Not the obvious ones. The quieter spaces where something is missing, but the system still appears to function. Where people are busy, well intentioned, and doing their best, while quietly compensating for something nobody has named.
One of those gaps became very clear in a process I was asked to spend some time with recently.
The business had done what it believed was the responsible thing. Time and care had gone into producing a detailed specification internally. Requirements were thought through. Edge cases captured. Decisions signed off. On paper, it looked solid.
And yet, the same questions kept resurfacing. Clarifications. Reinterpretations. Small misunderstandings that did not feel serious enough to escalate, but persistent enough to slow things down. Nothing dramatic. Just enough friction to make the work heavier than it needed to be.
It would have been easy to pin that on execution. Or communication. Or individuals not reading closely enough. That is usually where these conversations drift.
But sitting with it for a while, something else felt off.
The specification was doing its job inside the business. It created confidence. It reduced perceived risk. It allowed decisions to move forward. Once it crossed the boundary to the delivery team, though, it became something different. A document to interpret. To infer from. To work around.
No one had failed. The gap sat between contexts.
Raising this was uncomfortable. The process technically worked. Questioning it risked sounding critical, or like I was adding complexity where none was needed. There was a moment where I wondered whether it was better to leave it alone.
Instead, we slowed things down.
Rather than refining the spec again, we brought business stakeholders and the delivery team together to create a shared story map. Not as a replacement artefact, but as a way to see the work together. To talk through intent, not just output.
What changed was not the level of detail. It was the nature of the conversation.
Questions shifted. From “is this in scope” to “what problem is this actually solving”. Assumptions surfaced that had never been written down, mostly because nobody realised they were assumptions. There were pauses where confidence had previously filled the space.
It was awkward at first. Then noticeably lighter.
Looking back, it was clear how much of the earlier friction had been misplaced. People had been compensating for a system that asked them to guess, while appearing to offer certainty. When that guesswork created tension, it was easy to attach it to people rather than the structure shaping their choices.
Being in the middle of that kind of gap is not always comfortable for me either. There is a pull to move quickly. To translate discomfort into an answer, a tool, a decision. Sitting with uncertainty can feel risky, especially when others are looking for reassurance.
I am still learning when to pause and when to push. When naming the gap is enough, and when it needs something more tangible to move.
What I keep noticing is this. When gaps are ignored, friction gets blamed. When they are explored, responsibility often moves away from people and back to the system they are operating within.
If you are working inside a process that technically functions but feels wrong, you are probably not imagining it. And you are unlikely to be the problem.
If it would help to spend time looking at a gap before deciding what to do about it, that is the work I tend to sit in. You can get in touch through the site if talking it through would be useful.