When multiple organisations work together to deliver essential services, the biggest challenges often aren’t technical problems, they’re communication breakdowns.
We see this time and again: competent teams, good intentions, but persistent operational issues that seem impossible to resolve.
The frustration is real. Council officers chase updates on faults that appear to be taking forever to fix. Technical teams work hard to resolve issues but feel like their efforts go unrecognised. Service providers implement solutions that somehow don’t translate into improved customer experiences.
Sound familiar?
The Real Problem Hiding in Plain Sight
Recently, we’ve been working as an independent facilitator with several councils and their charge point operator, helping to identify why seemingly straightforward processes kept breaking down. What we discovered wasn’t incompetence or lack of effort, it was something much more subtle and systemic.
Consider the seemingly simple process of fault reporting and resolution. On the surface, it appears straightforward: a problem is identified, reported, assigned, and fixed. In practice, however, this process involves multiple systems, different organisational priorities, varying contractual obligations, and several handoff points where critical information can be lost or delayed.
Here’s what we found was really happening:
The Same Information, Across Different Systems:
Teams were entering identical data into separate platforms because each organisation had optimised for their own internal processes without considering the broader ecosystem.
Manual Integration Gaps: Critical information was getting lost during manual handoffs between systems, leading to delays that appeared as poor performance but were actually communication failures.
Invisible Work: Maintenance teams were making site visits without councils knowing, missing opportunities for additional repairs and creating unnecessary repeat journeys to remote locations.
The SLA Illusion: Faults appeared to be resolved within service level agreements on one system while councils saw completely different timescales on theirs, creating confusion and eroding trust.
Why Internal Teams Can’t See It
The most telling discovery was that none of these issues were visible to the individual organisations involved. Each team was performing well within their own metrics and processes. The problems only became apparent when viewing the entire system from an external perspective.
This is the curse of organisational silos. When you’re inside the system, you can only see your piece of it. Council officers see delayed responses to fault reports.
Technical teams see unclear problem descriptions that slow diagnosis. Service providers see constantly changing contact details and communication preferences.
Everyone is frustrated, but nobody can see the whole picture.
The Cost of Poor Collaboration
These communication breakdowns have real consequences:
Wasted Resources: Teams duplicate effort, make unnecessary journeys, and spend time chasing information that should be readily available.
Eroded Trust: When councils can’t get clear updates on service issues, they lose confidence in their service providers. When technical teams receive incomplete fault reports, they become defensive about response times.
Poor Customer Experience: Ultimately, residents and service users bear the cost through longer fault resolution times and less reliable services.
Missed Opportunities: Without proper coordination, routine maintenance visits become single-purpose trips instead of opportunities to address multiple issues efficiently.
The Pattern We Keep Seeing
What’s particularly concerning is how consistent this pattern is across different sectors and organisations. Whether it’s EV charging infrastructure, building maintenance, healthcare, or IT support, the same fundamental issues appear:
Information Silos: Critical data trapped within individual systems
Handoff Failures: Problems occurring during transfers between teams or organisations
Assumption Gaps: Each party assuming others have information they don’t actually possess
Defensive Positioning: Teams explaining why problems aren’t their fault rather than collaborating on solutions.
The organisations involved are often high-performing individually, but collectively they’re trapped in cycles of inefficiency that nobody can see how to escape.
Why Standard Solutions Don’t Work
The typical response to these challenges is often counterproductive:
More Meetings: Adding regular review meetings without changing underlying communication processes just creates more opportunities for misalignment.
Better Technology: Implementing new systems without addressing information flow problems often just creates an additional silo.
Clearer Contracts: More detailed service level agreements can actually make collaboration harder if they encourage defensive behaviour rather than joint problem-solving.
Process Documentation: Creating comprehensive procedures that nobody has time to read or update rarely improves day-to-day operations.
The Missing Ingredient
What these struggling multi-stakeholder operations need isn’t more complexity – it’s someone who can see the whole system and help connect the dots. But this requires more than just technical analysis, it needs facilitation with both kindness and courage.
The Kindness Component: Understanding that everyone is genuinely trying to do their best within their constraints. Council officers aren’t being deliberately difficult when they chase for updates, they’re facing pressure from residents and elected members.
Technical teams aren’t being obstructive when they ask for more detailed fault reports – they’re trying to solve problems efficiently.
The Challenge Component: Sometimes, real progress requires gently but firmly challenging situations where transparency is lacking. We’ve all seen it all, teams explaining away persistent problems rather than acknowledging them, or presenting overly optimistic timescales to avoid difficult conversations.
As the old saying goes, honesty is the best policy. When organisations spend energy covering their tracks rather than fixing underlying issues, everyone loses. The residents get poor service, the teams get frustrated, and the problems just get worse over time.
An effective facilitator needs to create a safe space where people can be honest about what’s not working, while also being willing to ask the uncomfortable questions that internal teams might shy away from:
• Why does the same information need to be entered into different systems?
• What actually happens during that “manual integration” between platforms?
• How can we ensure councils receive real-time updates without overwhelming busy technical teams?
• What would change if everyone could see the same information at the same time?
• And sometimes: “Help me understand why this issue keeps recurring despite the efforts we’ve discussed?”
The answers often reveal not individual incompetence, but systemic issues that have evolved over time as each organisation optimised for their own internal processes, and occasionally, blind spots that people have become so accustomed to that they’ve stopped seeing them.
A Different Approach Is Possible
The good news is that these problems are solvable, and often more quickly than you might think. But it requires a fundamentally different approach: one that starts with understanding the whole system rather than trying to fix individual parts.
In our experience, the technical expertise and goodwill required for solutions usually already exists within the stakeholder organisations. It just needs to be properly channeled and coordinated.
The question isn’t whether these communication breakdowns can be fixed. It’s whether organisations are ready to try a different approach to fixing them.
In my next blog, we’ll share how quick wins through better communication can transform multi-stakeholder operations in just a few weeks, and the practical steps that make it possible.
