Book excerpts - Ch2(E17): Minding the GAP Through the Cracks of Drama.

"Identifying the Invisible: Pinpointing Lacunas in Our Progress"

"We know something is wrong, but we can't put our finger on it."

I was recently invited to explain Things To Be Done to a group of innovators, currently working on introducing a new business process.

The project was led by two colleagues and sparked the curiosity and interest of several other colleagues who expressed a desire to join. But the work was not moving forward as expected, and outcomes didn't really move the needle toward progress.

In a preliminary talk with one of the leading innovators, she told me that the collaborators are great; they are motivated, experienced, and interested in helping. But, of course, they all had their time constraints, so the work sessions were scheduled months ahead and in distanced intervals so they won't burden anyone's calendar.

"If things are so great, why you're frustrated?" I asked.

"I see it's not going as fast as it should, but I can't put my finger where the problem is. We meet, talk, and assign tasks, and not much happens," She answered.

Obviously, there was a lacuna in the operation that prevented it from progressing towards the imagined prosperities. But the problem wasn't in underlining the fact that there is a lacuna - but rather highlighting what lacuna or lacunas we were dealing with precisely, what's our approach (tactics and methods) for attending to them, and what's our capacity for resolving critical lacunas.

Now that we've acknowledged their presence, we had to quickly and effectively highlight them, articulate them, and attend to them. Once our lacuna-related acts were more explicit, they would be less disruptive to our progress.

We agreed that I would join the next meeting and use the GAP sketch to seek lacunas.