Dr. Stephanie Moore nominated me to post a book a day on Twitter and my selection today was Flawless Consulting: A guide to getting your expertise used. I’ll link to the 2nd edition of the book as used copies of this older edition cover much of the same ground as the newest edition at a fraction of the price. We were assigned this text in my graduate program in Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University, and I used it as required reading in a consulting skills for designers course I taught at Old Dominion University. I plan to revisit some of the book’s themes in Designers for Learning’s upcoming Digital Inclusion Challenge where we’re setting up an experience for designers to seek out stakeholders who want to improve the access of their services/products for patrons with low digital literacy skills. We hoped to launch the free self-directed service learning experience last fall, but we’ve pushed things back as we migrate to a new LMS … more on that later.
Maybe it’s my background in the business world, but I think consulting skills are among the most important skills a designer can possess. Our role always involves working with a range of stakeholders, and (as the title of this book suggests) getting our expertise used is crucial to the job. Flawless Consulting does a good job of not only framing the key skills but also walking through the relationship, including preparing for the first meeting, strategies for engagement, “contracting,” dealing with resistance, ethics, etc.