Closing the Knowing-Doing Gap

Why do so many transformation efforts fail?? Why is driving change so hard??? The answer lies in the gap between knowing and doing.? It’s not enough to know what to do and to influence others’ mindsets.? That creates space for change but is unlikely to lead to change that lasts.? To drive impact, you need to get people to make commitments and drive behavior adoption.

The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action, was written in 2000 by Professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, from Stanford’s business and engineering schools, respectively.? The book is based on years of research, including case studies on how organizations have evolved their cultures.? It is just as relevant today as when it came out 25 years ago.? I was reminded of the book by David J. Friedman when he was a guest on my podcast (check out episode #46 at www.cxandcultureconnection.com, in which we talked about David’s book, Culture by Design).

Why is the Knowing-Doing Gap so big?

Every year, companies spend billions of dollars on training for their executives, managers and frontline employees.? They also spend billions on knowledge management systems and other technology to foster the sharing of knowledge and democratize access to insights.? They commit a lot of their leaders’ time to strategy and implementation, in some cases spending a lot on consultants. Unfortunately, a lot of this time and money is wasted.? Too often, companies and their consultants put the emphasis on getting buy-in, without following through to turn commitments into sustained habits. What people know explains less of the difference in performance across organizations than whether they build an action-oriented culture.

There are several root causes for the Knowing-Doing Gap.? Let’s explore them in turn.

First, many leaders mistake talking about a decision with acting on it, assuming that once a decision has been made people will follow through.

Second, memory becomes a substitute for thinking.? When we do something and it works, even if we only do it once, it becomes ingrained in our memory and hard to change.? This reduces the energy it takes to form habits.? However, it also means that assumptions are left unchallenged.

Third, leaders often leave things at too high a level and don’t get specific about the behaviors they want to drive across the enterprise.? For example, many leaders invest time to build alignment on their organization’s mission, vision, purpose, and values, but stop short of translating them into specific behaviors.? See my recent book review on Creating the Organization of the Future here for more on this topic.

Another reason for the Knowing-Doing Gap is an unhealthy focus on internal competition and individual performance.? This undermines collaboration and experimentation across the organization.? Building organizational muscle to turn knowledge into action is strengthened when we learn by doing.? Driving out fear is key to building a healthy culture.

Finally, the way companies approach measurement is often too complicated.? While there is no “golden metric” to focus on to drive performance (e.g., Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction, or Customer Effort Score), the alternative of highly complex scorecards is just as bad.? If people feel they don’t have influence over outcomes, they’ll act in counter-productive and suboptimal ways.

Why culture and focusing on behaviors is the key to close the Knowing-Doing Gap

The book includes three case studies for how to close the Knowing-Doing Gap: BP, Barclays, and New Zealand Post.? The BP example focuses on ways the company fostered a culture of collaboration.? The Barclays case focuses on translating values into behaviors and establishing executive sponsorship to support behavior adoption.? The New Zealand Post example focuses on data-driven, common-sense decisions that aren’t grounded in how other postal organizations do things.? All of them provide relevant insights that aren’t tied to a specific industry.

Based on these examples, the authors lay out several lessons to close the Knowing-Doing Gap:

• Link changes in behavior to a broader “philosophy” that lays out principles for how empowered employees make decisions.
• Focus on learning by doing, where your employees gain experience from trial and error
• Involve your senior leadership in building a culture of experimentation
• Make sure you focus more time on solutions and acting than studying the problem
• Focus on driving out fear, building a culture that inspires pride in collaboration and supporting one another
• Strike a balance between in-process metrics and end outcomes
• Use symbolic actions to reinforce desired behaviors

In my own experience, these leading practices are enhanced and amplified by tying your culture efforts to a cornerstone discipline such as Agility, Design Thinking, or Quality Management.? It also helps to build alignment among your leadership team on how your CX delivers on your brand promise, and the specific behaviors that bring this to life.? Your employee behaviors reinforce peak emotions along your customer’s journey.? In addition, your employee behaviors have an indirect impact on customer emotions through design and delivery of better, faster, and cheaper experiences.? At JourneySpark, we’ve developed our CX & Culture Connection ? Value Accelerator to engage leaders and your broader employee base across three modules that help build a culture that’s aligned to your brand promise:

1. A strategy module that helps you align on where to focus for capability building and experience design across Better, Faster, or Cheaper experiences
2. A culture module that helps assess whether your current culture is aligned to your strategy and brand promise for Better, Faster, and Cheaper, and what behaviors to focus on over habit building cycles
3. A voice-of-the-customer module to assess what emotions to focus on along the customer journey and whether you are delivering on your brand promise, and jump starts a sustainable approach to provide feedback on your habit building cycles

Based on these insights, you can craft the right roadmap to accelerate your growth flywheel and boost the ROI from your CX investments.? You can also take more pragmatic approaches to activate the right behaviors through the right system of change to work within and evolve your culture.? You can learn more about the CX & Culture Connection ? Value Accelerator at JourneySpark’s website here.

I recommend reading the book.? If you’d like to check out podcast episodes for the CX & Culture Connection that touch on related topics, go to www.cxandcultureconnection.com.

I hope this sparks some great ideas and energy for you to take action!

If you’d like to connect further on this topic, feel free to reach out for me on LinkedIn.? You can also join the CX on the Rocks Collective, where I’m acting as the culture expert to help coach and engage members on their CX and culture journeys.