A measurement is only as good as the evidence you can produce for it.
The Reality Gap is a composite of six weighted dimensions, each bound to observable evidence. This page states the method in full, because a measurement that cannot be examined does not deserve to influence a decision.
Six dimensions, weighted
Narrative Authority
Are the narratives the organization has declared the narratives the market repeats?
Adoption of declared narrative language in independent third-party sources, weighted by source authority.
Executive Authority
Do the people intended to carry the position actually carry it?
Named executive presence, subject ownership, and quote share across tier-ranked outlets.
Message Adoption
Is the specific language of the strategy surviving contact with the market?
Phrase-level persistence of claimed positioning terms versus substituted market language.
Competitive Differentiation
Is the organization distinguishable, or interchangeable with its category?
Distance between the organization's observed language and the aggregate language of its named competitive set.
Editorial Reach
Does the coverage occur where decision-makers actually read?
Five-tier source authority ranking applied to observed placements, not raw volume.
Evidence Confidence
How much should any of this be trusted?
Quantity, independence, quality, and recency of the underlying evidence objects.
Where a dimension cannot be measured from available evidence, it is removed from the composite and its weight is redistributed across the dimensions that can be. The measurement then reports which dimensions were excluded and why.
Rules the measurement obeys
Cite or refuse
No dimension is scored without evidence objects behind it. A dimension that cannot be measured is excluded and its weight redistributed — never estimated.
Sufficiency before score
A Reality Gap is only published when a declared position, an observed position, a minimum evidence volume, and a minimum number of measurable dimensions all exist. Otherwise the answer is 'not yet established', with the missing inputs named.
Source independence
Syndicated and republished coverage is clustered by domain so a single wire story cannot inflate confidence into a false consensus.
Fact and inference are separated
Observed facts, system inferences, and strategist judgments are stored as distinct classes. Inference is never permitted to corroborate itself.
Movement is explained, not asserted
Trend is derived by comparing successive measurements and describing which gaps closed, which opened, and which stood still.
Unknowns beat certainty
Where evidence is thin, the measurement says so. A confident number without provenance is worse than no number at all.
What the number means
Aligned
Observed perception closely tracks declared strategy. Effort shifts to defence and extension.
Drifting
Material distance on specific dimensions. The gap is addressable with focused narrative and executive work.
Divergent
The market holds a materially different view of the organization than the organization holds of itself.
The absolute score matters less than its direction. A gap of 54 that has closed nine points in a quarter is a healthier position than a gap of 41 that has widened.