the peddlers like to indirectly suggest, But you and I, oh wisest of clients, we have the taste to apply it in a situation-dependent way without getting caught up in it. We’re not like those OTHER fools in their foolish, gullible companies, running on flavors of the month.

Aloud, I said, “You’re right about shtick activity being up in the last few years. And the fake Microsoft logo worries me. Plus there’s that fake Yak Coin racket Agent Q told us about a few weeks ago. It all seems related somehow. Did you hear from him again by the way? Anything new?”

Gao shook his head. “I did talk to him again, but he didn’t have anything more to share. Just repeated what he told us the first time — fake Yak coins showing up all over the place, especially around shady transnational gigs. Why would anyone do that. That stuff is ancient history.”

“It almost feels like there’s dark forces out to destroy the gig economy, doesn’t it?”

Gao looked at me solemnly, and for once he didn’t have a snigger or aphorism.

“We should dig more,” he said, “I’ll put the word out.”

“And so it begins,” I thought to myself.

<< The 12 Eigenconversations | Into the Yakverse index | The Medium is the Client >>

I tweet a daily consulting tip on the @artofgig twitter account and compile them every couple of weeks here as a newsletter issue.

Here are tips 14-27.

Consulting Tip #14: By default, do not bill for travel time unless you actually work on the gig on the plane/train. Bill a high enough rate for billable time to cover overhead of travel-related schedule inefficiencies. Deal with exceptions like risky field travel case-by-case.

Consulting Tip #15: When you get a new lead, ask yourself whether one of your indie-consultants buddies might be a better fit for it than you, and refer them with a specific endorsement if so. Even if it means forgoing some short-term revenue yourself.

Consulting Tip #16: In the indie consulting economy, cooperation is more important than competition. You’re more likely to need support on skills you lack than to run into direct competition for a gig. So always look for ways to rope in buddies, and be open to being roped in.

Consulting Tip #17: Make all introductions (consultant to consultant, client to consultant, client to useful contacts) for free. Influence peddling for anything other than goodwill is rarely worth either the money or the moral hazard. Charge for what you know, not who you know.

Consulting Tip #18: Maintain a real blacklist and put people who behave poorly by your standards on it and stop working with them (both fellow indie consultants and clients). Indie consulting is a natural lemon market, and you are only as trustworthy as your network.

Consulting Tip #19: Make yourself a nice business card (from a service like Moo) with design and artwork that’s meaningful to you. They’re useless for networking but valuable catalysts for your identity formation as an indie consultant.

Consulting Tip #20: Don’t network. Netplay instead. If it feels like conscious “work”, you’re doing it wrong. At best you’ll gain short-term transactional benefits. Your network is ideally a positive externality of playing social games you actually take pleasure in.

Consulting Tip #21: Pay attention to the peripheries of your network. Your best leads will come from your weakest ties. People who know you best are usually your weakest sources of leads.

Consulting Tip #22: Do not book-keep time you devote to things viewed as goodwill (public commons contributions, free stuff, pro bono help to people who need it). Tracking means it is not coming from a place of abundance, and you will end up nursing a grievance about doing it.

Consulting Tip #23: If it feels like thankless work, then you are unconsciously expecting to be thanked, even if you say you’re not. Either charge for it, stop doing it, or structure it to accumulate value as an asset you control. Virtue signaling martyrdom is a dumb payoff.

Consulting Tip #24: Don’t whine about being asked to work for exposure. Do it if it seems worthwhile, don’t if not. Take note of those who exhibit exploitative patterns of trying to score free labor in return for worthless exposure, but you have no obligation to act on this info.

Consulting Tip #25: Do not act like you are in a union of exploited workers. The sine qua non of indie consulting is the search for greater individual agency than employees at any level from janitor to CEO can ever achieve. If that search doesn’t interest you, do something else.

Consulting Tip #26: Maintain a clear sense of what “independence” means to you in relation to all levels of permanent employees. Independence from collectivist agendas is as important as independence from the whims of capricious executives or the blundering of clueless managers.

Consulting Tip #27: Watch for signs of holier-than-thou smugness in yourself in relation to paycheck types. Your role in the economy exists because theirs do. Your choice to be an indie consultant is just that: YOUR choice. Respect theirs.

Here is Compilation #1 (1-13) if you want to backtrack and catch up.

If you’re active on twitter, and want to join the conversation there, follow @artofgig, introduce yourself via a reply to this pinned tweet, and follow some of your fellow subscribers on this list.

I’m in the middle of moving-week chaos (I’m moving from Seattle to Los Angeles) so no original-content post this week. If any of you live in LA, especially near downtown, do reply to this email to say hello. I have vague plans to pull together the occasional meetup.

<< The Two Shadows of the Hero | Into the Yakverse index | The 12 Eigenconversation >>

Occasionally, I get a drink with my young Millennial buddy, Arnie Anscombe — you may recall him from the original Art of Gig case study, and we talked about his brother Bernie in Making it Interesting a few weeks ago — and we swap notes. I pick his brain about the latest magical developments in data science and machine learning. He dumps his more speculative, narrative-oriented thoughts ( which he seems to feel guilty about thinking) on me for reactions. Usually in the form of gotcha questions, hoping to trip me up and prove the superiority of his methods, and perhaps atone for his sins of data-free speculation that way. He’s a bit of a Data Supremacist, but very Catholic about it.

When we met up a few weeks ago, he had a smug look on his face, like he’d come prepared with a particularly good gotcha for me.

“So, I see you wrote about me again in your newsletter, and dragged my brother and the rest of my family into it as well…”

“… ah c’mon, you know I love you all you guys…”

“…And not particularly flattering either. Bernie was a bit mad at you about it, but then we both got a couple of good leads for gigs from your subscribers, so I guess all PR is good PR.”

“Always glad to help out the Anscombe boys,” I said. “So what’s on your mind now?”

“So,” said Arnie, as we settled in with our drinks, “I read your other newsletter a few weeks back, where you talked about the 4 styles of consulting. And I have… some thoughts.”

“Ah yes, did you like that one?”

Arnie gave me an indulgent look, “You and your 2x2s. Usual wild speculation without a shred of data behind it, but entertaining as always. I suppose you have me pigeonholed in your Achiever quadrant.”

