How the ‘Knowing-Doing Gap’ undermines even the best ideas

A while back we had Stanford Professor Bob Sutton on our podcast. Bob is someone who I’ve long admired, and he didn’t disappoint. He’s had a brilliant career and written groundbreaking management books, but what makes him unique is his ability to forge decades-long relationships with legendary CEOs. He told us a great story about one of them, Ed Catmull, CEO of Pixar. Shortly after the launch of Catmull’s bestselling memoir, Creativity Inc, Bob went to an event at Pixar’s corporate headquarters. While he was there, one of Pixar’s movie directors said to him, “That’s a great book… I wish I worked at that company.” Even at a company as successful as Pixar, with all of its legendary accomplishments, there is still a gap between theory and practice. A quarter century ago Bob documented this phenomenon in the bestselling book he wrote with Jeffrey Pfeffer, The Knowing-Doing Gap. It’s not enough to identify the right strategy; you have to ensure that it gets carried out. Coming to terms with the knowing-doing gap Wise leaders strive to bring the best thinking to their organizations. They read management books to keep up with the latest thinking, pay to send their executives to courses at the world’s top business schools and invest in quality learning organizations and training programs. You can’t be an elite organization without access to the best thinking. Yet as Sutton and Pfeffer wrote a quarter century ago, “There is only a loose and imperfect relationship between knowing what to do and the ability to act on that knowledge.” They also cited research from Ernst & Young that reported that less than a third of executives felt that their organization incorporated new knowledge into their decision making and embedded things learned into their processes, products and services. The problem doesn’t just exist in organizations either. Researchers have documented a broad and pervasive KAP-Gap—meaning that shifts in knowledge and attitudes don’t necessarily result in shifts in p