I learned this the way most people do: by carrying the wrong artefact into the wrong room.
When something is on fire — a compliance mandate with a date on it, a broken flow during market hours, a project two quarters late — the instinct of a good analyst is to map the situation. Here are the eight gaps. Here is the dependency chart. Here is what we'd need in order to be sure.
Leadership doesn't want that. In a crisis they want three things: what exactly is broken, what you are going to do about it this week, and what it is worth. Insight without a proposed action reads as commentary, and commentary during a crisis is a cost.
That doesn't mean saying yes to everything. It means that when you say no, you say it on a bigger KPI than the one being waved at you. “We shouldn't do this because it's hard” loses every time. “We shouldn't do this because it costs us this much on the metric you care about more, and here's the alternative” wins, or at least gets a real hearing.
The other half is the speed of the first move. A project I inherited had been stuck for two quarters. It shipped a month after it reached me — not because I found a clever solution, but because I went and cleared the blockers one at a time instead of documenting them.
Radical action, a clear problem statement, an impact number. Save the gap analysis for the retrospective, where it actually belongs.