“Is that where you think you fit?”

Arnie waved the Rogerian Therapy question away.

“See, I think overall consulting style is the wrong unit of analysis. I don’t think I have a fixed mode. The real unit of analysis is the conversation, not the conversational style.”

One of my rules of thumb is to never let a conversation get bogged down in No True Unit of Analysis quagmires, so I caved immediately.

“Sure. The style lens has its uses for talking about doctrinal matters, but the conversational lens is probably better for fine-grained tactical questions about meeting-level sparring methods.”

“Exactly, and as we both know, professionals talk tactics and logistics, amateurs bullshit about strategy.”

I ignored the neg, and went yes, and: “Plus you can get more empirical with it. I bet you maintain a spreadsheet of your consulting conversations?”

Arnie grinned, “Of course. I log all consulting conversations. I track 19 objective metrics, and score all conversations on 7 subjective dimensions, on 5-point Likert scales. And I just took Tiago Forte’s course, so I’m building a second brain in Evernote too, for my free-form notes.”

Just thinking about all that work exhausts me, but I neither agree nor disagree with that sort of quantified self approach to consulting. Hey, everybody has their own style.

“And what patterns do you see from all your tracking?” I asked.

“Actually, it’s what I don’t see that’s interesting. See, one of the things I track is the set of broad functional themes every conversation hits, and interestingly, two business functions almost never come up, except in passing. But both almost always hover ominously in the background. Care to guess which ones?”

I smiled and leaned back. I was pretty sure I had this one. Time to put the young whippersnapper in his place.

“I’ll bet sales and corporate finance.”

Arnie looked surprised. “Got it in one, wow! How did you know? Do you track your conversations too?”

It was my turn to look indulgently at him. I leaned back, steepled my hands, and said, “No, it was a matter of simple deduction. You, like me, are an indie consultant. And like most indie consultants, you mainly get roped in to help with decision-making while there is still room for creative ideas, and time to try imaginative maneuvers. Elementary, my dear Arnie.”

“But what does that have to do with the missing conversations on sales and finance?”

“Let’s hear your theory first. I’m sure you have one. After all, as we both know, data without generalization is just gossip.”

Arnie smiled and shrugged, “Touché. I don’t have a theory. I thought you might have one. You’re the wild speculation guy.”

“Ah, indeed I am, and indeed I do. Very well…”

I took a sip of my Manhattan, and began. “You ever hear that line, the aim of marketing is to make sales superfluous? I forget who said that. Might have been Al Pacino in Raging Bull.”

Arnie gave me a pained look. “Yeah I’ve heard the line, and it was Peter Drucker. What about it?”

“See, sales is fundamentally a tactical mop-up function. If marketing is primarily about maneuvering and positioning for an unfair advantage, sales is primarily about being effective in the melee to finish the job. The better you are at the former, the less you need the latter. The idea behind the line is, if you do the marketing right, you might not need sales at all.”

“How does that explain why it doesn’t come up? And what about finance?”

“Finance too. Sales and finance — proper corporate financial engineering, earnings-per-share stuff — are both tactical mop-up melee functions. The aim of every other function is to make sales and finance superfluous. If demand for your product always outstrips supply, and there’s always a comfortable cash-and-control cushion, the VP of Sales and the CFO can spend all their time in Hawaii. Robots could do their jobs. Those jobs exist because strategy never takes you all the way.”

Enlightenment dawned on Arnie.

He said, “Ah, I see, and they don’t come up in free-wheeling open-ended strategy conversations — the kind indie consultants are usually involved in — because they’re the backstop downstream functions that kick in to solve problems with brute force….”

“….where upstream strategic maneuvering fails to make them superfluous by solving them with imaginative elegance. Precisely,” I finished the thought for him.

“So, let me see if I got this straight. If you do end up talking with a client about a problem from a sales or corporate finance perspective, it means the company has already lost the strategic initiative, and is embroiled in a melee situation.”

“Yes, and there’s nothing much left to talk about at a strategic level, only technical cleverness and brute force to get out of the situational melee. You can buy time, one quarter at a time, with sales hacks and financial engineering jiu-jitsu, but only for a while. If the company never gets back to where strategic maneuvering conversations fueled by imagination are meaningful, it is down for the count. Eight, maybe ten quarters before it turns into a zombie, ready for private equity or bankruptcy.”

“Ah, and the reason you and I don’t see much of that action is that there’s nothing much indie consultants can do if things get that far, and not much money to pay us with anyway.”

“Almost, right. There’s still technical things specialized indie consultant types can do, but ironically, if you’ve been dragged down to the melee level, it’s mostly a big-firm Positioning School game. Us People School types require time and real maneuvering room to deliver any kind of value.”

“Shades of Alfred Thayer Mahan there, huh? The Influence of Sea Power Upon History?”

Sometimes young Arnie surprises me.

“Precisely,” I said. “Culture eats strategy for lunch, but only if you survive the breakfast melee.”

“And I guess companies can go back to talking strategy when they’ve gotten out of the melee long enough to create some maneuvering room.”

“If they get out at all. That’s why finance and sales aren’t really absent from strategy conversations; they merely loom ominously as temporal forcing functions on all other conversations as corporate memento mori.”

“The twin 400lb gorillas in the room,” said Arnie, in an unusual display of conceptual licentiousness (though with characteristically accurate book-keeping of gorilla poundage). I might make a narrative-driven bullshit artist of him yet.

“Exactly. Not invisible so much as studiously ignored. Typically, sales and finance will only come up in a couple of ominous warning slides, showing profit or share-price trends, reminding you of the forcing functions and time horizons at work, framing the situation…”

“…and threatening to turn it into a melee.”

“Exactly. Remember that other other Drucker line, about marketing and innovation being the only two necessary functions in business? Well, sales and corporate finance are what happen when they turn out to be insufficient.”

“Ah, so does that mean every real strategic sparring conversation is a marketing and/or innovation conversation in disguise?”

I’d never thought of this. Young Arnie had managed to ask a gotcha question after all.

