The Knowing-Doing Gap

WHY DO SO MUCH EDUCATION and training, management consulting, and business research and so many books and articles produce so little change in what managers and organizations actually do?

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Yet these books find a ready market because the ideas, although often widely known and proven to be useful and valid, remain unimplemented. So, authors try, in part through repackaging and updating, to somehow get managers to not only know but to do something with what they know.

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translate this performance knowledge into organizational action.

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Numerous researchers have found that “little of what is taught in college or even business schools really prepares would-be managers for the realities of managing.”6

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Why it is that, at the end of so many books and seminars, leaders report being enlightened and wiser, but not much happens in their organizations? We wondered, too, and so we embarked

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why knowledge of what needs to be done frequently fails to result in action or behavior consistent with that knowledge.

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—the challenge of turning knowledge about how to enhance organizational performance into actions consistent with that knowledge.

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We found evidence that organizations in every industry suffer from this malady. But we found few satisfactory answers about either the causes or remedies for this vexing problem.

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understanding the barriers to turning knowledge into action

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But one of the most important insights from our research is that knowledge that is actually implemented is much more likely to be acquired from learning by doing than from learning by reading, listening, or even thinking.

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One of our main recommendations is to engage more frequently in thoughtful action.

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Taking action will generate experience from which you can learn.

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When we described the knowing-doing problem to others, we frequently got the same response. People would say that the knowing-doing problem comes from inherent problems of individuals—a lack of knowledge or skills or “personality” problems—and that its existence is a reflection of individual deficiencies. It isn’t. If you work in a place where you or your colleagues don’t turn your knowledge into action, it probably isn’t just your fault. There is no doubt that some people are better able to act on their knowledge, that some people are mentally healthier and better adjusted than others, and that individual psychology must surely play some role in the knowing-doing problems we uncovered. But our research suggests that this is not a large part of the story. Some organizations are consistently able to turn knowledge into action, and do so even as they grow and absorb new people and even other organizations. Other organizations, composed of intelligent, thoughtful, hard-working, nice people, fail to translate their knowledge about organizational performance into action. It is almost as if there were some kind of brain vacuum in those firms that sucks the wisdom and insight out of their people. These differences across firms come

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Great companies get remarkable performance from ordinary people. Not-so-great companies take talented people and manage to lose the benefits of their talent, insight, and motivation. That is why we focus on management practices that either create or reduce the knowing-doing gap.

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We wanted to see if we could quantitatively measure the knowing-doing gap and if there were statistically significant differences between what managers thought should done and what was

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financial performance, using a six-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. These questions assess managerial knowledge as we define it—that is, what leaders believe is important in affecting performance in their units. Then, both the managers and the assistant managers were asked to what extent the behavior in question was descriptive of what occurred in their restaurants—a measure of what was actually done—using the same six-point scale. In most cases, there was excellent agreement about what did, in fact, occur in the restaurant. There were, however, big differences between what the restaurant managers believed produced success and what they reported practicing in their units. For 17 of the 25 management practices, there was a statistically significant difference between what the managers thought was important for restaurant success and what they and the assistant managers reported using in the restaurant. In each instance, the direction of the difference indicated that they weren’t doing what they knew to be important (see Table 1-1). The data show that, for the most part, restaurant managers recognize the importance

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Time after time people understand the issues, understand what needs to happen to affect performance, but don’t do the things they know they should. We did a similar study of another restaurant chain that found nearly identical results. In that study, we also observed that leaders frequently rationalized their actions—or more accurately their inaction—by creating elaborate explanations for why they chose

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Does the Knowing-Doing Gap Matter?

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Why do we argue that the gap between knowing and doing is more important than the gap between ignorance and knowing?

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At least two major consulting firms, Andersen Consulting and McKinsey & Company, have units that specialize in transferring knowledge about best practices learned from work with past clients to current clients who did not know, or at least did not use, such information.

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Second, research demonstrates that the success of most interventions designed to improve organizational performance depends largely on implementing what is already known, rather than from adopting new or previously unknown ways of doing things.

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The changes were consistent with the idea of kaizen, or continuous improvement, most of them being small, simple, and in many cases, quite commonsensical given the particular manufacturing process. The genius of the Honda system was in its implementation, not in particularly novel or complicated technical ideas for enhancing productivity.

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If there is widespread diffusion of information on “best” (or at least “better”) practices, and if the evidence suggests that many successful interventions rely more on implementation of simple knowledge than on creating new insights or discovering obscure or secret practices used by other firms, then our position that the gap between knowing and doing is important for firm performance follows logically. This conclusion means that although knowledge creation, benchmarking, and knowledge management may be important, transforming knowledge into organizational action is at least as important to organizational success.

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These are all activities that treat knowledge pretty much like steel or any other resource, to be gathered, shared, and distributed. What firms haven’t done very much is build knowledge into products and services, or develop new products and services based on knowledge.

