Finding Your Real GR Weak Points (It's Probably Not What You Think)
The Problem With "We Know Our Weak Points"
Ask a GR team what their biggest weakness is. You'll usually get one of two answers. Either something vague — "we need to be more strategic" or "our relationships could be stronger" — or something overly specific to a recent loss: "we got caught flat-footed on Bill C-whatever."
Neither is a real diagnosis. Vague answers don't tell you where to focus. Specific answers are rearview-mirror thinking. And both share the same flaw: they're based on intuition and anecdote, not a systematic review of where you've actually been losing ground.
The conjugate method for GR starts with an honest diagnostic. Louie Simmons didn't guess where a lifter was weak. He tested it. He measured it. He got specific about exactly where the program needed to change before he wrote a single rep.
GR teams need to do the same thing.
The Five Diagnostic Categories
Here are the five areas where GR programs most commonly lose ground. Your job isn't to guess which one is yours. It's to look at your actual recent history and find out.
1. Coverage Gaps
Coverage gaps are the most common and most expensive weakness in Canadian GR. Federal, provincial, municipal, Indigenous governance layers — most teams are watching one or two and missing the others. An issue that dies quietly at the municipal level can resurface at the federal level six months later having already picked up political momentum you never tracked.
The signal: look at your last 10 issues that caught you by surprise. How many were in jurisdictions you weren't systematically monitoring? If it's more than three, coverage is your gap.
2. Timing Failures
GR is a leading indicator business. The work you do before a decision is made is worth exponentially more than the work you do after. If you're consistently reacting — finding out about consultations after they close, learning about regulatory changes after they've already moved the market — your timing is costing you.
The signal: track the last five times you entered a file and wished you'd been there earlier. What was the average gap between when you first engaged and when the decision was effectively made? If that gap is shrinking, you're improving. If it's stable or growing, your timing is a weak point.
3. Stakeholder Blind Spots
Every GR team has a relationship map that looks better on paper than it is in practice. The blind spot isn't usually the obvious people — it's the ones you don't know you don't know. The staffer who quietly controls what gets to the minister's desk. The regulatory clerk who flags issues before they reach the director. The indigenous organization whose position will shape the eventual consultation outcome.
The signal: go through your last 10 significant files and ask — for each one, do you know the actual decision-maker and their key influencers? If you can name them before the decision, that's a strong stakeholder map. If you only figure it out after, that's a blind spot.
4. Intelligence Lags
There's a difference between information you have and information you understand. An intelligence lag means you knew something was happening but didn't understand its significance until it was already moving. You read the bill. You missed the amendment. You saw the consultation but didn't catch the narrow window for intervention.
The signal: review your last five regulatory or legislative developments in your issue areas. For each one, when did you first become aware of it? When did you understand its implications? If understanding came significantly after awareness, you have an intelligence lag.
5. Submission Quality Trajectory
Most teams know whether they've made submissions. Very few track whether those submissions are getting better over time. A submission quality trajectory tracks: are your briefs getting clearer? Are your arguments anticipating counterarguments more effectively? Are you hitting submission deadlines with time to spare, or scrambling to the wire?
The signal: compare your last three submissions to ones from a year ago. Are they shorter, tighter, better structured? Do they anticipate the questions the department will ask, or do they just describe what you want? Quality improvement is slow but measurable — and it's one of the highest-leverage weak points to fix.
How to Run the Diagnostic
You don't need a perfect system. You need an honest one.
Start with this three-question audit for each of your active files:
What cost us the most in the last 12 months? The answer usually points to your real weak point, not the obvious one.
What do we consistently discover too late? That reveals your intelligence gap — what you're aware of but not understanding early enough.
Who do we wish we had a relationship with that we don't? That's your stakeholder deficit, and it's the one most teams know about but don't write down.
Do this across your top 10 files. The patterns that emerge are your diagnostic. Not what you think your weak points are — what the evidence says they are.
Why This Matters More Than Win/Loss
Win/loss thinking crowds out diagnostic thinking. When you're focused on whether you won or lost, you stop asking what specifically made the difference. You attribute the outcome to factors you couldn't control — the minister's political position, the timing, the existing relationships — and learn nothing useful.
Diagnostic thinking asks: was our coverage adequate? Did we engage early enough? Did we have the right relationships? Were our arguments the best they could be? These questions can be answered. They produce different insights each time. And they're actionable in a way that win/loss thinking isn't.
The goal of the diagnostic isn't to confirm your intuitions. It's to find the gap between what you think your weak points are and what your recent history actually shows.
PoliTraQ helps GR teams run systematic diagnostics and track weak point improvement over time. Request a demo to see how GR intelligence works in practice. Request a demo
Next in the series: Building Your Accessory Movements — selecting and measuring the proxies that compound into better GR outcomes.