I thought for a minute and did a mental review of my foggy first-brain memory of 8 years of conversations, hoping to get lucky. I came up with squat.

“Hmm… you know what? You got me there. I’m not sure. Off the top of my head, I count four different types of conversations that seem to account for 80% of my sparring with clients, but they don’t seem to map to the marketing/innovation dichotomy in any obvious way. What about you? Does that pop in your logs or notebooks?”

Arnie pulled out his laptop and tapped busily for a few minutes, then shut it and looked up ruefully. Apparently his second brain was as stumped as my first brain.

“I can try running some detailed analysis on my logs later, but I don’t see an obvious pattern there.”

“Ah, too bad.”

“So you’re saying you’re stumped, huh? Not even a 2×2 for your 4 different types of conversation?”

“Well, I do have a 2×2 in mind, but something seems off about it, and it doesn’t answer your question anyway. Hmm…”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Actually, I think this one is beyond me. Do you have another hour or so? I think we should go talk to my brother, he lives just around the corner in Diogenes Alley.”

“Whoa, you never told me you have a brother!??”

“Yes, I haven’t mentioned him before? Mycroft Rao. He’s much better than me at this sort of thing. Bills out at five times my hourly rate. I’ll bet he already has a taxonomy of Types of Consulting Conversations figured out.”

“Well then, let’s go. I’m free the rest of the evening!”

<< The Two Shadows of the Hero | Into the Yakverse index | The 12 Eigenconversations >>

<< Making it Interesting | Into the Yakverse index | Maneuvers vs. Melees >>

In the People school of consulting, clients are the heroes, and consultants are the shadows. This is not an assessment of virtues and psyches, but a model of default roles within the narrative structure of any interesting consulting gig. And while heroes may have a thousand faces, they only have two shadows.

As a consultant, you will be cast in one of the two available shadow roles, depending on whether you add value based on what you know, or based on who you know. While both are ways of injecting new knowledge into a situation, one is a direct way, while the other is an indirect way, and you’ll find out very quickly, via your first few gigs, which way you mostly lean.

And if you don’t like being a shadow? Well, that’s when you end up with a Positioning school shtick instead. We’ll talk about that another day. Today we talk about shadows.

Let me tell you a little story from my case files to illustrate the know somebody, or know something dichotomy of shadows within the People school, and how the two shadow types operate.

One of the things that might happen to you, once you gain some experience in indie consulting and the gig economy, is that you might be called upon by the FBI’s G-Crimes division (which was formed in the late 90s) to assist in an investigation where your expertise is relevant. It is always good to help them out if you can, even when they cannot pay and you have to write it off as pro bono work.

I had just helped wrap up one such case, a singular affair that the G-Crimes division had internally labeled the Bermuda Triangle case. I can’t share real names and details, but it involved two executives A and B, at rival big companies, colluding via an indie consultant C, based in the Caribbean, to put a small startup D (which had been threatening to disrupt both the big companies) out of business.

It had ended grimly, with A committing suicide by PowerPoint in a train wreck of a board meeting, and B being canceled on social media. They deserved it perhaps, but it was still grim. Startup D, fortunately, survived the affair with just a few bruises, and is now well on its way to becoming the new unicorn on its block. But it could easily have died if the G-Crimes division hadn’t intervened, with a little help from me.

Agents Jane Jopp and Guy Lestrode of the G-Crimes division were buying me a drink to celebrate our closing the case, and debrief a bit. With them was a third agent I hadn’t met before. An old, almost elderly man, with an almost-retired look about him. But something about his alert eyes suggested he was very much a live player, still in the game.

Jopp said, “This is Agent Q, he’s with a different three-letter agency. He asked to join us, and he might want to run something by you later.”

Agent Q waved his arm graciously, “That can wait. I’m curious to hear about the Bermuda Triangle case first hand. The whole IC is talking about it.”

I bowed, not to be out-gracioused, “Any enigmatic, spooky friend of Jopp’s is an enigmatic, spooky friend of mine.”

As we were sitting down in our booth, I spotted my long-time indie-consulting evil twin, Guanxi Gao, at the far end of the bar, speaking inaudibly into his phone. I waved at him. He nodded and held up a finger to indicate he’d be right over.

“Ah, looks like coincidentally, I have an enigmatic, spooky friend of my own to introduce,” I said.

Gao finished his call and sauntered over. He nodded at the three agents and motioned cheers with his drink.

“Jopp, Lestrode, Agent Q, meet my evil twin Guanxi Gao. He and I go way back; we’ve been collaborating and stealing gigs from each other for years. I believe I mentioned him to you last week Lestrode?”

Lestrode nodded. “Yes, you said he gave you the lead that helped us crack the case I think? Nice to meet you Mr. Gao.”

Gao nodded, “That Bermuda Triangle case? How did that work out?”

“Messily, but it could have been a lot messier. Thanks for your help on that one Gao, I owe you one, as do Agents Jopp and Lestrode here.”

Gao smiled, and started to say something, when his phone rang.

He glanced at it, and said, “Sorry, I have to take this. Nice meeting you, Agents.”

He nodded and sauntered off again towards the far end of the bar.

Jopp looked at the retreating figure. “He’s your friend? Doesn’t seem like your type. Looks like one of those bagman operator types. Not an idea guy.”

I’ll say this for Agent Jane Jopp. She may be lacking in imagination, but she has an uncanny ability to read people within seconds. Twenty years in the G-Crimes division, and she still can’t quite get inside the heads of us gig economy types — which is why she calls me in when she needs to get inside consultant heads — but she’s acquired a certain savant-like ability to thin-slice and classify us with scary speed and accuracy. Hers is a mind that indexes people like a search engine.

I said, “Bagman operator is exactly right. They call him 6% Gao in indie consulting circles. He’s as religious about only working for a percentage as I am about only working by the hour. Usually 6%. He says 6 is lucky.”

Lestrode perked up, “In China, 6 is 六, which sounds like 流, which means flow. It’s considered lucky.”

Young Lestrode is full of surprises. A Very Online younger Millennial nerd in his late twenties, exactly the right foil for Jopp, who is very much old-school in her ways. They make a good team. Agents like Young Lestrode are the future of gig economy law enforcement I think.

