The Guillermo. The Infrastructure Guy You Need To Make Knowledge Work.
On the role that sits between expertise and communication.
I’m in love with the film (okay, the series is also pretty good) What We Do in the Shadows. Not only because the level of absurdism is exactly my kind of thing (I’m an old Douglas Adams fan) but also because there’s a character there, a wonderful character: Guillermo de la Cruz, officially a familiar. A vampire’s servant. His job: dispose of bodies, source blood, and explain to creatures who are 400 years old how Uber Eats works.
But that’s not even the main thing.
His actual task and role (let’s not get into motivation) is to build an infrastructure around immortal vampires so they can interact with the modern world (surviving and satisfying their bloody and social thirst), and for the modern world to interact with them in return.
He’s not a vampire (though he desperately wants to be!) and no longer quite an ordinary human either. He exists between two worlds, and that’s why he’s the only one who can build something that works in both.
The vampires think he serves them. In reality, he’s the only reason they function in the modern world at all.
Expert organizations — research institutes, think tanks, cultural institutions — are not populated by vampires. Mostly. But they have their own version of Guillermo.
A person between the world of expertise and the world of communication, between what the organization knows and how that knowledge can exist on the outside.
And I’m one of them. I’m one of the Guillermos.
What does Guillermo actually do?
In the film and the series, Guillermo is a quiet, downtrodden figure. But me and professionals like me — we’re different Guillermos.
We’re Guillermos who chose this role consciously. The role is between experts, researchers, scientists, the communications department, the PR people, and the audiences.
So what does Guillermo do in our organization—an organization focused on the expert side of integrating Russian-speaking residents in Finland? An organization that, on the one hand, produces research, expertise, recommendations, and solutions for the Finnish state and public institutions — to help them better understand who Russian language speakers in Finland actually are, in all their complexity — and, on the other hand, runs projects and initiatives that support onboarding and integration into Finnish society.
For example, Guillermo builds a media platform — an actual media outlet for a linguistic minority — not as a standalone project, but as part of a system to support research and return research back to the very audience it’s about.
Then, Guillermo, together with the experts, builds a system for publishing interactive research reports instead of endless PDFs — to improve indexing and depth of engagement and to position the organization as an innovative expert structure.
Guillermo, catching his breath, spends several years connecting the organization’s websites for different target audiences into a coherent whole and helps launch three newsletters in different languages.
And Guillermo doesn’t stop there — he builds out an events system that fits within the organization’s broader communications, designed to engage both institutions and the general public.
And then he connects all of it.
What does Guillermo's work look like inside the organization?
On the one hand, his job is to bring experts into this new world. Not just explain where things go and how the CMS works, but to actually influence the structure of the final knowledge products, their format, sometimes their tone and language.
On the other hand, constant work with the people responsible for communications: helping them get to grips with new tools, developing channels, and building processes together.
And everywhere, Guillermo is a little bit of an impostor. And everywhere there is friction.
His mission is to exist between systems that would otherwise struggle to talk to each other, to create the kind of project, technical, and communications infrastructure where the knowledge and expertise of the vampires experts and researchers doesn’t just exist, but becomes accessible and travels.
Through channels, formats, platforms, and languages. All of it, so it can be engaging, accessible, and useful.
Guillermo is a servant. A servant of the goals and mission of an expert organization that wants its accumulated knowledge to actually make a difference.
The Seven Principles of Guillermo — seven principles for building infrastructure
1. Learning goes both ways
This position requires constant movement in both directions. Guillermo doesn’t just show up with nice slides explaining how everything should work from now on — he also spends hours explaining how the new CMS works, why the newsletter exists, and how the newsletter actually functions.
And at the same time, he is deep in the other direction: learning how the research is structured, how partner organizations operate, what the expertise actually produces.
Guillermo is a citizen of two worlds. And in both of them he’s, well... Guillermo.
2. Challenge and being challenged are part of the job
People always push back on Guillermo. And rightly so.
He disrupts established workflows and asks uncomfortable questions. What are you planning to do with this PDF? How are you planning to reach people from immigrant backgrounds with teenagers at home? What do we do with the data showing low levels of trust in Finnish media among people with immigrant backgrounds?
And then there are the other kind: why is the conference title three lines long if nobody’s going to read it, why does communications get brought in after the fact instead of before, can we let go of a little bit of expert control if that’s what it takes for anyone to actually hear us?
It’s constant advocacy, argumentation, legitimisation. And sometimes Guillermo is wrong. When that happens, he accepts it — and rebuilds. Being open to challenge in both directions isn’t a vulnerability.
It’s just part of Guillermo’s life.
3. Collecting signals from everyone
The expert owns the expertise. The communications person arranges communications. The audience deals with whatever actually reaches them.
Guillermo’s job is to collect signals from everyone: what the audience is saying, what the stakeholders think, what the researchers and experts are struggling with and hoping for, and what isn’t working on the communications side. Collecting that data, analyzing it, synthesizing it. Guillermo needs to be good at this.
4. Consistency
The strongest temptation in this position is to constantly change things. New tool, new format, new approach.
Guillermo has to know that changes don’t work immediately, that any new elements of infrastructure need time. A newsletter needs months to find its audience. A CMS needs six months to become a habit. To understand whether something is working, you have to give it time.
5. Translate, don’t lecture
The quickest way to kill a conversation is to speak in technical language. Sometimes, the only way to explain how channels and platforms connect is to draw it on a piece of paper. Not because colleagues don’t understand — but because abstraction doesn’t work when what’s needed is a decision. Guillermo’s job is to translate, not to educate.
6. Protecting everyone from everyone
The contractor building your website speaks their own language, usually calibrated for entirely different clients — business, all of that. The expert speaks their own language. Management speaks the language of strategy, deadlines, and budgets.
And here Guillermo’s job isn’t just to translate and connect — it’s to protect the organization’s interests in front of the contractor, protect the contractor from the organization’s chaos, and make sure the actual content doesn’t get lost somewhere in the middle.
7. Building legitimacy — permanently
Nobody is going to explain on Guillermo’s behalf why he’s needed. Eventually, everyone will accept it and believe in it. But at the beginning, the experts see someone who overcomplicates their process and flattens their expertise by forcing it into templates. The communications people see a tech person sticking their nose where it doesn’t belong. The IT specialists think he’s a strange and not particularly sharp marketer. Management sees a line item without an obvious result tomorrow.
Legitimacy in this position isn’t given — it’s built constantly, through results, through the language Guillermo uses to describe his own work, through the ability to show the connection between what he does and what the organization actually cares about. This isn’t self-promotion. It’s the condition for the function’s survival.
Final thought
Did it seem like Guillermo was a therapeutic device — a way to make it easier to talk about the in-between nature of this role without it getting too personal? You weren’t imagining it.
This role often has no name. It’s hard to find a professional community around it; there are almost no professional events for it, and no ready-made job description is available anywhere. But it exists, and it needs to exist — in every expert organization that is trying to make its knowledge go somewhere and change something.
