The Knowing-Doing Gap

🧠 Free Recall ❓ Quiz 🔍 Cues 🔮 Simulation 🥷 ShadowBox 📐 Encode Cards

Knowing "What" to Do is Not Enough

Why Typical Knowledge Management Practices
Make Knowing-Doing Gaps Worse 
Knowledge management efforts mostly emphasize technology and the transfer of codified information.
Knowledge management tends to treat knowledge as a tangible thing, as a stock or a quantity, and therefore separates knowledge as some thing from the use of that thing.
Formal systems can’t easily store or transfer tacit knowledge. The people responsible for transferring and implementing knowledge management frequently don’t understand the actual work being documented. 
Knowledge management tends to focus on specific practices and ignore the importance of philosophy.

Sounds like the value is actually in the values/philosophy not the actual instructions/knowledge - August 01, 2022 @ 6:26 AM

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.

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

People are always fascinated by successful companies. Many business books have a large dose of “what successful companies do” in them, and such information certainly can be helpful. 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. You and your colleagues can certainly acquire concepts and frameworks and at least the illusion of knowledge, if not the real thing. But you will not necessarily be any closer to being able to actually implement that knowledge or turn the frameworks into action. There is only a loose and imperfect relationship between knowing what to do and the ability to act on that knowledge.

Competitive advantage comes from being able to do something others can’t do. Anyone can read a book or attend a seminar. The trick is in turning the knowledge acquired into organizational action.

Acquiring knowledge through practice, performance, and even failure is indispensable

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 of the task and less in formal training programs that are frequently ineffective. “if you do it, then you will know”

Key idea here - August 01, 2022 @ 6:31 AM

Talk Substitutes for Action

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 plans about what the organization should do, and collecting and analyzing data to help decide what actions to take can guide and motivate action. Indeed, rhetoric is frequently an essential first step toward taking action. But just talking about what to do isn’t enough. Nor is planning for the future enough to produce that future. Something has to get done, and someone has to do it. Yet, in case after case, managers act as if talking about what they or others in the organization ought to do is as good as actually getting it done.

This manifests itself as 
Making Decisions as a Substitute for Action:
Making Presentations as a Substitute for Action:
Preparing Documents as a Substitute for Action:
Using Mission Statements as a Substitute for Action:
Planning as a Substitute for Action:

You’re Likely to Find Talk Substituting for Action When 
No follow-up is done to ensure that what was said is actually done 
People forget that merely making a decision doesn’t change anything 
Planning, meetings, and report writing become defined as “action” that is valuable in its own right, even if it has no effect on what people actually do 
People believe that because they have said it and it is in the mission statement, it must be true and it must be happening in the firm 
People are evaluated on how smart they sound rather than on what they do 
Talking a lot is mistaken for doing a lot 
Complex language, ideas, processes, and structures are thought to be better than simple ones 
There is a belief that managers are people who talk, and others do 
Internal status comes from talking a lot, interrupting, and being critical of others’ ideas

The fundamental premise of this chain of reasoning is correct. Sustainable competitive advantage is built by doing things that are difficult to imitate. But this line of reasoning confuses ease of understanding with ease of implementation.

organizations that avoid using talk as a substitute for action do one or more of the following:
Have career systems that bring people into senior leadership positions who actually have an intimate knowledge of the organization’s work processes because they have performed them themselves and have grown up with or been promoted from within the organization 
Have a culture that values simplicity and does not reward unnecessary complexity—a culture in which calling something “common sense” is a compliment rather than an insult, and in which the language used is simple, clear, and direct 
Use language that is action oriented and, even more important, have follow-up processes to ensure that decisions are implemented and that talk results in action and not just more talk 
Do not accept excuses and criticisms for why things won’t work or can’t be done, but rather reframe the objections into problems to be overcome rather than reasons not to try

Keep things simple, reframe objections into problems to overcome - August 01, 2022 @ 6:45 AM

Simple talk is valuable because it is more likely to lead to action.

