The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action

by Jeffrey Pfeffer

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. There is a limit to what we can do for you in this book, regardless of the insights we have acquired. One of our main recommendations is to engage more frequently in thoughtful action. Spend less time just contemplating and talking about organizational problems. Taking action will generate experience from which you can learn.

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 is a process in which social interaction is often crucial. A recent study of 1,000 employees in business, government, and nonprofit organizations reported that “most workplace learning goes on unbudgeted, unplanned, and uncaptured by the organization…. Up to 70 percent of workplace learning is informal.”30 This study by the Center for Workforce Development found that informal learning occurs in dozens of daily activities, including participating in meetings, interacting with customers, supervising or being supervised, mentoring others, communicating informally with peers, and training others on the job.

There is an unfortunate emphasis on technology, particularly information technology, in these efforts. For instance, one recent article on making knowledge management a reality asserted that “it’s clear that an intranet is one of the most powerful tools for achieving results within this [knowledge management] arena.”32 Another article asserted that “knowledge management starts with technology.”33 We believe that this is precisely wrong. As the Conference Board report noted, “Dumping technology on a problem is rarely an effective solution.”34 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.

this is why eg chat ops is a completely different beast from ops wiki + presentations

Knowledge management tends to focus on specific practices and ignore the importance of philosophy.

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. As one comprehensive study of the development of executives concluded, “One learns to be a leader by serving as a leader.”

The problem is that there are too many organizations where having a mission or values statement written down somewhere is confused with implementing those values. These firms act as if going through the process of developing a statement, perhaps publishing it on little cards that everyone carries or on plaques or posters on the walls, is enough to help the company perform better. It has a mission, it has a vision, it has values. So, now it can go on about its business. There is no reason to expect that just compiling and displaying a philosophy and core values will change how people act.

Existing research on the effectiveness of formal planning efforts is clear: Planning is essentially unrelated to organizational performance.

Unfortunately for getting anything done in organizations, one of the best ways of sounding smart is to be critical of others’ ideas. The devastating intellectual put-down is sometimes part and parcel of the academic game. It is largely harmless in universities since little of consequence happens as a result. Much to our surprise, however, put-downs are often part of the corporate game as well. At a large financial institution we studied, people scored points by criticizing others’ ideas in meetings. This behavior was particularly likely to occur in front of senior management, as junior executives sought status by appearing to be smart through critiquing the ideas of their peers, something that diminished the status of their victims and increased their own status.

Whenever an informal dominance order establishes itself, we can usually work out the rank of the individuals involved by measuring the length of time that they are allowed to talk. As a rule, the most influential person will be allowed the most talking time…. On a busy occasion, those at the bottom of the hierarchy are likely to find that they can barely get a word in edgewise. An individual who talks more than others feel he deserves will gradually be ignored.

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

Professor Barry Staw from the U.C. Berkeley Business School has shown that, at least initially, people and organizations respond to problems by clinging even more tightly to what they know how to do best and have done in the past. At the same time, these external threats cause people to resist trying new things; even when they do try, their anxiety makes it difficult for them to learn. 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.

the human tendency to react to problems, at least at first, by using old and ingrained practices and abandoning new and untried ideas makes it difficult to try new things even when people know they should do so.

Cache invalidation is hard?

According to social psychologists, the “need for cognitive closure refers to an individual’s desire for a firm answer to a question and an aversion toward ambiguity.”27 One consequence of the need for closure that has been identified in experiments is the “permanence tendency”: the inclination of most human beings to seek closure, to freeze on past knowledge and avoid evidence that disconfirms what they believe. People are especially likely to freeze on past knowledge when (1) they feel pressure from deadlines, the need to make a decision, or other time pressures; (2) they are fatigued, thus lacking energy to process new information; (3) they are in any other condition that makes it difficult to process information, like feeling physical discomfort or fear; and (4) “when closure is valued by significant others.”

He went on to say that after his firm funds a start-up, they put pressure on the management to use structures and practices that are much like every other firm they have funded, even though “we don’t really know if we are making them do the right thing. We are just making them do what we always make them do.”

Organizations learn. Then they encase their learning in programs and standard operating procedures that members execute routinely. These programs and procedures generate inertia… As their successes accumulate, organizations… grow complacent and learn too little.

