Intro

Introduction - Everyone Agreed

HarborView Services is a small-to-mid-sized organisation with an internal IT team that exists to “just make things work.”

Feature requests arrive constantly: - hallway conversations - follow-up emails - meeting notes that say “we discussed this last month”

Most of them sound reasonable. Many of them start with, “Can we just add a button?”

This case study follows one very normal request through three versions of the same reality.

• Part I shows what happens when agreement is declared early and treated as alignment. Everyone nods. Work moves fast. Nothing improves.
• Part II shows what happens when the same problem is handled professionally - with meetings, documents, and approvals - but without shared meaning. The failure is quieter, slower, and more expensive.
• Part III shows what changes when the team pauses long enough to describe the problem plainly, without solving it, defending it, or smoothing it over.

Nothing here is exaggerated. Nothing here is unusual.

If this feels familiar, that’s the point.