Everyone can see the gap

Imagine a leadership team a year into a strategy. The plan said one thing and the numbers say another. The executive can see it. The board can see it. The people doing the work have been able to see it for months, and have mostly stopped mentioning it. Nobody is confused, and the gap is exactly where it was.

This is the most common shape of the work we are asked into, and it surprises people how seldom the problem is information. They have the dashboard. They have the reports. What they lack is a way to act on what they already know.

Why a visible gap stays open.

A few reasons, usually tangled together. Closing it would mean someone admitting the plan was wrong, and that someone is often senior. The people nearest the gap have the least authority to change it. Everyone is busy delivering the version of the work that is already falling short, because stopping to fix it feels like falling further behind. And each group assumes another group owns the problem.

These are what organisations do under pressure, and they say little about the people involved. It is also why working harder so rarely helps: the effort goes into the existing shape of the work, and the existing shape is what produced the gap.

Seeing a gap and closing it are two different jobs. Most organisations are good at the first and stuck on the second.

Two jobs, in order.

So we separate them. First, diagnose: a few weeks of candid interviews and hard data, going where the gap actually lives, which is often somewhere other than where people said it was. What comes out is a written account in your own language: where the gap is, what is causing it, and what to do first.

Then navigate. The same people stay and work alongside yours while they close it. We coach in the moment, check what is working, and help the new habits hold until they no longer need holding.

The honest part.

Some gaps close quickly once they are named, and the relief in the room is almost physical. Others take a year, and they take it because the fix involves changing who decides what, which is slow for good reasons. We try to say early which kind it is.

Either way the first step is the same. Put the dashboard down for a week and work out why the gap will not move.

Paul Steele