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One of the main reasons that knowledge management efforts are often divorced from day-to-day activities is that the managers, consulting firms, and information technologists who design and build the systems for collecting, storing, and retrieving knowledge have limited, often inaccurate, views of how people actually use knowledge in their jobs. Sociologists call this “working knowledge.”29 Knowledge management systems rarely reflect the fact that essential knowledge, including technical knowledge, is often transferred between people by stories, gossip, and by watching one another work. This

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Sociologists call this “working knowledge.”29

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that essential knowledge, including technical knowledge, is often transferred between people by stories, gossip, and by watching one another work.

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As the Conference Board report noted, “Dumping technology on a problem is rarely an effective solution.”

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When just reading reports or seeing presentations, people don’t learn about the subtle nuances of work methods—the failures, the tasks that were fun, the tasks that were boring, the people who were helpful, and the people who undermined the work.

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Formal systems can’t store knowledge that isn’t easily described or codified but is nonetheless essential for doing the work, called tacit knowledge.

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most of the knowledge that is actually used and useful is transferred by the stories people tell to each other, by the trials and errors that occur as people develop knowledge and skill, by inexperienced people watching those more experienced, and by experienced people providing close and constant coaching to newcomers.

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Knowledge management systems seem to work best when the people who generate the knowledge are also those who store it, explain it to others, and coach them as they try to implement the knowledge.

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The second problem with much of the existing literature and practice in knowledge management is that it conceptualizes knowledge as something tangible and explicit that is quite distinct from philosophy or values. As Don Cohen, a writer specializing on knowledge issues, put it, “The noun ‘knowledge’ implies that knowledge is a thing that can be located and manipulated as an independent object or stock. It seems possible to ‘capture’ knowledge, to ‘distribute,’ ‘measure,’ and ‘manage’ it. The gerund ‘knowing’ suggests instead a process, the action of knowers and inseparable from them.”

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leading Japanese scholar in the area of knowledge in organizations made a simple but important point: “Knowledge is embedded in… these shared spaces, where it is then acquired through one’s own experience or reflections on the experiences of others…. Knowledge is intangible.”37

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The fact that knowledge is acquired through experience and is often intangible and tacit produces a third problem in turning knowledge into action. One important reason we uncovered for the knowing-doing gap is that companies overestimate the importance of the tangible, specific, programmatic aspects of what competitors, for instance, do, and underestimate the importance of the underlying philosophy that guides what they do and why they do it.

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“Knowledge is embedded in… these shared spaces, where it is then acquired through one’s own experience or reflections on the experiences of others…. Knowledge is intangible.”37

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Formal systems can’t easily store or transfer tacit knowledge.

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The people responsible for transferring and implementing knowledge management frequently don’t understand the actual work being documented.

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The Toyota Production System is about philosophy and perspective, about such things as people, processes, quality, and continuous improvement. It is not just a set of techniques or practices:

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What is important is not so much what we do—the specific people management techniques and practices—but why we do it—the underlying philosophy and view of people and the business that provides a foundation for the practices.

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The First Principle: If You Know by Doing, There Is No Gap between What You Know and What You Do

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But learning by reading, learning by going to training programs, and learning from university-based degree programs will get you and your organization only so far.

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There is only a loose and imperfect relationship between knowing what to do and the ability to act on that knowledge.

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do. Anyone can read a book or attend a seminar. The trick is in turning the knowledge acquired into organizational action.

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developed on the job, by doing, and in which managers were more often tightly embedded in the actual work processes, they found it hard to understand how someone could “know” and not “do.”

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“If you do it, then you

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When the army is not in combat, it is constantly training for combat. Much of this training is done by having soldiers perform the very actions that will be necessary during wartime.

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The army’s National Training Center “is credited with almost single-handedly transforming the post-Vietnam army…. Several of America’s most forward-thinking companies—including Motorola and General Electric—study it as a source of ideas about leadership and learning.”43

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Thus, at one level, the answer to the knowing-doing problem is deceptively simple: Embed more of the process of acquiring new knowledge in the actual doing

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United States, the philosophy of “if you do it, then you will know” is applied most consistently in occupations in which people might die if the work is done badly.

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procedure: “Hear one, see one, do one.”45 People in these occupations learn primarily by

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ONE OF THE MAIN BARRIERS to turning knowledge into action is the tendency to treat talking about something as equivalent to actually doing something about it. Talking about what should be done, writing

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Nor is planning for the future enough to produce that future. Something has to get done, and someone has to do it.

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It was as if talking made things real, that conversation, in and of itself, made things happen. There were no mechanisms in place to actually track implementation and, as short-term business results remained quite good, there was little sense of urgency to fix the problem.

