Neither Here Nor There, and Somehow That’s the Job

There was a meeting I will never forget.

I had been in my Technology Business Partner role for about a year. The room was full of senior stakeholders, all waiting for clarity on a programme that had, frankly, more questions than answers. Timelines were shifting. Priorities were contested. Every face in the room eventually turned toward me. I had nothing.

What happened next surprised me. I stopped waiting for clarity to arrive from somewhere above us, and I just started naming what I was seeing. “Here’s what we know. Here’s what we don’t. Here’s a first step that doesn’t require us to resolve all of it.” The room exhaled. We made a bit of progress.

I didn’t understand at the time why that worked.

What I did know was this: I had a gut feeling. I couldn’t fully name it. And even when I could name it, the existing process wasn’t built for it. The process was built for a different kind of problem, in a different time. So I did the thing anyway, a bit awkwardly, without a template for it.

That is, I’ve come to realise, a fairly accurate description of the BRM role most days.

The part nobody talks about

Here is something I want to be honest about, because I don’t see it said enough in BRM circles.

A lot of what we do is hard to quantify.

When the delivery team ships something, there is a thing. When the SLT decides on a strategy, there is a document, a slide, a moment someone can point to. When I do my job well, there is sometimes… a shift in a conversation. A relationship that didn’t exist six months ago, now does. A stakeholder who used to escalate directly to the top now calls me first. Two teams who used to fire emails at each other and call it communication now occasionally sit in the same room and mean it.

I can trace the thread back to a meeting, sometimes to a specific thing I said, but I cannot hand you a deliverable. I cannot point at a wall and say: yes, I built that.

Some days I wonder.

The delivery team gets the demo. The SLT gets the announcement. I get the quiet knowledge that today’s conversation probably wouldn’t have happened a year ago, and that I was somewhere in the middle of it. Probably. Maybe?

That’s not nothing, but it doesn’t feel very sexy.

Why the room is so hard to read

During McKinsey Forward, I picked up something called the APR framework: Awareness, Pause, Reframe. The idea is to apply it in difficult situations to shift your mindset to a more adaptable one. I still use it.

The instinct, when a room goes uncomfortable, is to fill the silence with an answer. To solve. To find the answer quickly, because uncertainty is uncomfortable and most of us are trained to resolve it fast. APR asks you to do something harder: first become aware of what you’re feeling and what’s pulling you. Then pause, genuinely, rather than just waiting for your turn to speak. Then reframe, find a different angle on the situation, one that might open up options that your first instinct closed off.

I find this useful not just as a personal practice, but as a way of understanding what goes wrong in rooms when ambiguity arrives.

Because people in those rooms are operating from very different instincts. James Brett’s work on digital leadership development, drawing on Bill Joiner’s Leadership Agility research, gave me a framework for what I kept witnessing. Joiner identifies stages of development that map almost exactly onto the dynamics I was experiencing. Two in particular kept showing up.

The first, which Joiner calls the Expert stage, describes colleagues who react to uncertainty by going deeper into what they know. Uncertainty hits and they dig. They go deeper into the domain, which is what got them here, and which is completely rational. And often they’re right. But sometimes the problem isn’t a technical puzzle. Sometimes it’s a political one, or a relational one, or an “everyone has agreed to pretend this isn’t happening” one. In those situations, the depth of expertise becomes almost an obstacle. The problem doesn’t fit the tool.

The second, the Achiever stage, describes colleagues who operate at a different level. The strategic ones are better at the big picture, and I mean that without irony. But the outcome they’re pointing toward still needs a number, a date, something a dashboard can track. When the problem is diffuse, when the value of what’s needed is real but refuses to land in a spreadsheet, they get uncomfortable too. They might frame it as a resourcing problem, or a governance problem, or a communication problem, because those at least have solutions with names.

Neither instinct is wrong. Both make complete sense given the role each person is playing.

But the BRM, if they’re doing the job properly, is often operating somewhere past both.

Not because we are more advanced (I want to be careful here, I genuinely mean that). Brett describes a third stage, the Catalyst, where the primary driver shifts from personal expertise or personal achievement toward enabling the success of others. That framing stopped me when I first read it. It is, almost word for word, what the BRM role asks of us. Our job requires us to hold the tension. To stay in the ambiguity rather than collapsing it prematurely into something manageable. To APR, if you like, while the rest of the room is in react mode.

It can feel like being fluent in two languages neither side knows the other is speaking.

The thing that’s hardest to admit

Some days I feel like I’m on the wrong side of both worlds.

Joiner’s research found that the vast majority of leaders operate at either the Expert or Achiever stage. Most of the rooms we walk into are populated by people whose instincts are wired toward certainty or toward ownership. Which is fine. But it does help explain why the BRM role can feel so lonely sometimes.

The Expert knows exactly what to do. Wrong or right, they are certain. They might not see how the decision lands three floors up, or six months later. But they are not confused about what they think, and certainty is at least a stable place to stand.

The Achiever is goal-oriented, strategic, building toward something visible. They can articulate what success looks like and they have a plan. Their plan might miss some of the political texture, sure. But it’s a plan, and a plan has edges you can hold.

The BRM, on a hard day, sits between them and feels neither. Not certain enough to be the Expert. Not outcome-ownable enough to be the Achiever. Facilitating something that may or may not land. Influencing a process whose results you will never fully be able to claim.

That’s the honest version.

But here is the thing about that kind of work. It builds something more enduring than a deliverable.

A strategy document can be revised or shelved. A product launch can fail. A reorg can undo a year’s worth of visible progress overnight. But the organisational relationships that a BRM has been quietly investing in, the trust built across boundaries, the stakeholders who now see technology as a partner rather than a service desk, the room that has learned to have a different kind of conversation, that stuff is genuinely hard to kill.

It survives reorganisations. It survives leadership changes. It survives bad quarters.

And I believe, on the days I can see it clearly, that navigating these environments is building something in me too. Thicker skin, maybe. Or a better relationship with not-knowing. The ability to sit in a room that has no resolution and not reach for a fake one.

I’m honestly not sure if that’s growth or just adaptation. Maybe there isn’t much difference.

Maybe both. Probably both.

The APR habit helps. Stop. Actually stop. Work out what the moment is asking for, not what my muscle memory wants to give it. Find the frame that opens options rather than closes them.

When it gets heavy, I go back to that meeting. I walked in with nothing. I just named the question clearly.

Sometimes that is enough. 

What about you? Do you have a way of staying grounded when the room wants clarity you don’t have?