“Well, Gao’s certainly all about making things flow smoothly wherever he goes. He’s always miraculously in the right place at the right time, positioned to nudge things along in just the right way. Interesting coincidences and serendipitous meetings seem to just happen around him. For a 6% cut.”

“And is it a coincidence that he’s here at the same time we are?” asked Jopp.

I grinned and held up my drink, “Let’s just say I owe him 6% of a drink.”

Lestrode said, “To get back to the Bermuda Triangle case, I’ve been meaning to ask you. How did you guess A and B would have a hidden connection via our friendly Caribbean rogue consultant C?”

I set my drink on the table, steepled my fingers, leaned back, and closed my eyes, “You know my methods Lestrode, apply them.”

Lestrode is an energetic learner, always game for such prompts. He leaned forward in his armchair, elbows on knees, and stared down at the carpet, frowning.

“Well, you make up a 2×2, and when you’ve eliminated 3 of the quadrants, the 4th, however improbable, is the right one.”

Jopp winked at me, and smiled indulgently at Lestrode.

I said, “That is indeed my primary method. You’ve been watching and learning, I see Lestrode. Do go on.”

“Well…in this case, from the outset, the two obvious questions were: was the course of events across the three companies actually intended by anybody, or an emergent effect, and, were people behaving maliciously or stupidly?”

“Malice vs. Stupidity; Intended effects vs. Emergent effects, a very promising 2×2,” I said, encouragingly, taking a sip of my absinthe.

“And if we’d gone by priors, we would have concluded it was just an unfortunate — for the startup D that is — spot of emergent stupidity. No premeditation, no crime. Two dumb big companies acting in ways that accidentally almost killed a smart, promising startup that was threatening to disrupt both of them at once.”

Agent Q spoke for the first time, “Ah, a Double Morton effect. Interesting.”

I gave Agent Q a long, curious, appraising look, but could read nothing in his face. What sort of agent knew about esoterica like the Double Morton effect? He looked at me and gave me an enigmatic smile. Why was he at this meeting, I wondered. Well, I’d find out soon enough. I set the thought aside.

Lestrode said, “Is that some sort of technical term for emergent stupidity? But yeah, that’s what we thought it was at first. G-Crimes got called in because all three companies hire a lot of the same gig workers below the API, and we thought some low-level organized grift might be going on in the ecosystem, but then Agent Jopp noticed that two executives at the two big companies had been unusually well-positioned to personally benefit from what happened. In eerily similar ways too. That’s when we called in Rao, and started looking for above-the-API shenanigans at the C-suite level.”

I smiled, “I’m curious to see where you take this 2×2, go on Lestrode.”

“Here, lemme sketch it out,” said Lestrode. He grabbed a cocktail napkin and scribbled for a minute.

“Okay, so two unrelated executives in different companies making bank the same way suggested it wasn’t… a Double Morton, at least not primarily. On the other hand, it didn’t seem like a lucky accident because there wasn’t really much luck involved. And it couldn’t have been coincidental opportunism either, because both A and B made identical non-obvious trades to exploit the situation. So that left intended malice. But we had to prove active collusion, and to do that we had to find the connection between them.”

I beamed at Lestrode and nodded at Jopp, “Excellent hindsight analysis Lestrode! Jopp, you have a very promising understudy here. I predict an illustrious career in G-Crimes for Young Lestrode here.”

“So is that how you figured it out?” asked Lestrode, looking at me expectantly.

Jopp and Agent Q turned to look at me as well.

“Not even close, but that would have been a good way to proceed if there had been no other options. It might even have gotten us somewhere non-random. In fact, I’m going to take that napkin with the 2×2 if you don’t mind.”

I pocketed the napkin. Just because an answer is the wrong one for a given situation doesn’t mean it might not be the right one for a future situation. And as a consultant, you never pass up an idea in 2×2 form, no matter who it is from, or where you find it.

“We can call it the Lestrode 2×2,” I added graciously. It never hurts to liberally give credit where due, while you’re busy pocketing useful ideas for later.

Lestrode said, “So how did you figure out then? What 2×2 did you use?”

“What makes you think I used a 2×2 at all?”

“Well…” Lestrode trailed off uncertainly.

“It’s my shtick? We’ll have to have a little chat about shticks at some point Lestrode, just the two of us. But no, in this particular case, it wasn’t a 2×2 that did the trick.”

“So what did you do?”

“I made a call to my friend Guanxi Gao over there, and asked if he knew the two executives and any connection between them. He pointed me to our friendly Caribbean consultant, C. Who, as we now know, played a bit of creative chess postman, and took a cut from both ends.”

Lestrode looked deeply disappointed, “That’s it? That’s all? You just got the actual answer from somebody? You didn’t apply your Gervais Principle theories and do some deep abductive reasoning?”

I smiled and said, “In consulting, Lestrode, there are two ways to solve a problem; you either know somebody, or you know something, and when you’re mainly a know-something guy like me, you should always cultivate know-somebody people, because knowing somebody is nearly always a faster route to the right answer. When you’ve exhausted your rolodex of everybody who might actually know something, whatever remains, however messy, must be actually thought about. With or without 2x2s.”

“And Gao is a know-somebody consultant?”

“Precisely. He has a vast global network of contacts. He knows everybody, and never makes up an idea if he can make a phone call instead. I’ve never seen him draw a 2×2, but he can keep making phone calls long after I’m out of 2x2s.”

Lestrode didn’t seem impressed. “Huh. Not much of a networker, he didn’t say much to us. I’d have thought any consultant would be eager for a line in to G-Crimes.”

“Oh trust me, he networked exactly as much as he intended to. And he isn’t here by accident. I mentioned I’d be debriefing here with you guys, and I was 90% sure he’d swing by to check you out.”

“How come he didn’t try to chat us up more, or give us his card? Isn’t that what you guys do, hand out cards to everybody you meet?”

Jopp interrupted, “You’re thinking like a graduate student on LinkedIn, Agent Lestrode. What Mr. Rao is saying is that our new acquaintance Mr. Gao is no ordinary networker. He’s an operator. A pick-up artist among indie consultants. A market maker in the interstices of the gig economy.”

