Betterment Over Perfection (The Painful-Gap Method)
Don't craft a perfect strategy — close your single most painful gap, then the next, forever.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
For anyone overwhelmed by 'strategy,' Martin reframes it as a problem-solving tool. Instead of solving all your company's problems (perfection), identify the single most painful gap between the outcomes you're getting and the outcomes you want, and make different choices to close just that one. Then move to the next gap. Over time the gaps shrink and the whole gets dramatically better.
Origin
Roger Martin's 'betterment over perfection' concept, which he has written about publicly; presented here as the tactical on-ramp to using the Strategy Choice Cascade.
Core principles
- 01A strategy is a problem-solving tool; the problem worth solving is a gap between current outcomes and desired outcomes
- 02Your current outcomes are the natural result of all your past choices interacting with the competitive environment, so they won't improve much without different choices
- 03Attack the single most painful gap, not every problem — solving everything is perfection, closing one gap is betterment
- 04Iterating gap-by-gap compounds: each cycle makes the whole better, and the gaps get smaller over time
- 05The gap you work on must be one you feel in your heart, not one someone else defines for you
How to run it
- 1
Name the single most painful gap
Identify where your current outcomes fall short of what you wish they were — the one that hurts most right now (customers leaving, a channel abandoning you, a resource you can't find).
Pro tip Pick the gap you genuinely feel, not an abstract 'improve everything' target — emotional ownership is what makes you actually solve it.
Watch out Don't try to solve the problems of the world or even all your company's problems — that's perfection, and it stalls you.
- 2
Assume current outcomes won't self-correct
Recognize that today's results are the logical product of your existing choices, so expecting them to improve without changing anything is naive.
- 3
Run the gap through the Cascade
Ask which choice to change: where you play, how you win, your capabilities, or your management systems — to achieve a different aspiration and close the gap.
- 4
Close it, then move to the next gap
Once the gap closes, redirect attention to the next most painful gap, and repeat continuously. The compounding is the point.
Pro tip Don't wait for a quiet moment — people who say 'I'll get to strategy after the operational fires' never amount to anything.
In the wild
A business-school professor who won teacher-of-the-year more than anyone taught 13-session second-year courses. Each year he polled students, cut the single worst-rated session (the biggest gap between what students wished for and got), and replaced it with something new.
→ Over 25 years of this betterment loop the course kept getting better and better; he repeatedly won professor of the year.
Common mistakes
Chasing perfection
Trying to fix every problem at once is paralyzing; betterment means fixing the one gap that matters most now.
Waiting for later
Deferring strategy until operational concerns are handled means you never do it — 'nobody like that ever amounts to anything.'
Letting someone else define your gap
The gap must be one you feel; an externally imposed problem doesn't generate the ownership needed to solve it.
Is it for you?
Best for
Operators and individual contributors intimidated by strategy who need a concrete first move; anyone convinced they're 'not a natural strategist.'
Not ideal for
Situations demanding a single large discontinuous bet where incremental gap-closing would be too slow to matter.
From the transcript
“I just think of it as a problem solving tool”
“there's a gap between those two”
“what is the single most painful Gap currently that I'm facing”
“don't try to solve the problems of the world or even all the problems of your company that's Perfection betterment is making that Gap go…”
“the worst thing to do is to wait people say well I've got all these operational concerns right now and then I'll get to strategy…”
From the episode
5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy
Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker)