Part III
Part III – The Disciplined Reset
The third attempt did not begin with a meeting.
This was unusual.
The Pause
After the second release failed quietly and expensively, HarborView did something radical.
They stopped.
No new tickets. No Phase 3. No vendor demos. No “quick wins”.
Someone — no one remembers who — said:
“Before we touch anything else, can we write down what the actual problem is?”
No one objected.
This was new.
Writing It Down (Uncomfortably)
The first draft was terrible.
It included: - causes - solutions - opinions - the word “obviously” twice
It was rejected.
The second draft was shorter. Still wrong. Still confident.
Rejected again.
By the third attempt, something changed.
The language became dull. Specific. Unimpressive.
People stopped explaining. They started describing.
What Finally Got Written
Not what they wanted to fix.
Not what they thought was broken.
Just this:
- where users get stuck
- what they can’t see
- what they have to guess
- what staff have to manually reconcile
No buttons. No workflows. No promises.
Just the mess, written plainly.
The Awkward Moment
As the problem took shape, alignment disappeared.
Operations realised the issue wasn’t speed — it was sequencing. IT realised it wasn’t UI — it was missing context. Compliance realised controls weren’t ignored — they were invisible. Leadership realised “visibility” meant four different things.
No one was aligned anymore.
This was progress.
Decisions, Finally
With the problem stable, decisions became possible.
Some ideas were rejected immediately. Others were deferred. One small change survived scrutiny.
It wasn’t exciting. It wasn’t fast. It didn’t solve everything.
But it solved the right thing.
The Outcome
The next release was quieter.
Fewer announcements. Fewer slides. Fewer surprises.
Support tickets dropped. Workarounds faded. No one called it a win.
Which is how you knew it worked.
The Difference
Nothing magical happened.
The team didn’t get smarter. The tools didn’t get better. The pressure didn’t disappear.
They just stopped pretending they agreed before they actually did.
End of Part III.