Memory is a Substitute for Thinking

You’re Likely to Find Organizations Trapped by Their History When - 
The company has such a strong identity that anything new is viewed as being “inconsistent with who we are” 
There are pressures to be consistent with past decisions, to avoid admitting mistakes, and to show perseverance 
People have strong needs for cognitive closure and avoiding any ambiguity 
Decisions are made based on implicit, untested, and inaccurate models of behavior and performance 
People carry expectations from the past about what is and isn’t possible, and what can and can’t be done, into the future

one of the most powerful interventions we have uncovered to free people from the unconscious power of implicit theory: making people think carefully about the assumptions implicit in the practices and interventions they are advocating.

Feat Prevents Acting on Knowledge

How to Drive Fear and Inaction Out of Organizations 
Praise, pay, and promote people who deliver bad news to their bosses. 
Treat failure to act as the only true failure; punish inaction, not unsuccessful actions. 
Encourage leaders to talk about their failures, especially what they have learned from them. 
Encourage open communication. 
Give people second (and third) chances.
Banish people—especially leaders—who humiliate others. 
Learn from, and even celebrate, mistakes, particularly trying something new. 
Don’t punish people for trying new things.

Driving Out Fear during Hard Times 
Prediction: Give people as much information as possible about what will happen to them and when it will happen. 
Understanding: Give people detailed information about why actions, especially actions that upset and harm them, were taken. 
Control: Give people as much influence as possible over what happens, when things happen, and the way things happen to them; let them make as many decisions about their own fate as possible. 
Compassion: Convey sympathy and concern for the disruption, emotional distress, and financial burdens that people face.

Measurement Obstructs Good Judgement

MEASURES AND THE MEASUREMENT process, especially badly designed or unnecessarily complex measurement systems, are among the biggest barriers to turning knowledge into action.

we can conclude that measurement practices that help organizations develop knowledge and turn that knowledge into action typically have the following properties: 
The measurements are relatively global in their scope, focusing less on trying to assess individual performance, which is always difficult in interdependent systems, and more on focusing attention on factors critical to organizational success. 
The measures are often focused more on processes and means to ends, and less on end-of-process or final outcomes. This focus results in measures that facilitate learning and provide data that can better guide action and decision making. 
They are tied to and reflect the business model, culture, and philosophy of the firm. As a result, measurement practices vary from one firm to the other as the business imperatives, cultures, and philosophies vary. And, in measuring things such as adherence to values, recruitment and retention, and working cooperatively with others, the measures depart from conventional accounting-based indicators. 
The measures result from a mindful, ongoing process of learning from experience and experimentation. There is not the sense that the system is ever completed. Rather, there is the view that the measurement system can always be improved and, because the business environment is likely to change, practices that are effective now may be ineffective in the future. Measures evolve to serve a fundamental core business and operating philosophy or strategy that is more constant. 
The measurement process uses comparatively few metrics. Although these firms may collect a large amount of data, they emphasize and attend to a small set of measures that are believed to be especially crucial for supporting the company’s business model, philosophy, and culture. A focus on critical issues and processes is emphasized at the expense of comprehensiveness and complexity—things that dilute attention and that mix the important with the trivial. 
At its best, measurement closes the loop, auditing and assessing what the organization is doing, thereby ensuring, as in the case of Intuit, that the firm does what it knows.

Internal Competition Turns Friends into Enemies

How to Surmount the Knowing-Doing Gap

Turning Knowledge Into Action

Eight Guidelines for Action
Why before How: Philosophy Is Important.
Knowing Comes from Doing and Teaching Others How.
Action Counts More Than Elegant Plans and Concepts.
There Is No Doing without Mistakes. What Is the Company’s Response?
Fear Fosters Knowing-Doing Gaps, So Drive Out Fear.
Beware of False Analogies: Fight the Competition, Not Each Other.
Measure What Matters and What Can Help Turn Knowledge into Action.
What Leaders Do, How They Spend Their Time and How They Allocate Resources, Matters.

Knowing about the Knowing-Doing Gap Is Not Enough

Unstarred

Dunk (exclude from study)

The Knowing-Doing Gap

Review Questions

Todos

Sensemaker