Mind the Gap!
If you've ever taken the tube in London, you have heard that calm, assured (and slightly eerie) voice just as the doors open. It reminds you to mind the gap between the train and the platform.
Everyone hears it. Everyone steps over it. Things keep moving. Nobody owns the gap. It's just there. Acknowledged, warned about, navigated.
I've had that voice in my head a lot lately, and the consequences are considerably more expensive than a sprained ankle. Both are painful.
The map is not the territory
First of all who doesn’t love the London Underground map? It's beautiful. Colour-coded, logical, elegantly structured - a masterpiece of information design. It tells you exactly how to get to where you want go.
But also, the thing bears almost no resemblance to actual London. The distances? Wrong. Angles? Wrong. If you follow it literally, above ground, you’ll end up in the valleys of Wales.
The map is the strategy. It's clean and compelling and directionally correct. But the moment you step off the train and into the actual city, you need something else - an understanding of how the map translates to the ground beneath your feet.
Most organisations and leaders are brilliant at drawing the map. Fewer have roles, functions and systems to navigate the gap between it and reality.
What lives in the gap
Every seasoned London commuter knows things that aren't written. Walk on the left. Position yourself at the exact spot on the platform where the doors will open on your carriage (the one that will be kinda empty because of the short platform earlier) - not because anyone told you, but because you learned it, absorbed it, figured it out through repetition and the subtle social consequences of getting it wrong. Armpit in face whilst face is squashed against the door, anyone? Anyone?
The thing is - none of that is written down. There's no official guide to tell you which carriage puts you nearest the escalator at your destination, or which turning to take so you cut your walking. It's tribal knowledge. Lived knowledge. And it works, right up until it doesn't - until someone leaves, someone new arrives and has to learn it all from scratch, the hard way.
Organisations have exactly the same problem. Which teams need early warning before a decision lands? Which dependencies will cause a six-week delay if they surface in the wrong meeting? Which commitments look executable on a strategy doc but fall apart the moment they meet actual capacity? This knowledge is real and critical - and in most organisations, it lives nowhere official. No operating model. No documented rationale. No system that holds the logic of how work actually flows.
The goal of owning the gap isn't to be the person who holds all of this in their head. (Please, no). It's to build the thing that holds it instead - so the knowledge lives in the system.
Is your gap getting wider?
The Underground has some of the oldest infrastructure in the world. You can feel it - the narrow tunnels, the ancient rolling stock on certain lines, the signal failures that ripple across the entire network because one thing upstream went wrong.
When everything is connected, a gap in one place doesn't stay local, and is rarely contained. As organisations move to more skills-based-cross-functional teams, this can start to get ‘spenny.
Teams are leaner than they were five years ago. Strategic ambitions (particularly around technology and transformation) are much bigger. The speed at which commitments get made at the top of the house has accelerated, while the operational groundwork required to support those commitments takes time, diligence and sometimes even an overhaul.
The result? The gap is wider. And when something goes wrong in the middle, it cascades. A data quality problem that nobody owned breaks the experience the business spent a year building. A handoff that wasn't defined holds up release plans. A process that should have been automated eighteen months ago is still eating twenty hours a week of someone's time - someone who was supposed to be doing something else.
None of these are dramatic in isolation. Like a signal failure at Paddington, the disruption feels disproportionate to the cause. That's the nature of unmanaged gaps. They don't stay where they started.
This isn't a project management problem
When organisations feel the gap - when things are slipping, when strategy and execution aren't connecting - the instinct is often to add more oversight. More coordination. More status reporting, steering committees etc.
If not handled correctly, this can be the equivalent of adding more tube announcements - or yes, it closed that one at Waterloo, but what about the next train?
Project management is very valuable, and I’m of the opinion everyone needs to have this skill. But it solves a different problem. It keeps defined work on track. The gap I'm describing sits upstream of that - before the project starts, before the workstreams are named, before anyone has asked whether the infrastructure actually exists to support what's being committed to.
