From Breakdown to Breakthrough: The Power of Hearing Both Sides in IT Consultancy

two people back to back in disagreement and in need of IT consultancy

IT Consultancy – Keeping Things Human

Another productive session chalked up. One last sip of coffee, quick scan over the notes, aaand…”Save”.

Presenting Issues

Partner A describes a long-standing pattern of frustration: concerns have been raised repeatedly, but rarely seem to land, or are only ever addressed at surface level. They also express a sense that the day-to-day reality of the relationship is largely invisible to Partner B. They feel this has bred a quiet, accumulating resentment. This doesn’t result in anger, more a feeling of not being heard.

Partner B describes the opposite experience; that problems tend to arrive already in crisis, with little or no warning. The word “blindsided” was used several times during the session, and “stuff only landing on their lap once the damage was already done”. Partner B also expresses some frustration at having invested time and money without a clear sense of whether it’s actually solving anything, along with a degree of defensiveness at being asked to act on issues they didn’t know existed.

When pushed, both express a wish for things to be better. Neither believes the other is acting in bad faith.

Areas of Commonality

Despite the friction, both parties want broadly the same outcome: stability, trust, and a future they can each feel confident in. Both describe themselves as committed to making this work. Not because they have to, but because they believe in what they’ve built so far. Without prompting, both independently used versions of the phrase “I just want this to work.”

Recommendations moving forward

Continue joint sessions, with both parties given equal space to describe their experience without interruption or correction. Resist the urge to prescribe a fix before both perspectives have been fully heard. Revisit in four weeks.

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OK, so these aren’t notes from a couples’ counselling session, but they feasibly could be.

“Partner A” is an Operations Manager. “Partner B” is the Managing Director they report to. And this is an anonymised excerpt from a Discovery Session – aiming to facilitate, rather than fix, challenges expressed between two colleagues, who, somewhere along the line, had stopped having an honest conversation about their technology.

IT Consultancy – What’s Actually Involved

What a Discovery Session Actually Looks Like

It’s rarely one meeting. Usually it’s a short series — separate conversations with the people closest to the daily friction, and with the people holding the wider view, followed by a joint session once both have had the space to speak freely on their own.

Nobody’s taking sides. Nobody’s building a slide deck of “findings” to present back at people. The point is simpler than that: get an honest picture of where things actually stand, before a single technical recommendation gets made.

It’s slower than jumping straight to a fix. That’s deliberate.

IT Consultancy and the Power of Listening to Both Sides.

What Tends to Shift, Once People Listen

It’s very easy to walk into a negotiation with preconceived outcomes: to be told we were right, or to be “given the answers” – or both.

The same holds true when discussing technology; yet neither represents a long-term fix.

What we see instead, once both sides stop stating their case and start listening to the other one, is that the “problem”, isn’t the real issue. The real issue is almost always that nobody had asked both sides what they wanted the business to look like in a year, and then properly listened to the answer.

When people listen and understand, their perspective starts to take a more aerial view. When technology considerations form around ‘the bigger picture’, an IT service gets recognised as a business helper rather than “a person on the end of the phone who resets passwords.”

IT Consultancy – Keeping Things Human

Staying Human, in the Business of Building Something Technical.

As an IT company, the irony isn’t lost on us here. What we ultimately deliver is technology and almost by definition, a piece of technology asks a process to move from “organic” to becoming more structured, more automated, more digital…

Which is exactly why the conversation that occurs before the technology, matters as much as it does. A system shaped by only one perspective – either the one closest to the daily friction, or the one furthest from it – tends to look efficient on paper yet creates new friction in practice.

So, our actual recommendation, for a technology business, sits closer to staying human and present than it does to selling anything.

That’s the good stuff; less prescribing, more listening. Less “here’s your fix,” more “tell us both what’s actually going on” … letting the right technical answer follow from there, rather than the other way round.

Communication is key, understanding not only where you are going as a business, but including staff feedback and gaining insight from key stakeholders are all tools you can leverage.

Making business decisions isn’t easy; even experienced leaders get big calls wrong more often than you’d think. So, be critical, think outside the box and get advice.

IT Consultancy – Asking Better Questions

Good Open Questions to Ask

Closed questions get you closed answers. “Is the system working?” gets you a yes or a no, and usually the version of the truth someone thinks you want to hear. Open questions get you the real one.

A few worth having in your back pocket, whether you’re running a Discovery Session or just trying to have a more honest conversation with your own team:

To get the bigger picture “What would you want the business to look like in a year?”

To surface friction without putting anyone on the spot “Where do things tend to slow down, or go wrong?”

To get at what hasn’t been said yet “What haven’t you had a chance to raise?”

To find the common ground that’s easy to miss “What are we already agreed on, even if it doesn’t feel that way right now?”

To close constructively, rather than just diagnostically “What would ‘better’ actually look like from here?”

The question is only half the job, though. What you do with the answer matters more — resist the pull to jump straight to a fix the moment someone finishes speaking. Sit with it. Ask a follow-up instead.

IT Consultancy – Recognising the Signs

Signs It’s Time for a Discovery Session

Some patterns worth noticing:

The same concern keeps being raised, and keeps not quite landing.
Decisions about tools or process get made without the people using them day-to-day.
New technology gets bought, used half-heartedly, and quietly abandoned.
Conversations about “the system” always seem to end up being about something else.
Nobody’s acting in bad faith, and yet somehow, everyone feels a bit misunderstood.

None of these are signs of a bad team. They’re signs of a conversation that hasn’t happened yet.

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Computer Care sits in the room between the people living the daily reality of your business and the people holding its long-term vision – not to sell you a fix, but to help both sides hear each other properly before deciding what to build. For more insight into what we do and why we do it, do please read more about us