When growth stalls, companies often invest in more headcount, software, budget, and, more recently, whatever is identified by AI as broken. It feels like progress because it is visible and immediate, but it usually fails. What causes a company to falter is not a shortage of capacity, it is a gap that nobody owns. These holes exist in every organization.
Elaine Joggerst has spent more than 20 years finding and closing these gaps, building, rebuilding, and scaling programs, partnerships, and new lines of business across companies like Citrix, CurveBeam AI, and PC Connection. “The ones who move a company forward are the ones who spot those gaps and build what is missing.” Most people walk right past them, heads down inside their own lane.
Most Growth Problems Are Structural Problems in Disguise
The reflex to add resources fails because it treats a structural problem as a capacity problem. Joggerst’s experience points somewhere cheaper and far more accurate. Growth problems are usually structural, and pouring people or tools into a hole does not close it. It funds the dysfunction at a higher monthly cost. The discipline is to find where execution actually breaks before building anything, and the break is normally in the same place. “The gap is almost always sitting between two teams who think it belongs to someone else,” Joggerst notes.
Neither team is dropping the ball because the ball was never clearly in anyone’s hands, which is exactly why these gaps persist for years within otherwise well-run companies. Naming the gap is not a modest first step. It is half the solution, because a problem no one will claim is unsolvable by definition, and a problem named sharply suddenly has an edge, an owner, and a path forward. The companies that stay stuck keep buying capacity to treat symptoms. The ones that break out find the structural fault first and stop paying for the same problem twice.
A Good Idea Without a System Is Just a Hope
Seeing the gap is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. Plenty of sharp people identify exactly what is missing, close it once through sheer effort, and consider it handled. Then it reopens the moment their attention moves, because a fix that depends on one person working heroically is not a fix. It is a temporary suspension of the problem. Once Joggerst sees the gap, the real work begins, designing the process, program, or partnership that fills it and making it repeatable and expandable by design.
That repeatability is the whole difference between a one-time win and a capability the company actually owns. A solution wired into the structure keeps working after the person who built it has moved on, and it scales as the company grows instead of buckling under its own success. Anyone can patch a gap once under pressure. The operators who matter build the structure that permanently closes it and makes the next gap easier to close.
Structure Is Inert Until People Choose to Run It
A system, however elegant, does nothing until people run it, and people do not run what they do not understand or believe in. This is where structurally sound initiatives quietly fall apart, not from a flaw in the design but from the assumption that a good design sells itself. It does not. Joggerst treats alignment as active work rather than an afterthought. “Connection and communication are the difference between a plan on paper and results that win the room,” she reflects. Bringing teams together, communicating the why, and building momentum are what convert a sound design into a result that holds, because change only sticks when the people executing it understand why it matters and feel a sense of ownership.
Find the gap that everyone else walked past. Build the repeatable structure that closes it. Align the people who bring it to life. When run in that order, it is how a company turns what is missing into what moves it forward, and it is why the most valuable people in any organization are rarely the ones executing flawlessly inside the lines. They are the ones quietly building the parts of the company that were never there to begin with.
Follow Elaine Joggerst on LinkedIn for more insights on operational transformation, cross-functional alignment, and building the structures that turn organizational gaps into growth.