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Preparing Documents as a Substitute for Action:

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status by using complex language to mask simple ideas. C. Wright Mills, a famous sociologist, noted that the complex language used by academics usually has nothing to do with the complexity of the subject matter. Rather, “it has to do almost entirely with certain confusions of the academic… about his own status…. Desire for status is one reason that academic men [sic] slip so easily into unintelligibility.”21

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being focused on a core process—sales—that everyone is familiar with and does, knowledge is acquired and turned into action almost effortlessly, because nearly everyone in the firm, including the most senior executives,

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As we noted at the outset of this chapter, talk is inevitable in organizations and necessary for decision making and action. We observed that organizations that were better at learning and translating knowledge into action understood the virtue of simple language, simple structures, simple concepts, and the power of common sense, which is remarkably uncommon in its application. New United Motor Manufacturing (NUMMI) and Saturn both have comparatively simple structures.

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Simple talk is valuable because it is more likely to lead to action. It is less possible to second guess or dispute simple, direct ideas. One may disagree with a simple idea or a simple philosophy, but that is transparent at the outset. Second guessing and finger pointing are largely precluded when the organization operates on the basis of simple, straightforward ideas and language.

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Workout was nothing more complicated than bringing people of all ranks and functions—managers, secretaries, engineers, line workers, and sometimes customers and suppliers—together in a room to focus on a problem or an opportunity, and then acting rapidly and decisively on the best ideas developed, regardless of their source.31… Simplicity is a quality sneered at today in cultures that like their business concepts the way they like their wine, full of nuance, subtlety, complexity, hints of this and that. In the ‘90s, cultures like that will produce sophisticated decisions loaded with nuance and complexity that arrive at the station long after the train has gone.32

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Town meeting… a plenary session for all participants at which… ideas for improvement were presented to one or more business leaders…. At the end of each discussion, the business leader would make an immediate decision about the idea… Action follow-up. In each business, a process was developed to implement approved Work-Out ideas, and to follow-up to make sure that the changes were actually put in place. 34 The GE cultural change process had two elements that ensured talk would not be the only thing that occurred. First, the talk itself entailed language that impelled action because of the specificity and sense of urgency it conveyed. Over time, this action-generating aspect of language improved as General Electric people learned what kinds of talk produced actions and what didn’t: “When ideas were presented that were focused and tangible, they were much more often accepted than vague and general recommendations.”35 Second, the meetings did not end with dialogue, discussion, and presentations. Decisions were made and follow-up occurred to ensure implementation was part of the

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The notion that people learn from doing rather than from just talking about what they should do isn’t very complicated either. But these are potent means for preventing talk from being the only thing that occurs.

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After Action Reviews,” in which they work with combatants to understand what went right and what went wrong and how they can do better in the next day’s battle. The instructors place especially strong emphasis on learning from failure, viewing the acceptance of failure as crucial to the process of learning by doing. These exercises have led to dramatic improvements in combat performance. Instead of providing soldiers vague or abstract talk about what to do in battle, the loop between what happened during the last battle and what was said about how to fight the next battle is closed day after day during these two-week exercises.

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Russo’s response was often to note that one can always find a reason not to do something. He would tell the visitors to come back when they were actually serious about doing something about their issues. There is another response, also: Reframe the task from being one of merely finding all the problems or pitfalls for a particular course of action to one in which the task is not only to uncover problems but also to solve them. This reframing transforms talk about how something that may be useful and necessary can’t be done into talk about how to do it. An example illustrates the process.

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Organizations that successfully turn knowledge into action have an urgency to do so. They don’t take problems or obstacles as reasons not to do something. Rather, they frame issues as how to get things accomplished. In so doing, they act on wisdom that other organizations, seeing the pros and cons, the pitfalls and difficulties, talk themselves out of even attempting.

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The organization’s memory, embodied in precedents, customs of often unknown origin, stories about how things have always been and used to be, and standard operating procedures, becomes used as a substitute for taking wise action. We have also been amazed by how rapidly such precedents are established. Experiments by behavioral scientists show that when people do something even a single time, this past action often becomes an automatic, or mindless, guide for future action, even when the action undermines a person’s performance.1 Just like in these experiments, in many companies we studied, doing something, even if only one time and regardless of whether it was effective

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performance paradox: “Managers know what to do to improve performance, but actually ignore or act in contradiction to either their strongest instincts or to the data available to them.”1

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Why before How: Philosophy Is Important.

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rather with some basic principles—a philosophy or set of guidelines about how they will operate.

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“If you do it, then you will know.”

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CEO David Kelley likes to say that “enlightened trial and error outperforms the

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planning of flawless intellects.”

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When we get an idea, we make it right away so we can see it, try it, and learn from it.”

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The tangible, physical, material aspects of knowledge acquisition and knowledge transfer, learning by doing, learning by coaching and teaching, are critical.

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First, it creates opportunities for learning by doing. Without taking some action, without being in the actual setting and confronting the actual “part,” learning is more difficult and less efficient because it is not grounded in real experience.

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