For three months now, I have been adjusting into a new identity. With my new job, I am now a consultant, a contractor and a service provider. I work for managing a product of testing services, and provide some of those services.
It's not my first time on this side of the table, but it's my first time on this side of the table knowing what I know now. 20 years ago when I was a senior consultant, I was far from senior. I was senior in a particular style of testing, driven to teach that style forward and learn as much as I could. And while I got to work with 30 something customers opening up new business of testing services back then, I was blessed with externally provided focus and bliss of ignorance.
I had a few reasons to stop being a consultant back then:
- Public speaking. I wanted to speak in public, and as a consultant your secondary agenda of sales was getting in the way. Not really for me, but in eyes of others. I got tired of explaining that I would not be able to go to my organization for sponsorship just so that I could speak, and that I was uncomfortable building that link when contents should drive the stage. I knew being in customer organizations for exactly the same work would change the story. And it did. And that mattered to me.
- Power structures.With customer and contractors, there is a distribution of power. When a major contractor in a multi-customer environment kicked out of steering group the testing representatives of two out of three organization citing "competitive secrets" and I was the only one allowed in room to block the play that was about to unfold, I learned a lesson: being in the customer organization was lending me power others lacked. Back then I had no counteracts, and I do now, having been in boardrooms as both a testing expert advising board members, and member of those boards.
Thus 20 years later, I knew what I was doing when I joined consulting to solve the problem of testing competences in testing services in scale. I knew consultancies are the place where this can be solved in scale. I knew the numbers are not on individual customers side, and scale means I need to serve many customers. I knew I needed to level up the testing services to become the testing services I had so much difficulty purchasing when I was on the customer side.
What I did not know is that the job of consulting would teach me about ethical stress. Because when you serve many yet invoice some, your life is a daily balancing with your sense of fairness. And you will feel the push of just working for one customer so that the overhead of context switching would not be on any of them. The teaching of ethics this particular organization offers adds to the stress. Working by the hour is an extra mental load.
It's not that I can't deal with it. It's just that it is so much more than it was before that it sticks out, and I need to label it:
Ethical stress is the continuous sense of having to balance the different perspectives.
If it takes me an hour to report hours, who should pay for that hour?
If I get interrupted with another customer while working for a different one, who pays for the reorientation time?
If I have to create a plan and actually have to follow that plan even though I know better, do I look worse even though I am better?
Having recognized this, I now use it to discuss no estimates in agile teams. Because ethical stress is the big thing estimating and following detailed hours brings to people in the team. It is an invisible motivation killer, impacting how we do the tasks to make them trackable rather than flow best way we know how.
Ethical stress costs us energy. And sometimes we are so focused on teaching the ethical part of things that we forget the stress part of the same.
