A friend sent me a message this week that made me reassess several years' worth of things I'd mentally filed under helping out.
He described the consultancy I'd given him over the years.
My first reaction was roughly:
Consultancy?
So, naturally, I started digging.
I've been doing quite a lot of archaeology on my own work recently. Going back through old projects, looking at what I actually did, and occasionally discovering that something I dismissed as just a thing I helped with has a perfectly ordinary professional name.
This particular rabbit hole turned out to be quite deep.
The things I counted
I've always been quite good at counting the things I made.
For a while, I made the Marbleday poster every Friday for Pixel and Enderz.
That was easy to understand as work. There was a brief. There was a poster. People saw the poster.
I've made logos and other visual artefacts for The Queen's Hall, Narberth.
Again, easy.
Somebody needed something. I designed it. There was an artefact at the end that I could point at and say:
I made that.
Marblefest is the same. Every few months there is eventually a finished animation with my name attached to it.
But I've realised I've been much less inclined to count everything that happens before the thing exists.
The things I didn't count
Every Marblefest involves a lot of back and forth with Spooo, he has an idea. And sometimes quite a ridiculous idea.
We talk about it, pull it apart, add things, discard things and work out what might actually be possible.
I've described our working relationship before as:
He comes up with a crazy idea and I work out how we can make it happen.
I counted the animation as the work. I didn't really count the conversations that made the animation possible.
The same thing happened with Pixel.
When he started exploring NFTs and AI-generated imagery, he came to me because I'd already developed an interest. When we later explored making new artefacts for NFT's, Pixel approached me because of my interest in generative AI and knew my way around image editing.
Could the weird artefacts in AI-generated images be repaired? Could we make this stuff usable? What exactly were we doing with NFTs anyway?
We investigated it together.
At the time, I didn't think: Pixel is consulting me because I have knowledge that is useful to this problem.
I thought:
Ooh, interesting. Let's work this out.
Apparently, there's a pattern
Once I started looking for it, I kept finding it.
When Teddy built the old MSLA website, he knew how to build websites.
He didn't know the game.
I did.
So when he needed to understand how something worked, what something meant or what the people using the site would actually need, he asked me.
I thought I was helping Teddy with a website.
In reality, I was bringing domain knowledge to a technical project.
My friend Smurph has done the same thing.
When he was working on a mutual friends website, we talked about colour schemes and typography. I've helped people set up and use his !mycycle bot. Alongside Smurph and Nicolle, I help administer the Spoootown Discord, configure bots and moderate a community that now has 1,392 members.
Again, none of this arrived with a little badge saying:
CONGRATULATIONS! YOU ARE NOW CONSULTING.
It was just stuff that needed doing.
Then I remembered the organisations
This is where my I was just helping my friends theory starts to fall apart slightly.
There's Queen's Hall.
I've made things for them, but making the thing was only part of the job.
Before you can design something for somebody else, you have to understand what they're trying to achieve. You listen. You interpret ideas that aren't necessarily expressed in design language. You make choices, explain them, respond to feedback and turn all of that into something useful.
The finished design is the artefact.
The thinking that gets you there is something else.
And then there's WJEC.
I've contributed practitioner expertise to the development of their new Foundation qualifications.
They know qualifications.
I know what happens when qualifications meet actual learners in an actual classroom.
So they brought practitioners like me into the process.
And somehow, even that had gone into the mental filing cabinet as:
That WJEC thing I helped with.
At this point, the evidence was becoming slightly difficult to ignore.
What did I call it at the time?
Helping.
Giving someone my opinion.
Explaining something.
Looking over something.
Showing someone how something works.
Making a few suggestions.
Answering questions.
Working something out together.
The more I dug, the less this seemed to be about finding a handful of occasions when I'd accidentally been a consultant.
It was a pattern.
Someone knows I know something they don't, or can do something they can't, so they bring me into the problem. We work through it together.
Sometimes I make the final thing or maybe somebody else does.
Sometimes my contribution is knowing the audience, the technology or the subject.
Sometimes it's being able to stand somewhere between two of those things and translate.
The invisible bit
I'm not about to retrospectively declare every favour I've ever done for a friend a consultancy engagement.
That would be ridiculous.
But I do think I've spent years undervaluing a particular kind of work because it doesn't always leave an artefact behind.
I've counted the poster.
I've counted the logo.
I've counted the animation.
I've counted the website.
I've been much worse at counting the expertise that somebody came to me for in the first place.
The useful contribution isn't always the thing at the end.
Sometimes it's knowing which question to ask.
Sometimes it's spotting the bit that won't work.
Sometimes it's understanding the people who are eventually going to use it.
Sometimes it's translating between someone who understands the technology and someone who understands the context.
Sometimes it's showing somebody how to do something well enough that they don't need you next time.
And sometimes it's sitting with somebody saying:
Right. How on earth are we going to make this work?
I've spent quite a lot of time recently doing archaeology on my own work.
I keep finding things I'd labelled as hobbies, side projects, helping out or just something I did.
The work hasn't changed retrospectively.
I just have better words for it now.
And apparently, sometimes that word is consultancy.