There is a scene in Ted Lasso built around one line: be curious, not judgmental. It is a dart-game speech in a fictional pub, and it is also the best IT support training ever aired. We mean that literally; we have built a help desk on it.
IT support is one of the few jobs where your customers arrive embarrassed. Someone clicked something, broke something, or cannot make the printer behave, and they already feel dumb about it. What your help desk does with that embarrassment determines what you find out, and when.
Judgment is the default posture of bad IT support
You know the voice. You clicked what? You typed your password where? Every sigh from a technician teaches the user a lesson, and the lesson is: hide things from IT. The person afraid of being scolded sits on the phishing click from Tuesday until Friday, and hands the attacker a four-day head start.
The intern who broke something quietly tries to fix it alone, and turns a ten-minute problem into a weekend one. Judgment does not prevent mistakes. It prevents reports of mistakes, which is catastrophically worse. In IT support, the information you do not receive is the incident you cannot stop.
Curiosity changes what people tell you
Run support the other way and watch what happens. Huh, interesting, when did it start doing that? What were you trying to get done? Show me the email. Curiosity treats the user as a witness to be interviewed instead of a suspect to be charged. Witnesses talk.
And in security, people telling you things fast is the entire ballgame. Nearly every incident retrospective includes the sentence “if we had known sooner.” CISA’s own guidance on cyber threats leans hard on early reporting for exactly this reason: speed of disclosure beats elegance of response almost every time.
The operational version of nice
This is not about being soft, and it is not a personality trait you hope your techs have. It is engineering. We make reporting a click one button. We thank people who report, publicly when they will tolerate it. We never, ever perform disappointment. The metric that matters is time-to-report, and kindness is how you compress it.
Small process choices carry most of the weight. A named human who answers instead of a ticket void. Plain-language follow-ups instead of status jargon. Closing the loop with what the fix was, so people learn instead of just waiting. None of this costs money. All of it changes what users tell your IT support desk the next time something feels off.
You can audit your own IT support for this in one afternoon. Read the last twenty tickets and count the apologies. Users apologizing for bothering the help desk is the tell: it means asking for help costs something social, and costs suppress demand. The goal is a desk people use early, not a desk people brace themselves to call.
Then look at what happens after a mistake. If your provider’s notes say “user error” and stop there, you are buying blame, not support. Our write-up on hiring for curiosity covers the staffing side of this: curious techs produce curious tickets, ones that end in causes rather than culprits.
What owners should ask their IT support provider
Ask how long the average user waits before reporting a security worry. Ask whether anyone has been made to feel stupid, and whether your provider could even tell. Ask what happens, step by step, when someone admits a phishing click. The answers reveal whether you have a fear-based desk or a curious one.
This philosophy runs through our managed IT support practice, and our FAQ covers how we structure it day to day. The bet is Lasso’s bet: relentless decency is a competitive strategy disguised as naivety. Years of running support desks this way has us convinced. Curious first, fixes second, judgment never. Better mornings, and measurably better security.
