The Art of Gig, Volume 1

Here is the big idea to keep in mind: About 90% of your effectiveness as a sparring partner derives from the depth of your appreciative worldview, developed and expressed through critical reading, writing, podcasts, and talks. Only about 10% depends on your in-session sparring skills. In this, sparring skill is similar to negotiation skill. In nego

Indie consultants naturally fit in where the capability gap is either small enough and oddly-shaped enough to be filled by a few individually contracted people, or where the gap is large, but can be filled by a fairly generic type of labor without the help of a labor-aggregating counterparty. The four response regimes of consulting

the problems external consultants solve always fall into two basic buckets: insufficient systematic confidence and insufficient systematic doubt.

These two loops—both of which are metacognitive OODA loops with the sparring serving as an orientation activity for both parties—are at the heart of sparring. Where this beautiful symmetry breaks down is in the relative value of the two loops. The client’s loop passes through the real world. The sparring partner’s loop passes through the adjacent-p

Way back in 2009, Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void called this the “Sex and Cash” theory.1 The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the assignment covers both bases, but not often.

They are what you might call “20% beef” where the starting point is rejecting some core sacred-cow axiom of a prevailing orthodoxy and then building something new and interesting on that foundation of principled dissent based on additional ideas and novel elements.

Create choices, not recommendations.

The Explorer is a client who wants to build capacity for systematic doubt at an outer-world locus. They do this by constantly considering possibilities, alternative perspectives, and refactorings of worldviews. They tend to hire a sparring partner type of consultant who can constantly stress test their thinking and actions, and undermine their assu

This is the divide between the Positioning and People schools of consulting. The essential difference between the two schools 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 p

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 skills 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.