I nodded, “Precisely.”

“I’ve run into many like him over the years,” Jopp continued. “Build trust everywhere, know who has what available to sell, and when, who is in the market for what. Make the right connections at the right times.”

She turned to me, “So he’s good, huh?”

“Among the best,” I said. “And he’s only going to get better playing both sides of the US-China trade cold war too. Someone to watch.”

All three agents turned to look thoughtfully at Gao, still on his phone at the other end of the bar, his head down, mostly listening, occasionally saying something inaudibly.

“Now that you’re on his radar,” I said, “you’ll run into him at least twice more in different situations relatively quickly; and he’ll say more and listen more each time. By the third meeting, it will seem like you’ve always known and trusted him.”

“And do you trust him?” asked Jopp.

“Like me, he chooses interestingness over money. So yeah, I trust him. Up to a point. As much as one can trust an evil twin. I wasn’t kidding about that.”

“What happens after the third meeting?” asked Lestrode.

“Well one day, maybe at the fourth meeting, or maybe at the tenth, when you meet him, you’ll realize you want something from him. And he will make it happen, for 6%. But right now, he’s in no hurry to deepen the connection. He’s just checking you out…” I turned to look at Agent Q, “…like your associate Agent Q has been checking me out for the last half hour.”

Agent Q smiled, “Well, yes, I’ve certainly been doing that. Agent Jopp told me you were generally a good person to get to know in the gig economy, and I can see why she thinks that now. But as it happens, if we’re done discussing the Bermuda Triangle case, I do have something I want to run by you right now, and it can’t wait till our fourth serendipitous meeting.”

He pulled up a photograph on a tablet, and slide it across the table towards me.

“Do you recognize this object?”

It was a photograph of a Yak coin.

I smiled.

“I suppose there’s a rare third way to solve a problem in consulting, besides knowing somebody and knowing something.”

Agent Q raised his eyebrows questioningly.

I pulled out my wallet, carefully extracted my own Yak coin, and put it down on the table next to Agent Q’s tablet.

“You can have something to show,” I said.

Agent Q looked at me quietly.

“Told you he’d know something,” said Jane Jopp smugly. Lately, she’s been taking a sort of patronizing, proprietary attitude towards me, showing me off like a performing pet. It’s an occupational hazard of being a know-something consultant. I don’t mind though.

Lestrode frowned and leaned forward, “What’s that? Some sort of ancient rare coin?”

A voice spoke up from the shadows behind our little group. It was Gao, he’d finished his call and rejoined us unnoticed. How long had been listening, I wondered. That’s the thing with Gao. He’s a sort of deus ex machina haunting the gig economy in a lurking, invisible way. You don’t see or hear him until he decides he wants to be seen and heard.

“Yak coins. Not particularly rare. I’ve got a few myself. Didn’t know you had one Rao.” Gao stepped forward, bending down to look at my coin.

He straightened up, and pointed at the tablet, “The one in the photograph is a fake though.”

Agent Q looked at both of us speculatively.

“Well, well, well. Looks like I need to have a chat with both you gentlemen. Perhaps I could buy you both a drink if our friends from G-Crimes are done here?”

Jopp and Lestrode rose together, and put on their jackets.

Jopp said, “Yep, we’re done. Thanks again for your help with the Bermuda Case, Mr. Rao, nice to meet you Mr. Gao. We’ll leave you to chat with Agent Q here. See you around.”

“Thanks for the drink.”

They nodded and left. Gao hesitated for a moment, checked his phone, then seemed to come to a decision. He shrugged, and sat down,

“I guess I have time for another drink,” he said.

Agent Q motioned to the waiter for another round of drinks.

I picked up and pocketed my Yak coin, and slid the tablet back towards Agent Q.

“Well Agent Q,” I said, “In my experience Gao can be trusted in such matters, so what are you doing with a photograph of a fake Yak coin, and how can we help you?”

<< Making it Interesting | Into the Yakverse index | Maneuvers vs. Melees >>

I’ve been tweeting a daily consulting tip on my new @artofgig twitter account for the last few weeks. So far it’s been a mix of silly and serious, esoteric and practical, n00b tips, and protips. I’ll be compiling these as public posts here every couple of weeks.

If you’re active on twitter, and want to join the conversation there, follow @artofgig, introduce yourself via a reply to this pinned tweet, and follow some of your fellow subscribers on this list. A modest stream of idle consulting chatter is getting underway already.

Here’s the first compilation, tips 1-13.

Consulting Tip #1: Your consulting True Name must be kept a secret except from other consultants with whom you have shared a gig.

Consulting Tip #2: Every gig is a parallel universe with its own timeline. Discover the bandwidth of your personal multiverse as early as you can.

Consulting Tip #3: Define scopes, not rules. Instead of asking, “should I do this?” ask, “under what circumstances would it be a no-brainer to do or not do this?” In consulting, circumstances vary a lot more than in employment.

Consulting Tip #4: Pack a protein bar and a light sweater when visiting client sites. You never know how cold they’ll have the AC set, or whether or not there will be snacks/food to suit your nibbling needs.

Consulting Tip #5: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to increase the client’s rate of making trigger decisions. Except when it isn’t.

Consulting Tip #6: Trust, but verify, things your client says. Treat them as you would a sympathetic unreliable narrator in a novel. Just because you’re on their side doesn’t mean they have their story straight.

Consulting Tip #7: Do not automatically nod along when a client criticizes people you don’t know. Instead, challenge with more conservative alternate reads of the hearsay evidence. “Based on how you say he acted on the call, sounds like he might just be insecure after the reorg.”

Consulting Tip #8: Never let a missionary purpose in your head get in the way of hearing what a client is saying

Consulting Tip #9: Tour offices at every possible opportunity. Observe layout, patterns of proximity, naming/numbering conventions for physical infrastructure like conference rooms, furniture, break rooms, informational environment like posters and live displays etc.

Consulting tip #10: Tour factories and other specialized work facilities, like design studios or testing environments, at every opportunity possible. Ask operating staff as many questions as possible. Get enough engineering literacy to understand what you’re looking at.

