Virginia grabbed a napkin and wrote down five things: Heart rate. Breathing. Muscle tone. Reflexes. Color.

Doctors had known all of these markers for decades. The knowledge was not new. What was new was someone finally organizing it into something a nurse could use in sixty seconds in the chaos of a delivery room.

That became the Apgar Score. It is used in delivery rooms around the world today. Somewhere right now, a nurse is scoring a newborn out of ten because Virginia saw over breakfast something nobody else had bothered to address.

The gap was not a secret. It was just sitting there, waiting for someone to act.

I learned a word for that gap from my volleyball coach, who grew up in Hawaii.

Puka.

It means hole, gap, opening — the same hole at the center of those puka shell necklaces everyone wore in the nineties. My coach would yell “puka!” when she spotted a space on the court nobody was covering. I heard it so often it stopped being a word and became a reflex: See the gap. Move.

I have been moving toward gaps my entire career. And I have come to believe that this instinct – to walk into any room and see not just what is happening but what is missing, and act before being asked – is one of the most powerful and underrated career strategies available to professionals and executives alike.

Early in my career, I found myself on the edges of a major trial. I was not on the team. I was the newest lawyer at the firm with time on my hands and a pile of disorganized medical records that nobody wanted to manage. So, I managed them. I built color-coded binders for every significant medical issue, decoded thousands of pages of chart abbreviations, loaded them on a dolly, wheeled them into the war room, and started walking the partner through the organized tabs.

That was day one. The binders were the first puka. Then I found the next one. And the next. Six weeks later, I was a vital member of a trial team I was never originally slated to join. When the lead partner left for a larger firm, he took a small, handpicked group with him. I was on that list.

He moved again to an even larger firm and brought me along a second time: a chain of events that started with a dolly and a stack of binders nobody wanted to deal with and ended at one of the largest global law firms in the world.

That trajectory started because of a willingness to step into a space that others stepped around.

Some gaps are obvious: the unowned problem, the operational bottleneck, or unglamorous work outside everyone’s formal job description. Everyone sees it, but few step forward.

Other gaps are organizational or structural, and those are often the most valuable. For leaders, cultivating an environment where people actively seek out and fill these gaps is what separates adaptive companies from stagnant ones. When employees move toward unassigned problems, careers grow organically: they do not wait for a bigger title, but instead begin handling the responsibilities of that next level until the organization adapts around them.

The person who fills gaps consistently becomes indispensable to the people around them. Repeatedly demonstrating initiative builds a reputation that opens doors before you ever knock on them.

The puka mindset relies on two core behaviors:

• Relentless curiosity: The habit of walking into any room or analyzing a business model and asking not what you have been assigned but what this situation actually requires. Widening that lens reveals what is falling through the organizational cracks.

• Decisive initiative: Filling the gap simply because it needs filling, not for immediate credit, but because operational momentum demands it. Awareness without action is merely observation.

Right now, one of the most critical gaps across corporations is the practical integration of AI. While executive boards debate high-level strategy and conference panels discuss theoretical disruptions, the daily tools sit largely underutilized on the ground.

The gap is not access; it is application.

I know that gap well, because I once filled it with binders and a dolly.

The medical records were never a secret. Every page had been produced and was sitting in a box for months. What was missing was not information but shape, a way for a partner to find the one chart note about a missing lab value in seconds, standing in front of a jury. Back then, that kind of organization took weeks.

A version of that work now takes an afternoon.

The conversation about AI is still largely framed around what it replaces. A better question is what it makes possible. For the first time, much of the work that once kept organizational gaps open can be done faster, cheaper, and at scale. The tracker nobody built. The eight years of vendor contracts nobody has read end to end. These gaps persisted not because they were invisible but because nobody had the hours to close them.

Imagine a junior team member on a long project watching the same questions get asked over and over, because the information is scattered across emails, meeting notes, and old drafts. She uses an AI tool to pull it all together into a single tracker the team can actually use, then checks it herself against the source material. Nobody assigned her the work. She just noticed a gap nobody owned and closed it before lunch.

The tool does not replace judgment. It does not decide strategy. It organizes what is already known so the humans can spend more time thinking and less time hunting.

The cost of filling a puka has collapsed. The value of spotting one has not. The people who move toward that space now position themselves at the front of a wave that will generate new roles and opportunities for years. For senior leaders, the task is twofold: build the habit of spotting these openings yourself, and create a culture where taking the initiative to fill them is recognized and rewarded rather than treated as a compliance risk. That can mean funding small pilot programs, giving teams explicit room to experiment within reasonable guardrails, or simply promoting the people already finding smarter ways to work before anyone told them to.

AI is just today’s clearest example. Every industry has its own version, and pukas are never in short supply.

Gaps in strategy and execution never run out. The fundamental question for any team or leader is simple: when an unowned problem sits in plain sight, who moves first?

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.