The Gain inside the Gap

Not all of it landed. The SLT session that most of this week was building towards — two weeks of conversations, synthesis, thinking done in the open — missed the mark. The cluster leads I needed to properly test the thinking with were mostly unavailable: off sick, on holiday, or covering for others. I made the call to press on rather than wait. Sometimes that's the right call. This time, the work needed that collaboration and didn't quite have it, and it showed.

What came next was replanning. Taking the feedback seriously, stepping back, and finding a cleaner line through it. That process isn't comfortable. It's also not optional if you actually want to move forward rather than just defend your position.

There's a concept in The Gap and the Gain I've been reflecting on this week. We measure ourselves against an ideal — and anything short of it reads as failure. But if you measure backward instead, against where things were, the picture looks different. A week that included difficult feedback and a significant replan also produced a sharper brief, a clearer narrative, and a better sense of where the real gap is. That's not a consolation prize. That's the gain.

The things that go well teach you how to repeat yourself. The things that go wrong teach you something you didn't already know — but only if you stop defending the original long enough to hear what the feedback is actually pointing at. Adam Grant puts it well in Hidden Potential: growth comes from character and learning behaviours, not raw talent. That's the useful framing for a week like this.

Linked notes

• 2026-05-22 The Gap and the Gain — Dan Sullivan & Benjamin Hardy
• 2026-05-29 Hidden Potential — Adam Grant

Lesson learned

The things that go wrong teach you more than the things that go well. But only if you stop defending the work long enough to hear what the feedback is actually pointing at.