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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.
Spend less time just contemplating and talking about organizational problems. Taking action will generate experience from which you can learn.
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.
the gap between knowing and doing is more important than the gap between ignorance and knowing?
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.
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,
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.
When knowledge is transferred by stories and gossip instead of solely through formal data systems, it comes along with information about the process that was used to develop that knowledge. 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.
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.
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.
Knowledge management tends to focus on specific practices and ignore the importance of philosophy.
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.
If You Know by Doing, There Is No Gap between What You Know and What You Do
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.
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.
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.
managers act as if talking about what they or others in the organization ought to do is as good as actually getting it done.
A decision, by itself, changes nothing.
An even more extreme form of substituting talk for action occurs when managers act as if talk, writing, and analysis are the main tasks that they, or anyone else in the firm, ever need to do.
There are many other firms where planning activities, holding meetings to discuss problems and their solutions, and preparing written reports are mistaken for actually accomplishing something.
How could so many meetings, task forces, and documents produce so little difference?
Mission statements are among the most blatant and common means that organizations use to substitute talk for action.
there are too many organizations where having a mission or values statement written down somewhere is confused with implementing those values.
There is no reason to expect that just compiling and displaying a philosophy and core values will change how people act.
There seems to be little connection between how much effort an organization devotes to planning or even how well it does planning and how well it performs.
Existing research on the effectiveness of formal planning efforts is clear: Planning is essentially unrelated to organizational performance.
Be very wary of judging people just on the basis of how smart they sound, and particularly on their ability to find problems or fault with ideas.
They are smart enough to stop things from happening, but not action oriented enough to find ways of overcoming the problems they have identified.
Desire for status is one reason that academic men [sic] slip so easily into unintelligibility.”21
The test of language is whether it generates constructive action.27
people accept new beliefs as a result of changing their behavior.
the fact that behavior is preeminent suggests that action can influence talk even more powerfully than talk influences action.
People in organizations that use memory as a substitute for thinking often do what has always been done without reflecting.
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
When people are unsure about how they, or their organizations, should act, they automatically imitate what others do.
“Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking of them.”9
Staw calls this the “threat-rigidity effect,” as threats and difficulties cause people and firms to do what they have done repeatedly in the past and, therefore, to engage in even more “mindless” behavior than usual.19
By bringing to the surface assumptions that are otherwise unconscious, interventions and decisions become much more mindful and incorporate what people know.
make people mindful of problems with doing things in old ways, make it difficult to use the old ways, and create and implement new ways of doing things.
organizations can be built and managed so that their people constantly question precedent and resist developing automatic reliance on old ways of doing things.
the better and more competent central staff functions are, the worse it is for the organization.
fear is an enemy of the ability to question the past or break free from precedent.
Fear helps create knowing-doing gaps because acting on one’s knowledge requires that a person believe he or she will not be punished for doing so—that taking risks based on new information and insight will be rewarded, not punished.
Fear will cause them to repeat past mistakes and re-create past problems, even when they know better ways of doing the work.
fear causes a focus on the short term, often creating problems in the longer run.
fear creates a focus on the individual rather than the collective.
