The Spaces In Between…..

Recently, I’ve been noticing something new, something I haven’t been paying sufficient attention to. It struck me in a conversation with a colleague yesterday. We were talking about organizational design, performance, and a number of issues. She presented a chart, the one below is a cleaned up representation of the chart.

The content of the chart is irrelevant to this discussion, but each block represented a different part of the GTM organization, their roles, responsibilities, and key metrics. We were talking about this in the context of organizational performance. But we can look at similar block diagrams we use to represent systems, organizational models, how we allocate our time, and any other thing.

In our discussion, we talked about each block, what it meant and how we optimize performance across the blocks.

All of a sudden an idea struck me, “Did you choose to structure the diagram this way purposefully?”

“What do you mean,” she asked.

I responded, “We’ve been talking about each of the blocks individually, how we optimize performance within the blocks. But we haven’t talked about the ‘spaces’ in between. Did you draw the diagram in this way to highlight the spaces in between? Are the real performance issues occurring in the spaces in between?”

We create all sorts of models, frameworks, systems because it is easier for us to divide things into “chunks.” Then we talk about what each of those “chunks” mean. At a very high level, we can represent marketing, sales, customer service, product management as separate functions within the organization. We can break these down and look at “chunks within the chunks,” like SDRs, AEs, AMs, Sales Enablement, Sales Ops (oops, I guess the current fashion is to call those Revenue Enablement and Ops).

Or we can “chunk up” our customer engagement process with: awareness, education, selection, commit, onboarding, adoption, expansion. And within each of those elements, we optimize our engagement strategies.

But what about the spaces in between? What happens as we transition from one block to the next, one part of the diagram to an adjacent part, what happens in the hand-offs, or the transitions?

There is another way we are impacted by the “spaces in between.” It’s often the space between what is said or intended and what is heard or understood. Or the gaps between our commitments and our actions. Or the gaps between what we say and what we do.

These gaps pervade everything, our processes, our organizational structures, our communications and interactions with each other.

We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the “spaces in between.” But it’s actually in these spaces where so much can go wrong or be missed. If each function (block) is doing it’s job, but as we look at all of it put together and we are failing, there has to be something going on in the spaces in between. Or in our conversations, actions and how we interact and behave with each other.

Are we looking at things as a “whole?” Are we looking at how all the pieces/parts fit together, and how each is connected to the others? The spaces “in between,” are as important as each chunk.