A wardrobe of hats

There's a simplified version of my job that's easy to describe: a client shares a brief and I deliver against it.

But that's very rarely how the work plays out or how it feels. Lately I've been thinking about why.

An extension of the team, not a supplier to it

When I work with a client, I don't think of myself as someone brought in to execute a task list. I think of myself as an extension of their team, their department and their business. That distinction really matters.

A supplier delivers what's asked for. A team member notices what wasn't asked for, because they're close enough to the work to see it.

The value of standing outside

There's a particular kind of usefulness that comes from being in an organisation but not fully of it. I sit close enough to understand the pressures, the history, the politics, but far enough back to see the whole shape of something a busy internal team often can't.

That distance is where a lot of the real value lives. I can spot the gaps: in knowledge, in process, in systems. Not because anyone's failing, but because gaps are hard to see from inside the day-to-day.

And spotting them is only the start. The more useful part is what comes next, which is recommending how to close them, explaining why it's worth doing, and identifying the metrics that will show the value once it's fixed. Put simply: I can help clients act on things they didn't know they needed.

The part I love most

This is where the work gets genuinely enjoyable for me, having the ability to move between hats. Consultant one day, strategist the next, designer after that, trusted expert throughout. Each hat brings a different lens, and switching between them is how a business gets stronger and more mature over time. It's rarely one discipline doing the heavy lifting; it's the blend.

A recent example

I recently put this into practice with a client by introducing the idea of a design system. It wasn’t something on their radar, but I could see it would help put them in a far stronger position ahead of an upcoming digital project.

It started with a conversation, but it needed more than that to land. So, I wrote a business case: the reasoning, the risks of not doing it, the value it would unlock. Not a nice-to-have pitch, but a considered argument for why this mattered now.

That business case did its job. I'm now leading the build of the design system itself, laying the groundwork so the client is set up to move into their next digital project with consistency, speed, and confidence already built in, rather than retrofitted under pressure later.

Why this is the work

Projects like this are why I don't think of my role as brief delivery. A brief is a starting point, not a ceiling. The real value for me, and hopefully for the businesses I work with, is in everything that happens around it: the noticing, the recommending, the discussion for what matters, and then doing the work to make it real.

If your team could use an extra pair of hands, and the odd hat, I'm just a message away.