I received some feedback from Monday’s email about being of service, and I asked to share it because it brings up another really great aspect of being any sort of expert or mentor:
“Food for thought but I always thought of SMEs as being ones to put guardrails on things; what’s fun about working with them is that they’re also excited about solving problems like I am but have also been burned enough times to know what not to do. I also love the rubber duck effect that happens when someone is in tune with you when solving a problem.
I feel like iterations are a granted fact of life but SMEs greatly reduce the number of iterations to success.”
Thank you, RC!
I’d originally focused on SMEs and consultants being helpful for answering questions and steering efforts, but this point about guardrails is even more valuable.
Experience isn’t just knowing the right way to do something—it’s also having tried a bunch of the wrong ways, getting a few cuts and a bruised ego, and digesting those lessons well enough you can talk about them to others.
Note I’m not talking about genuine safety concerns and collective industry understandings here—those are a more serious topic to address on a different day.
This is the simple stuff you can laugh about or roll your eyes at later, like running a bunch of wind tunnel configurations and later realizing you didn’t get enough “control” runs to actually pull out the data differences you cared about. Hurts in the moment, but you’ll definitely avoid doing that next time!
A SME’s ability to “reduce the number of iterations to success” is so valuable. They’ve already done those iterations before, and now they can share those lessons with you and save you the time and headache.
This is similar to the value of a consultant, even in just a part-time advisory role. You’re literally paying for those iterations they’ve already been through and the burns they’ve already healed over.
It’s the classic story of calling a plumber and paying $300 for a 10-minute fix: you paid $5 for the part, and $295 for them to know how to fix your problem. And, how NOT to fix it, or at least not break everything around in the process.
Writing this, I’m realizing it’s what makes any sort of service pricing tough to pin down. How do you quantify all those times you tried something, messed up, and can now apply that learning to your current client’s problem? How do you attach a monetary value to the effort that they won’t have to go through, because you can already see it coming and head it off in advance?
Something for me to think over. (And you too maybe, if it’s relevant.)
Anyways, what I hope you take away is this: being of service doesn’t mean you have to provide the service, but it also means you don’t have to know the exact right answer all the time, every time.
Sometimes it can be enough to have a whole bunch of wrong answers in your back pocket, and work together with your team to navigate through to the right one.