Consulting Tip #11: Pay attention to calendar management practices in client organizations, especially around senior executive schedules, and chat with admins whenever possible to learn the typical patterns of calendar craziness and how they cope.

Consulting Tip #12: Make all travel and site-visits count, but let your primary client gate-keep what’s appropriate for you. Ask if they want you to meet with people you might not otherwise meet, and line up 1:1s.

Consulting Tip #13: Never be a “mysterious outsider” in an internal meeting. When sitting in/calling in on client meetings that aren’t about your gig, always make sure someone introduces you, explains your presence, and says enough to put others at ease. And at least say hello.

There’s a joke I like that illustrates the foundational role of knowledge in consulting work.

Guy takes his car to the mechanic because it is making a mysterious noise. Mechanic opens up the hood, and tightens one nut. Mysterious noise gone!

“That’ll be $50,” says the mechanic.

“Hey!” the customer protests, “All you did was tighten one nut! How is that $50?”

“Let me print out an itemized bill for you,” says the mechanic.

The itemized bill:

Knowing which nut to tighten to resolve a mysterious noise is a simple example of a knowledge asymmetry. In this case, the knowledge was everything. The mechanic didn’t bring any execution skill to the party. He could have “consulted” on which nut to tighten for $49.90 and the customer could have done the “execution” themselves, saving $0.10.

This is often the case in consulting. The execution skill is often either trivial or available in-house in the client organization. The entire value lies in knowing which nut to tighten.

Knowledge Asymmetries

The joke illustrates two features of knowledge asymmetries.

On the one hand, it highlights the value of knowledge asymmetries. Knowing which nut to tighten is, in a sense priceless. Somebody who does not know which nut to tighten will likely waste hours trying to figure out the problem, and possibly do dumb things that make it irreversibly worse. In the worst case, the cost of the unfixed loose-nut problem might be the whole car being lost in an accident, possibly with loss of life.

But it would be a general waste of cognitive resources if everybody knew enough about cars to solve the loose-nut problem, which might occur in one out of a hundred cars over its lifetime. It makes sense for a few specialists — preferably people who have self-selected into car repair because they like the work — to know about the mysterious-noise/loose-nut connection, and do the nut-tightening for everybody.

On the other hand, the joke also illustrates the obvious potential for abuse, hinted at in the opaque “knowing which nut to tighten” claim. The mechanic could easily have screwed around doing nothing for hours or even days, made needless repairs with expensive parts, and finally done the nut-tightening as well. The customer wouldn’t have been any the wiser.

Worse, even if the mechanic doesn’t do that, how does the customer know that $49.90 is in an appropriate price for the “knowing”? Would other mechanics charge the same? Was the knowing the result of something you might learn in a weekend auto-repair course or the result of 30 years of experience and pattern recognition training? Is it a reasonable mark-up on amortized learning costs? Or rent-seeking?

These problems, of course, are aspects of the famous principal-agent problem.

While it is inherent to all knowledge work, the principal-agent problem is particularly acute in any relationship where the typical principal has a need that is rare enough that there is no incentive for them to get systematically knowledgeable about the domain, while fulfilling the need is so common an activity for the agent that they have incentives to learn to do it very cheaply, systematically, and efficiently.

A personal example: my “sparring conversation” model maps to a type of conversation I tend to have once every week or two with a different client. So I get 25-50 practice sessions a year. But some of my lower-frequency clients (often C-level execs at mid-size companies who have to do all the high-level thinking for their companies on their own) tell me that I’m the only one they have such conversations with, so their frequency is perhaps 1-2 times a year.

Knowledge Asymmetries for Employees

The principal-agent problem does affect regular employer-employee relationships, but is not as severe for several reasons:

1. A manager — the internal “customer” for the work of an employee — is likely to have done the same kind of work before being tapped to supervise it

2. The relationship is longer-term and higher frequency. It is harder to hide the nature of a problem when an instance is being detected and solved every week.

3. There are likely peers with the same kind of knowledge, and strong incentives to rat out a fellow employee who is exploiting principal-agent knowledge asymmetries

4. Much of the asymmetric knowledge is actually in proprietary systems rather than in the heads of particular employees

As a result of these factors, in work done by employees, there is a visible, reasonable-seeming correlation between effort and problems. And in general, the more important the problem is judged to be, the greater the cost of the effort.

This is not an accident. It is practically the definition of an organization: a collection of systematically monitored, high-frequency activities defined by reasonable-seeming correlations between effort and output.

In fact, you could argue that the core competency of organizations is knowing — at an codified process level — roughly how much effort it should take to accomplish any of a vast array of core activities they can do better than outsiders, and setting compensation policies accordingly.

If you’re one of those people who likes to analyze firms in terms of Coasean transaction costs, this effect can be seen as lower monitoring costs in a relationship. An employee is simply cheaper for an organization to monitor for dishonesty or ineffectiveness than an infrequently used consultant.

A much-worse-than-average employee (in terms of either dishonesty or incompetence) will soon be spotted. A genius employee who routinely finds 1-minute solutions to problems that take peers days will either be promoted to work on the hardest problems, or have their thinking skills analyzed and turned into teachable disciplines for non-genius employees. They are likely to turn into teachers themselves, trading the asymmetric knowledge for esteem.

The net effect of these two feedback loops is that behaviors that do not exhibit a reasonable-seeming correlation between effort and output either get weeded out or tweaked until they do.

What’s more, this dynamic also makes it harder for the firm itself to be dishonest the larger it gets, because more people with agent-side participation in knowledge asymmetries have to collude (so a “tell” of a possibly shady firm is a great deal of internal secrecy between groups that minimizes the number of people with complicity in any given deception).

Any employee with a very unique, opaque, and illegible skill is a huge risk for an organization. To prevent such an employee from falling prey to principal-agent temptations or being poached by a competitor, they are likely to end up highly compensated, so that it is simply not worth their time or energy to exploit the asymmetries of their knowledge.

Often a uniquely skilled but underutilized employees, despite being compensated enough to make dishonesty uninteresting, will end up leaving and becoming a consultant simply to find more things to do.

Reasonable Efforts for Reasonable Output

I’ve used the relative phrase reasonable-seeming rather than the absolute reasonable to describe the perception of effort in tasks done by employees.

