Have you noticed something interesting about most filmed interviews by non-professionals (e.g. people that do not work in the media)? The non-professionals looks terrified. They are nervous, wooden, shifty, and look scared of the camera. This undermines the entire interview.

In fact, it undermines the entire tactic… perhaps even a huge percentage of the strategy.

Can you imagine going through all this effort, only for the interview to be ruined by the presenter?

This is a skills gap. The presenter has likely never been on camera before. They do not know the best body language to adopt, where to look, how long to look at the camera, what to do if they become uncomfortable, etc. They might not know that they need to exaggerate their personality to match the setting. This results in a wooden, underwhelming interview.

Along with knowledge gaps and resource gaps, skill gaps are one of the three gaps you need to fill before you execute a tactic. Too often, people overestimate their abilities and believe they can do something they have never done before really well. This is an arrogant (and, unfortunately, common) mistake to make.

You can correct this by identifying your skill gaps and taking action to close them.

Knowledge Gaps

Now you do the same thing, but for knowledge. Looking at the tasks above, what knowledge would you need that you don’t possess today?

Knowledge is anything that can be written down or passed along in a single medium to multiple people. The nature of knowledge makes this task difficult. You might not know what you don’t know. However, this too is something you can ask and find out by asking yourself “What don’t I know which I should know?”.

Look at the tasks above again. Are there any in there which probably require knowledge?

You would probably want to know:

• How much to pay vendors
• How to hire good vendors and work with vendors
• How to entice experts to participate in interviews
• How to set up a paid advertising campaign.

Each of these is information you can acquire relatively quickly. The key step is identifying what information you need to begin with.

This is where you need to have a simple knowledge acquisition plan. You might reach out to a few people who have done this before and find out what we should pay, who is highly recommended, what kind of things we should watch out for.

Likewise, you can find a few relevant online communities (aha!) and ask in there. For the really important tactics, you want to be prepared with all the knowledge we need to make it happen.