How Strong Organizations Drift Without Realizing It

This week, we’re taking a brief step back from sharing insights about Maine to talk instead about why insights themselves matter so much, and why acknowledging their role in good decision-making was one of the reasons we created the Maine Insights Lab in the first place.

One of the most common things we hear from leadership teams is some version of this:

“We’re doing a lot, but it’s adding up the way it should.”

Marketing is active. The website exists. Campaigns are running. The team is capable. And yet, decisions feel harder than they used to, results feel less predictable, and conversations keep circling back to tactics instead of clarity.

In those moments, it’s tempting to assume the issue is marketing.

In reality, what’s usually happening is more subtle.

It’s an insight gap.

What an Insight Gap Actually Looks Like in Practice

An insight gap isn’t a lack of data, and it’s not a failure of talent. It shows up when organizations are operating on assumptions that were once reasonable, but haven’t been re-examined in a while.

We see it when:

• leadership teams describe their audience confidently, but with different definitions depending on who’s talking
  
• messaging is directionally “right,” yet consistently underperforms expectations
  
• internal agreement exists on what to do, but not why it should work
  
• marketing discussions default to channels and deliverables instead of audience behavior and motivation
  

None of this happens overnight. It’s gradual. And it happens most often in organizations that are otherwise well-run.

Why Good Organizations Are Especially Prone to This

Strong organizations tend to rely on institutional knowledge. That’s a strength, until it quietly becomes a liability.

Markets change. Customers evolve. Cultural expectations shift. What felt obvious five years ago can become outdated without ever triggering a clear alarm.

So teams compensate the only way they know how: by staying busy.

The problem is that activity can mask misalignment for a long time. Campaigns still launch. Metrics still move. But confidence erodes, and decisions start to feel riskier than they should.

This is where many organizations unintentionally start treating marketing as the problem, when the real issue is that no one has slowed down long enough to ask better questions.

Insight Is Not About More Information. It’s About Better Decisions.

Insight work isn’t about producing reports or validating instincts after the fact. At its best, it does three very specific things:

1. It distinguishes between what you know and what you’re assuming
   
2. It creates shared understanding across leadership, not just within marketing
   
3. It reduces friction in future decisions by clarifying what actually matters
   

When those pieces are missing, marketing ends up carrying weight it was never meant to carry. It becomes the place where uncertainty shows up, even though the root cause lives upstream.

In other words, marketing often reveals the problem, but it rarely creates it.

What This Means for Leaders

If your organization feels busy but not fully aligned, the answer isn’t automatically a new strategy, a new campaign, or a new agency partner.

Sometimes the most productive move a leadership team can make is to pause long enough to close the insight gap before spending more time or money acting on incomplete assumptions.

Later this month, we’ll talk about what that pause actually looks like in practice, and how focused insight work can restore clarity without slowing momentum.

Because the goal isn’t to do less, it’s to move forward with confidence again.