Therein lies a subtlety. The work of an organization is a theater of apparent reasonableness that may or may not be actually reasonable depending on whether or not the foundational assumptions for the internal reality of an organization are actually true.

Quite often, these assumptions are at least slightly out-of-date. Often, they are wildly, insanely obsolete, in ways that are obvious to outsiders. Internally though, the organization may be unconsciously pumping a massive amount of energy into denying what’s obvious to outsiders. It may take serious social courage to challenge the “consensus of reasonableness” in the internal economy of valuing efforts and outcomes.

On the other hand, outsiders can be very, very wrong in interpreting the externally visible behaviors of an organization, in which case, reasonable-seeming is actually reasonable in an absolute sense, and it is the world outside that is insane in its beliefs about what “reasonable” looks like.

In some cases, there is no way to easily tell whether the organization is deluded, or the external world is deluded. The best you can do is think hard about it (from either side of the organization’s boundary) and wait for the judgment of history.

In either case though, one of the tells of an organization working very hard to maintain an internal reality that is dissonant with respect to external perspectives is resistance to consultants.

When the internal reality is deluded, consultants might inject an entirely unwelcome reality check.

When external reality is deluded, consultants might contaminate a fragile island of deeper truth by injecting bad external thinking.

In either case, we consultants represent informational risks and threats to the organizations we try to help, and it’s generally up to us to manage the risk.

Neutralizing Your Risks

This entire system breaks down in areas where the organization does not know enough to efficiently deploy as employee knowledge but has a strong (possibly rational) resistance to plugging knowledge gaps using consultants.

Consulting begins where monitoring costs get too high, relative to need frequency, for employees to be the right answer.

That doesn’t mean the monitoring cost problem goes away. It tends to get solved in varied ways:

1. Crisis-only consulting policies: Organizations will simply resist retaining consulting services unless it is a crisis and the cost of not bringing in outside expertise to help become unacceptable. These companies simply leave the risks of non-crisis knowledge gaps that cannot be addressed by employees unmanaged.

2. Ecosystem competency: Organizations will consciously develop competency in managing an ecosystem of consultants via specialized monitoring mechanisms — think certification programs.

3. Externalize the risk explicitly: Many organizations will require consultants and contractors to carry specialized insurance policies, as some of you will know. I’ve never yet taken such a gig.

4. Relying on exceptions: Many organizations will have default no-consultant policies, but allow senior executives to make exceptions based on special needs and the existence of trusted relationships. This of course, is an entry point for a lot of cronyism.

In my experience, the most common approach is the first one, leaving non-crisis knowledge gap risks unmanaged. Approach 2 works where there is a skills base that the organization can control and shape in some way (such as by owning the core design of a product). Approach 3 passes the buck to the consultant.

Last week, I took a lot some cheap shots at the economics-inspired positioning school of consulting. This week, I tried to give you a glimpse of how an economics lens can sometimes be useful in understanding how to approach gig work. The conclusion to draw from this, however, is that your best approach to creating trust and getting good gigs is Approach 4, ie a people-school approach to a problem whose structure is illuminated by a positioning school analysis.

Build relationships that allow you to be an exception to anti-consultant rules/barriers. So long as you keep yourself honest by resisting the lure of cronyism and only taking gigs where it is clear that you’re bringing genuine external knowledge or relationships to the party, it is the best way to address the legitimate principal-agent concerns of clients, without bearing too heavy a burden of externalized risk-management costs yourself.

There is a fault line that runs through the consulting world. You can find it in every corner of it, from Fortune 100 strategy work and sector or function-specific work to startup-whispering and boutique design agency work.

You can even find it far from big organizations in domains like life coaching for stay-at-home housewives.

The fault line is live. It seems to propagate through completely new consulting domains as fast as they emerge.

This is the divide between the Positioning and People schools of consulting.

The essential difference between them is that the Positioning school takes its intellectual cues from economics, and uses formal models and numbers as the ultimate foundation for everything, while the People school takes its intellectual cues from sociology and psychology, and uses narrative as the ultimate foundation for everything.

If you think these big-picture schisms only matter at C-suite levels, for billion-dollar problems, think again. A life coach might adopt a spreadsheet-driven life optimization approach (this essay explains how you can do that) or one that looks more like psychoanalysis. Or take the newish field of crypto. The Bitcoin world is already exhibiting Positional school biases, while the Ethereum world is already exhibiting People school biases.

Why should you care?

You should care because great deal of energy has been building up along this fault line ever since the internet matured as an economic medium around 2000, destabilizing a 50-year old detente between these two schools. A detente that favored the Positioning school.

A war of ideas is coming, and you’re going to get caught up in it one way or another.

You should also care because because indie consulting is almost entirely People school. The converse is also true, though less strongly so: the People school is dominated by indie consultants (and smaller boutique agencies). So merely by identifying as a current or aspiring indie consultant, chances are, you’re at least unconsciously sympathetic to the governing philosophies of the People school, and unsympathetic to those of the Positioning school.

This means you’ve likely already picked a side, and it’s probably the People side.

Walter Kiechel’s excellent 2010 book, Lords of Strategy, has a good account of the history of the Positioning vs. People schism in the strategy consulting world, where the divide is clearest (here’s my review), so I won’t rehash that. Let’s skip right to the methodological differences between the two schools.

The Great Playbooks

This week’s application of the Bohr principle: The opposite of every Great Playbook is also a Great Playbook.

The Positioning school tries to operate by this Great Playbook:

1. Assume a relatively simple, predictable model of the players in a situation (example, rational actors, bounded rational actors, or legibly-biased rational actors).

2. Make some sort of standardized, relatively detailed, and data-driven map of the environment.

3. Place the simplified people models on the map.

4. Simulate possible futures, pick the best ones, and then use the player models to prescribe courses of action.

5. “Execute” the solution, and monitor the evolution of the situation with a feedback loop.

The People school tries to operate by this Great Playbook:

1. Take an inventory of actual named players in the situation, sorting them into rings by their level of agency and ability to influence the situation.

2. Make up a story to account for the recent history of the situation, using abductive reasoning, to uncover what the actual players are up to, and why.