That requires different judgment. The ability to sit between strategic intent and operational reality, and translate in both directions. To look at a plan and say: this works on paper, but here's what happens when you actually try to get there. To surface a dependency before it becomes a delay. To push back on a commitment that isn't executable - calmly, with evidence, before it becomes someone's problem six months later. Not to say “we can’t”, but to show them Google Maps instead of the Northen line.
Most organisations don't have this as a formal function. They have talented people doing fragments of it, alongside other jobs, because they care enough to fill the space. Until the space gets too big, or those people run out of runway.
Owning the gap
Tube travellers encounter the same problems as everyone. But they don’t panic. They know the alternative routes. They know which line to switch to, which exit gets them closest, which direction to walk when they come up from underground. But here's the more interesting thing - that knowledge doesn't have to live only in their head. The good ones share it. They're the person in the group who says actually, if you change at Baker Street you'll save ten minutes and then everyone knows. They post it on Reddit. The knowledge moves from one person's experience into the group's system.
When the gap has a genuine owner in an organisation, you see something similar.
Commitments get pressure-tested against reality before they're made, not after they've slipped. Blockers surface before they become escalations. Decisions have documented rationale so when someone experienced moves on - the logic doesn't disappear with them. The operating model is the system. The system is the point.
The work is invisible when it's working, which is most of the time, because the problems it prevents are the ones nobody ever sees. But unlike the tribal knowledge version, where everything depends on one person knowing where to stand, this version survives. It scales. It doesn't need to be relearned from scratch every time someone new steps onto the platform.
So how do you actually close it?
Start with a diagnostic. Not a workshop, not a strategy offsite - just three honest questions.
1) Can you draw a line from your strategic objectives to the person accountable for making them operationally executable?
Not the person doing the delivery work. The person who owns the model connecting strategy to delivery. If that line doesn't exist, or leads to a job description that doesn't quite fit, that's your gap.
2) Where and when do your escalations come from?
If blockers surface later rather than earlier in the process, something upstream isn't working. A volume of escalations about the same things are the signal failures - by the time the announcement goes out, the disruption is already spreading.
3) And what happens when someone leaves?
If the answer involves a lot of institutional knowledge walking out the door, you don't have a system. You have a person. Those are not the same thing, and the difference matters enormously when the stakes are high.
Once you've diagnosed it, closing the gap is less complicated than it sounds but it does require a deliberate decision to treat it as a function, not a gap-fill. And that means building a system. Not a tool. Not a tracker. A blooming system. The tool is irrelevant. The discipline is everything.
That system has three parts, I think.
First, somewhere decisions live - an operating model that documents how work gets prioritised, what the intake process looks like, and what the criteria are for saying yes, no, or not yet. So anyone can find the logic, not just the person who built it and the other person they mentioned it to.
Second, somewhere dependencies are visible before they become blockers - a structured coordination rhythm where cross-functional handoffs get surfaced and owned explicitly, rather than discovered accidentally.
Third, a single point of oversight across the whole workflow. The Line Controller. I stress this is not someone who holds every decision or has to know every detail, or that is allowed to just hold everything in their head, but someone who can see the whole track. Who makes sure the handoffs happen, the right people are in the right conversations, and nothing drops between platforms.
This is what turns tribal knowledge into infrastructure.
Two questions worth sitting with
If you're a senior leader or owning a product release: when did you last ask (genuinely, not rhetorically) who is responsible for the layer between your strategy and your execution? Not the delivery teams. Not the project managers. The function that owns the operating model connecting them. The person who will know where the doors open, which platform we need, and what's actually between you and where you're trying to go. Is this person different for BAU than growth initiatives? Why and why not?
If you're someone who has spent your career in that space, navigating the spaghetti, translating the map, standing in the right place so everyone else doesn't have to figure it out themselves, and you've struggled to explain what you do: you're not doing too many things. You're doing one thing that most organisations haven't named yet. For what it’s worth I have spent years getting closer to the right language. But the journey is kind of the point.
Mind the gap isn't just a warning on a Tuesday morning commute. It's a structural question every organisation and team should be asking: what’s the distance between what it commits to, and what it actually ships?
Are you minding the gap?
Stand clear of the doors. Use all carriages, pleaase!
