The Share-Out #2: Bridging The Knowing-Doing Gap

Years ago, I read a book that influenced me a lot. It’s called “The Knowing-Doing Gap ” and is written by Robert Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer. The subtitle clearly outlines the prospective take-away: “How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action”.

This book really hit home for me, since I had long held a frustration about the fact that we understand so much and have so much information and knowledge, that somehow never transpires into action.

On an organizational level, this is obvious. Most companies struggle with transforming knowing into doing. Almost always there is an abundance of unused data, untapped skills and hidden talent that could be game changers, were they funneled into strategic decision-making and operational excellence. But despite all the knowledge-sharing systems, talent management programs, AI-powered CRM platforms and numerous meetings we still tend to take the same old roads and fall into the same old traps.

We know so much, but we don’t make use of it.

The same goes for us as individuals. One of my favourite examples: I have never met a smoker who doesn’t know cigarettes are bad for their health. The only reasonable thing would be to stop smoking. But we tend to just keep doing those things that we know are bad for us.

There is more: Fact resistance is a well-known phenomenon in society – just look at what we know about climate change and what we in fact do. Producing alternative facts when the knowledge at hand does not suit your agenda, is a strategy used by election-losing presidents, as well as anti-vaxxers.

The paradox is that we – as a society – are constantly trying to gain more and more facts about, well, everything. The focus on measurements and data-driven government and business is huge, to the point of absurdity, as if more data would solve our problems by just being measured. ?

But here’s the thing: We tend to focus a lot on the knowing part. We think we need more data, more visualization, more training, more competencies and a broader skill set. But most often, we don’t. More knowledge will not help us getting the right things done.

Why? Because, in the gap between the “Knowing” and the “Doing” there is a fundamental layer called “Being” – how we are.

It the way we are – the state we are in – that constitutes our ability to transform knowledge into effective action and high performance. And in my experience, we just don’t address that “being” part enough in the way we lead our organizations and ourselves today.

There are important questions that we always should ask ourselves when making decisions and taking actions, as individuals, teams and organizations alike:

• How does this piece of knowledge occur to me?
• How does it make me feel?
• Who do I become when I get to know this?
• How does it trigger me?
• Does it frighten me into a fight-or-flight mode, or even into resignation?
• Or does it energize me and make me want get going immediately?
• In either case, why is that so?

These are questions that tend to we shun, because somehow we seem to think that facts should speak for themselves and that there is a obvious, rational, and clean-cut answer to what we should do.

But there isn’t. And even if there were, we should ask these questions. Because if we don’t, we will not get connected to what we do. We will externalize them and keep a distance, not fully committing ourselves to our actions and taking full responsibility.

We also need to be much more okay with the fact that in this VUCA world , we will always need to take actions without being able to know if we are doing the right things. We must build up an inner safety with regards to potential failure, rather than trying to evade it by performing another in-depth analysis.

To conclude: You already know what you need to know. What you need to challenge is your state of being, admit to yourself what gets in the way of action, own it and fix it – and then learn how to support and challenge others with the same intent

Because if you don’t do this, you will once again land back on the path of least resistance, doing the same things as always.

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Reflection: That was my Share-Out. How does this occur to you? Please share where this takes you, and how you think and feel about that.