The Knowing-Doing Gap and the Seeing-Being Trap
Why organisations find it so hard to do what they already know.
"There's nothing so practical as a good theory" – Kurt Lewin
Kurt Lewin (1890-1947), founding father of social psychology, understood that the best theory is one that works in real-world practice.
Although I’d not heard of Lewin at the time, that thinking was behind my choice of course when I decided to study engineering waaaaay back in the 1970’s.
I wanted a course that combined academic study with practical experience in an engineering environment, which in my case was with BAE Systems. 1
My choice was heavily influenced by a story of a First Class Honours Mech Eng graduate from Oxford University turning up for his first real world job.
He’d arrived to find his boss on vacation, and so was sent to spend his first week on the shop floor, getting to know the kind of equipment the firm produced.
The chargehand showed him a machine in for servicing, handed him a screwdriver, and asked him to remove the inspection cover.
The freshly minted engineer, with his first class degree from a world leading university, approached the first screw and proceeded to try to turn it the wrong way.
It turns out he’d never picked up a screwdriver, or any kind of engineering tool before.
I was horrified by this story. How could anyone with an engineering degree – especially a first from Oxford – have never done any actual engineering..? 2
The same phenomenon occurs even more frequently in organisational culture change.
In the 1990's, two Stanford Professors, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, undertook a four-year study into why, in a world awash with change theories, organisations had achieved so little real-world change.
The problem they found was not that executives don't already know what they need to do, but they don't do what they already know.
They published their findings in “The Knowing-Doing Gap” (2000) subtitled "How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action". 3
Unfortunately, despite the promising subtitle they confessed: "We found no simple answers to the knowing-doing dilemma" and concluded that "given the importance of the knowing-doing problem, if such simple answers existed, they would already have been widely implemented."
Are you, like me, struck by the irony of a book about the gap between knowing and doing concluding that if we knew why the gap existed we’d have done something about it..?
That’s the problem with organisational culture change right there in a nutshell.
We’re so blinded by conceptual knowledge that even when top scholars research why we don’t take action on what we know, they conclude the problem is a lack of knowledge…
But, like the engineer who’d never picked up a screwdriver, the problem is not a lack of theoretical knowledge, it’s a lack of real-world, sleeves-rolled-up, dirt-under-the-fingernails experience with tackling organisational culture.
In 35 years of real-world practice helping organisations create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility and adaptiveness, I’ve not come across a single organisation that lacked conceptual, theoretical knowledge about culture change.
In fact, quite the opposite.
Most client organisations I’ve worked with had previously hired traditional consulting firms with clever concepts and crisply marketed methodologies.
Many had suffered a sequence of disasters, with ‘best practices’ from one old-school firm after another, before the penny finally dropped that this kind of ‘help’ actually hinders… 4
Sadly, it’s only after being let down like this that most organisations look further afield for people with the experience they need.
To be fair, old-school consulting firms are highly efficient, well-oiled machines set up and optimised for the kind of work they’ve been doing for many, many decades – providing well researched, logically reasoned, clearly presented ‘book smarts’. 5
But without the ‘street smarts’ required to create future-fit cultures, their one-size-fits-all, best practice methods fail in 70- 90% of cases – their self-confessed failure rate according to old-school consulting’s brand leader, McKinsey. 6
There are three main reasons for this sad litany of repeated failures:
Cultural transformation involves developing future-fit attitudinal and behavioural muscles within the client organisation. These muscles will never develop under the old-school consulting model where junior consultants are shipped in by the busload to do the heavy lifting.
Every client organisation is unique, and what works in one organisation hardly ever works in the next. This means one-size-fits-all approaches are only ever best practice for consulting revenues, not client results.
Theoretical concepts, models, and methodologies are not enough to change mindsets, attitudes and behaviours. It’s absolutely crucial to find and focus efforts on the unique leverage points for change within the existing culture.
To create a future-fit culture, where sense making, decision making & action taking are tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the organisation, you must understand, deeply and precisely, why your organisation isn’t already operating like that.
The highest leverage, lowest risk place to focus those efforts is on the key influencers, unique to each organisation and not always in the most senior positions, whose mindsets, attitudes and behaviours systemically affect everyone and everything else. 7
A future-fit culture of innovation, agility and adaptiveness emerges naturally and automatically when these key influencers escape their seeing-being traps. 8
Seeing-being traps constrain the ability to see beyond the familiar.
They’re why it’s possible to understand what needs to be done but be unable to do it.
Seeing-being traps are the underlying root cause of the knowing-doing gap described by Pfeffer and Sutton, and the fundamental reason organisations don’t develop future-fit cultures despite the increasingly urgent need.
The highest leverage, lowest risk way forward for any organisation is always unique to them, due to their always unique pattern of key influencers and seeing-being traps.
I’ve published extensively before in this Substack channel and my website on how you can take high leverage, low risk action in your own organisation by focusing your efforts precisely and deeply on shifting the mindsets, and therefore attitudes and behaviours, of the key influencers.
If you want to set up a call to explore in more detail your organisation’s unique aspirations, circumstances, and constraints, drop me a line.
I joined Hawker Siddeley Dynamics (HSD) in late 1976. BAE Systems was formed in 1977 from a combination of British defence contractors including HSD.
I spent much of my youth rebuilding cars, covered in oil and with skin missing from my knuckles, hence my horror…
Hired Help That Hinders is the fifth and most systemically toxic of the Five Fatal Habits that have consistently stifled, smothered, and strangled organisational efforts to create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility and adaptiveness for more than three decades.
Brand leading old-school finders, minders, grinders consulting firm McKinsey was established almost a century ago in 1926.
McKinsey made this admission here. Note they say: “We know, for example, that 70 percent of change programs fail to achieve their goals, largely due to employee resistance and lack of management support”. In fact it’s more the case that “We know, for example, that 70 percent of change programs fail to achieve their goals, largely due to them being led by old-school finders, minders, grinders consulting firms like McKinsey”.
Find out more about key influencers here (7 min video).
Find out more about seeing-being traps here (7 min video).