People don’t want to deliver bad news to others because they fear they will be blamed by association, a worry that numerous psychological experiments demonstrate is well founded. Unless managers actively encourage the surfacing of bad news, the MUM effect means that the people around them will avoid bringing negative information to light, even if such information is essential for turning knowledge into action. The effect also means that people will avoid making suggestions for improvement if doing so first means implying that something is wrong.

The fiction in most measurement systems is that individual performance measures assigned to individuals presumably reflect the effort and skill those people used in doing their jobs. But individual performance in an interdependent system will always be difficult or impossible to measure. Individual performance and behavior, even if they could be accurately assessed, are the result of many things over which the person has little or no control, as the above example nicely illustrates.

maybe organizations could learn from measures such as TrueSkill, where results are measured at the group level, but every individual gets a personal score based on their involvement in different groups

A strong social identity binds people together and to the unit, creating loyalty, teamwork, and mutual commitment. But a strong social identity also causes people to readily reject knowledge and practices that are different from how people in their group think and act—even though, when they stop to reflect, they agree with the ideas and accept the evidence that underlies such knowledge.

“superior performance not only does not require competition; it usually seems to require its absence.”19 The failure of competition to invariably foster superior performance is readily explained: Trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things.

Pygmalion effects can be created without inducing contrasts between high and low performers. When platoon leaders at training camps were convinced that all of the soldiers in their classes had unusually high command potential, there was still a strong Pygmalion effect. This research suggests that overall performance of a group can be increased when leaders expect everyone to do well. There is apparently no need to sort people into subgroups of high-status “winners” and low-status “losers” in order to use the power of the self-fulfilling prophecy to enhance performance.

People are better at learning new things, being creative, and doing intellectual tasks of all kinds when they don’t work under close scrutiny, they don’t feel as if they are constantly being assessed and evaluated, and they aren’t working in the presence of direct competitors.

Giving people the room and space to talk to each other is also important, because learning is the socialization of knowledge. People like to tell others what they are learning but they do not have the time for it. Companies spend all this money hiring smart people and then overburden them and do not allow them to share their knowledge.

The research literature going back decades is quite clear: One very effective way to reduce intergroup competition and conflict is to provide the groups struggling with each other with a common goal and a common external threat or enemy. This is a wonderful way of providing an external focus and a common social identity—us versus the outside competitors or threat.

Firms that are serious about building a cooperative internal culture take steps consistent with that goal. That includes being willing to fire, not hire, or encourage to leave people who may have talent but whose goals and behaviors are too competitive and individually oriented to fit. This requires making tough judgments and being willing to act on those judgments.

the program’s designers did not make the common mistake of treating knowledge as a “thing” stored away for later use. Rather, the goal of the program was to “build a network of people” across different parts of BP and “to let knowledgeable people talk to each other, not to try to capture or tabulate their expertise.”

“There was a lot of debate about this. Do you have senior principal, junior principal, senior associate, and so forth? And we said we didn’t want to make the lines between people more apparent than they already are, and those are the three titles and positions.” By reducing the distinctions among people and having as few status categories as possible, competition for status was downplayed and the structure emphasized building a shared identity within the firm. People felt they had a shared fate, that they were in it together, and there was less of a feeling of difference across classes or categories of people.

Organizational performance often depends more on how skilled managers are at turning knowledge into action than on knowing the right thing to do. Knowledge and information are obviously crucial to performance. But we now live in a world where knowledge transfer and information exchange are tremendously efficient, and where there are numerous organizations in the business of collecting and transferring best practices. So, there are fewer and smaller differences in what firms know than in their ability to act on that knowledge.

We human beings can learn some things those ways—mostly specific cognitive content. But many things, about organizations, operations, and people, can only be learned by firsthand experience. The tangible, physical, material aspects of knowledge acquisition and knowledge transfer, learning by doing, learning by coaching and teaching, are critical.

In a world where sounding smart has too often come to substitute for doing something smart, there is a tendency to let planning, decision making, meetings, and talk come to substitute for implementation. People achieve status through their words, not their deeds.

By pretending to be naïve and asking “dumb” questions, and even trying to design solutions that are known to be wrong, product designers can overcome the hazards of being too knowledgeable.