In every team, every family, every country… a silence shows up…one that lives right in that narrow passage between what people say they understand and what they actually do. It’s a strange little corridor. You can’t always see it, but you can feel the drag of it. Plans begin with clarity, but the execution lags considerably.

I’ve spent years watching how humans navigate this space. We underestimate it. We treat it as a minor inconvenience, a behavioural wrinkle we can iron out with the usual prescriptions: training, incentives, reminders, consequence frameworks.

And yet, the real story is always deeper… psychological… infrastructural.

The knowing is never the problem. Most people know exactly what the vision is, what the task is, what the expectation is. It’s the crossing over into actually doing, that costs them.

That space in-between is crowded with things we pretend not to see. Fear of exposure. Loss of autonomy. Competing loyalties. Invisible labour. Emotional exhaustion. The weight of “I should” battling the truth of “I can’t right now.” It’s never laziness. It’s never defiance. It’s something more primal — the mind’s quiet negotiation with itself about risk, capacity, desire, and belonging.

And when you zoom out, you notice how systems participate in widening this space. Leaders announce a direction but fail to realign the scaffolding beneath it. Teams understand the strategy but return to workflows built for something completely different. Cultures claim to value accountability but reward avoidance in a thousand subtle ways. Organisations repeat the same loops because the distance between knowing and doing has been paved over with optimism instead of infrastructure.

This is the invisible in-between…

The soft, unlit territory where alignment either roots itself or quietly disintegrates. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear the tension humming inside people who want to deliver but can’t find the bridge between clarity and action. If you trace that hum back to its source, you’ll find systems that are beautifully articulate but operationally contradictory… expectations that sound good but rest on outdated rhythms… leaders who communicate the what but never rewire the how.

And maybe this is the real work of alignment: not just clarifying vision but escorting people across that internal threshold where knowledge transforms into behaviour. It requires patience. It requires design. It requires the humility to accept that humans don’t execute plans just because they understand them. They execute when the path is frictionless, when the emotional cost is manageable, when the system around them stops punishing the very behaviour it asks for.

Most of the dysfunction we call “underperformance” is simply energy leaking in the in-between. Not incompetence. Not unwillingness. Just misalignment. A gap that was never named, never built for, never tended.

Some days I think the real leadership skill is learning how to see that space clearly… and how to close it gently… without coercion… without judgement… simply by acknowledging that knowing is cheap and doing is expensive, and every human is paying with a currency we don’t always see.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

Where is the in-between showing up in your own life or leadership — and what invisible cost is being paid to sustain it?

About Giselle

I’m Giselle Hudson — writer, possibility thinker, musician, Organization & People Development Sensemaker™, and MCODE Legacy Coach. I help leaders and soul-driven professionals decode the deeper patterns shaping their business, work, identities, and results especially when it look like a performance issue but it’s really misalignment in disguise.

If something in your life or business feels off and you can’t quite name it, message me. Sometimes one conversation is all it takes to see what’s really going on.