A senior engineer at an industrial equipment repair and automation firm gave us four lines that are worth slowing down on.
"A customer requested a quotation and we generated the pricing and different people didn't send it on to the customer until they complained."
Read what did not go wrong. Nobody failed to decide. Nobody failed to do the work. The pricing existed. Somebody sat down, worked out the number, and finished.
Then it sat.
The phrase carrying the weight is "different people." He does not name who dropped it, and from the sentence it is clear there was nobody in particular to name. The quotation was with several hands and the responsibility was with none of them, which is a different failure from a person forgetting. A person forgetting is recoverable. You can ask them.
And notice who ended up doing the checking. Not him, not his colleagues, and not a system. The customer. The first anyone inside that building knew the quotation had not gone out was when the person waiting for it complained.
He rated what it cost him as trust, not time and not money. That is the heavier of the two answers this question gets, and it is the right one: the customer now knows something about how that company handles the things it says it will do.
This is the execution gap, and it is the only account in either survey where the person who finds the failure is the customer. Everything before the decision worked. The decision itself was never in doubt. What was missing was anything that held the commitment after the work was done and before it reached the person waiting.
–Clint
A number worth sitting with
We gave executives a list of nine things a system could do for them, and asked which they actually wanted. We ran it twice: once letting people tick as many as they liked, and once making them choose exactly two.
The two runs disagree about plenty. They agree about this.
Two answers lead both times. A ledger of what I owe other people and what other people owe me. And the ability to pull the context I need when I need it. Cap the picks or leave them open, and those two are still at the front.
Recording and taking notes finishes second from last, both times. Last place went to warning me when a relationship has gone quiet, which on the run where people had to choose two was picked by nobody at all.
Sit with the middle of that. An enormous amount of what the market has built for executives in the last three years records the meeting. The transcript, the summary, the action items pulled out of the call. It is the most crowded product category adjacent to this problem, and when you ask the people it was built for to rank it against eight alternatives, it comes second to last.
The gap is not that recording is useless. It is that recording is aimed at the wrong half of the arc. A transcript is a very good record of a decision being made. The quotation above was decided perfectly, written up correctly, and never sent. A recording of the meeting where the price was agreed would have captured every word and changed nothing.
What the ranking says these leaders want is the other half: something that holds the thing after the room empties, and knows what is still owed.
Product progress
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The next time something in Brief should not be there, don't just clear it. Tell it why. One tap tells us exactly what to fix.
–Zac
A finished piece of work that never reaches the person waiting for it is the execution gap at its plainest. Larry takes both stages of the gap apart in the second Executive Intelligence Paper, The Decision-to-Done Gap. It is free, ungated, and about a twenty-minute read.
Those nine capabilities, shortened: pull the context I need. Track what I owe and what I am owed. Catch commitments across systems. Anticipate what is about to slip. Keep a durable record of what was decided and why. Tell me when my day is drifting. Brief me before a meeting. Record and take notes. Warn me when a relationship has gone quiet. Which two would you actually use on a Thursday?