Ask leadership how the process works. Write it down.
Now ask the team that runs the process. Write that down too.
You are holding two documents that describe two different companies.
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Here is the part that matters, and it’s the part everyone gets wrong: nobody lied to you.
Leadership described the process they built — the one in the SOP, the one they can walk through on a whiteboard, the one they believe is happening because at some point it was. That’s the truth, from where they stand.
The team described what they actually do, every day, to get the work out the door despite everything. That’s also the truth. Theirs is just the version with the workarounds left in.
Both stories are true. Only one of them is running your company.
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I once worked with a founder who documented everything. Flowcharts for every process — real ones, maintained, laminated-grade. By every official measure, this was the most process-mature company you could ask for.
One step in the onboarding flowchart said: *prepare the customer for onboarding.*
I asked five people what that step meant.
I got five completely different answers. Five different sets of actions, five different definitions of done, five parallel onboarding experiences running under one box on one chart. One interpretation — and I need you to know I am reporting this, not inventing it — effectively involved a sword.
The founder wasn’t wrong. A process existed. The team wasn’t wrong. They were each executing their honest reading of it. The official story had one step where the real story had five, and nobody had ever stood in the place where you could see all five at once.
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The gap between the stories is not a character flaw and it’s not an accident. It’s physics.
The official story is written once. Reality updates continuously. The process drifts — because the market shifted, because a tool changed, because a customer broke an assumption — and the document doesn’t drift with it, because updating the document is nobody’s job and flagging the drift costs political capital nobody’s sure they want to spend.
And then the gap does something clever: it hides itself. Because the team reports status *in the language of the official story* — that’s the language leadership speaks, and the contract from Chapter 1 is still in force. So leadership hears the official story repeated back and takes it as confirmation. The real story stays where it lives: in the work, invisible from above.
This is why I keep saying the gap is not a communication problem. Everyone is communicating fine. It’s a visibility problem. The organization has no structural way to see its second document — and the second document is almost always load-bearing.
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The most reliable finding of my entire career comes from putting the two stories in the same room at the same time. It’s the core of what I call PBJ Sessions™ — leadership’s version of reality and the team’s version, same table, same hour.
The reaction is never anger. That’s what people expect, and it never happens.
The reaction is surprise. Both sides discovering, in real time, that the other side’s company exists. And the gap between the two descriptions — mapped honestly, without blaming a single person for it — is where the revenue has been leaking the whole time.
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You can keep managing the official story. It’s cleaner. It’s calmer. It fits on the whiteboard.
It’s just not where anyone works.