A consigliere is a trusted advisor. Not a freelancer you hire for a task. Not a consultant who hands you a report and disappears. A consigliere is the person in your corner who sees the whole picture, speaks honestly, and stays. The relationship is built on trust, continuity, and judgment. That's what I do with technology.
Most people's experience with tech support looks something like this: something breaks, you call a stranger, they fix it (or try to), and you never hear from them again until the next thing breaks. The interaction is transactional. The person helping you doesn't know your name, your situation, or your comfort level. They just want to close the ticket.
I spent thirty years inside that model, working in higher education technology support. And I spent most of those years quietly doing it differently. I never called the people I helped "users." I never made them feel dumb for not knowing something. I never sent a bulleted list of instructions and called it support. Instead, I sat with people. I learned how they worked. I walked them through things in a way that left them more confident than when they arrived. And I built relationships that meant they'd come back before a small frustration became a crisis.
The question that drove everything was never what's wrong with your computer? It was what do you need, and how can I help you feel confident getting there?
Simon Sinek wrote that people don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it. My why has always been the same: I believe that the person sitting across from me matters more than the technology they came in to fix. The technology is the reason for the appointment. The person is the reason for the work.
These essays explore what that philosophy looks like in practice. The methodology behind relational technology support. The small moments in a consultation that nobody trains you for. The institutional friction of caring too much inside a system that measures the wrong things. And the vision for what comes next: a practice built on trust instead of tickets, where the people I help are people I've chosen to serve.
If any of this resonates, you're in the right place.
- Chris Powell