3. Start “nudging” the situation to test your narrative, and start forming live, evolving judgments about the actual players: who matters, who doesn’t, how they align/don’t align, what futures they are working towards.

4. Pick the group of players you think is both right about the future, and capable of winning the future. Help them win. If such a group doesn’t exist, or you’re on the wrong side from them, exit the situation or switch sides.

5. Keep retelling the story and nudging the action according to the current narrative logic, monitoring the evolving situation for narrative violations and disruptions.

Of course, these are just broad predispositions. In practice, both schools muddy their own idealized playbooks a lot. Still, there is something like a grain to how problems get analyzed and solved by the two schools, an overall tendency. My playbook caricatures attempt to capture those dispositions and tendencies visible under actual case histories.

The reason there is usually a clear tendency one way or the other is that opposed Great Playbooks are based on opposed Great Truths, and people tend to swing towards one or the other.

The Great Truth of the Positioning school is that objective, external reality is everything, and subjective reality is just noise that gets in the way, but is easily tuned out.

The Great Truth of the People school is that subjective, internal realities (note the plural) are everything, and objective reality is a matter of evolving consensus and dissensus.

The resulting methodological divide between the schools is pretty unmistakeable.

The Methodological Divide

For the Positioning school, narratives, if used at all, are a matter of cosmetics and optics. A way to package, present, and influence using the conclusions of a one-size-fits-all playbook.

Positioning school practitioners are essentially wonks at heart, who believe in truth-by-spreadsheet, but sometimes make what they think of as concessions to human nature by telling stories.

For the People school, formal models and data, if used at all, are something like specialized forensic investigative tools. To be used when the process of repeatedly retelling the story while nudging it along runs into show-stopping mysteries and puzzles.

People school practitioners are essentially storytellers at heart, who believe in truth-by-narrative, but sometimes make what they think of as concessions to empiricist insecurities by including data and graphs.

These two Great Playbooks are in an eternal cosmic dance with each other.

It should be obvious that the former produces scalable, generalizable, somewhat universal solution templates for widespread problems, while the latter produces non-scalable, bespoke, hard-to-generalize solutions for specific situations.

Peak Positioning School

Great Truths are eternal and unfalsifiable. Great Playbooks never go away, they are simply rewritten for new eras through cycles of prominence and obscurity.

That doesn’t mean that all Great Truths are equally true at all times. When a Great Truth and its associated Great Playbook get too powerful, internal contradictions start to blow up. Then you get a collapse and recession, during which the opposed Great Truth rises from its own recession. So you have 2 yin-yang cycles of peaks and troughs.

The Positioning school has been on the ascendant for about 400 years, with a particularly rapid rise to near-total dominance in the second half of the 20th century. The People school, on the other hand, has been in recession for nearly as long, and is due for a resurgence.

Peak Positioning was probably sometime between 2001 and 2015. The output of the Positioning school has declined in quality if not quantity. It hasn’t had truly fresh big ideas to offer since the late 90s, and is running largely on momentum and fumes at this point.

The Lay of the Land

By my estimate, about 80% of the consulting industry (in terms of revenue and profits, but not headcount) is aligned formally or informally with the Positioning school.

It comprises relatively larger firms and institutions, including the Big 3 consulting firms (McKinsey, Bain, BCG), the Romulan Empire, and Mordor. It scales all the way down to firms of a couple of hundred. Many indie consultants who are alums of larger organizations also run the Positioning school playbook.

The heart of the Positioning world is Harvard Business School, and the Pope of sorts is Michael Porter. Other leading intellectuals of the Positioning school include Emperor Palpatine, and Saruman. Institutionally, it is organized as what Kiechel calls a literary-industrial complex, comprising prestigious publications, conferences, and a busy book-producing cottage industry to document the never ending stream of structuralist models of the world. Positioning School people wear expensive suits and fly around in business class.

The People school is much more of a fragmented grab-bag world of small firms and indie consultants. Instead of a single heart, it has a distributed presence all over the world, with small, volunteer-staffed outposts in Silicon Valley, the University of Toronto, and Tatooine. Instead of a Pope, it has dozens of contending thought leaders, such as Karl Weick, Gareth Morgan, Albus Dumbledore, Yoda, and Lao Tze.

Though we have a few of our people at Positioning School strongholds, such as Clay Christensen at Harvard, institutionally the People school world comprises a shadowy network of personal relationships, stealthy organizations such as the Order of the Yak, and a vast, hidden warren of emails lists, slacks, twitter conversations, and messaging groups. We typically wear Henleys, rarely fly business class, and often orienteer cross-country to get from Point A to Point B.

Instead of a literary-industrial complex, we have something more like a background tradition of evolving oral history with many more contending ideas and no clear canon at the core. To quote from my review of Kiechel’s book:

[Lords of Strategy] quotes one study which found that 105 experts polled for “key ideas” from the [People] school produced 146 candidates, of which 106 were unique. With that much dissent, the “People” school doesn’t stand a chance in the commercial marketplace for retail business ideas (which is why, by my reasoning, it is automatically more valuable, since fewer people understand the ideas). By contrast, in the “Positioning” school, there are perhaps a couple of dozen key ideas that everybody agrees are important, which every MBA learns, and most non-MBA managers eventually learn through osmosis.

I wrote that in 2010, when the tide was just starting to turn in favor of the People school (which Kiechel notes in his book).

Springtime is coming for the People school, and winter for the Positioning school. So congrats, you picked the right side at the right time.

Be wary though, of getting all tribal about it. Being a consultant is about staying in a state of dynamic balance, evolving your own game with the shifting balance of power between Great Truths and Great Playbooks.

The Positioning school may be headed for an extended recession, but there will still be times when its Great Truth will prevail.

The People school may be ascendant and headed for dominance in the post-digital world, but there will still be times when its Great Truth will fail.

Think of this as the difference between riding a bicycle and sailing a sailboat. A bicycle in a state of balance is upright except when taking corners. But a sailboat might lean strongly in one direction or the other, depending on the direction of the prevailing wind, and the direction you need to go.

As this war of ideas unfolds, you want to be a sailboat, not a bicycle.