Knowing-Doing Gap – Guidelines for Action

This paper has been prepared by Andy Middleton of Pembroke Training. It is based on guidelines from Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton’s excellent book “The Knowing-Doing Gap”.

All of them seem applicable to the work we do with our clients and provide sound advice on what really needs doing to make change happen. Think about the guidelines from the perspective of your own work – how can you apply them to the team that you work with, as well as to the internal or external customers who are most important for your day-to-day work. Details of the book are at the end of the document. It’s well worth the read.

1. Understand Why before How
Philosophy is more important than planning. Too many managers want to know ‘how’ in terms of detailed actions, behaviours and techniques, rather than understand the real reason that a team or individuals are going to be likely to want to change.

Skip Le Fauvre, President of Saturn Motors, made a major impact at the US-based car manufacturer motors. He has this to say about the induction process:

“When you came into the organisation, the first thing the leaders did was introduce themselves to everyone who came into the company. And, the leaders taught the new people who the leaders are and what our philosophies are, what our background was, and what we hoped we would be able to achieve. We laid the philosophical base. That’s the first thing you get to do when you get to join Saturn.”

What do leaders do you in your firm? What is your philosophy for doing the best job that you possibly can? How are you communicating this to your suppliers and customers?

2. Knowing comes from doing and teaching others how
The biggest themes in Pfeffer and Sutton’s book are the importance of just getting on and doing it, and the importance of creating an atmosphere where mistakes are accepted as an essential part of the learning process. Think about the number of meetings that you have been to that have no end result. Ever wondered why? The following quotes may be enlightening:

“In a world of conceptual frameworks, fancy graphics presentations, and, in general, lots of words, there is too little appreciation for the power and indeed the necessity, of not just talking but of doing – and this includes explaining and teaching – as a way of knowing.”Rajat Gupta, Managing Director, McKinsey

“…we don’t have the knowledge because we’ve never had to implement it or teach it. And I see that's a huge gap, where people don’t engage in the learning process by teaching. And where companies are doing that, I think we are seeing far greater results on an operational level.Tom Lasorda, Senior Executive, General Motors

“When we started out, we probably didn’t do our training right. We did it in a way that we had always been taught…If you have facts to transmit, you stand up and transmit facts. Then you say, “what are your questions” and you dialogue around the questions and close the book. At the end, you assume people will go off and do something with it. That’s just dead wrong. And so we combined the experiential learning with some of the textbook learning. And the training got a little better…what really matters us you can get a team together around a business process that they think is really important in their business and have them participate in activities that show them what these tools for the quality process are all about”Senior Executive; quote from The
Knowing-Doing Gap, Pfeffer and Sutton

The last quote is particularly poignant for us, as it summarises what we have been working on for the last ten years (one of the reasons, too, why the book has so much resonance). Doing it, making it relevant, create deep understanding – three good start points for any training intervention.

3. Actions count more than elegant plans and concepts
Tom Peters talks about going for “ready, fire, aim” as a better approach than “ready, aim, fire” – suggesting that we take too long procrastinating rather than just getting on with it, perhaps making a few mistakes along the way. Without action at least some level, it is hard to know whether or not what you are thinking about will actually work. When you create a culture of “fire” rather than “aim”, you are sending out strong messages about the value of action rather than talk.

“If you sit around devising elegant and complex strategies and try to execute them through a series of flawless decisions, you’re doomed. We saved Continental because we acted and we never looked back”Greg Brenneman, COO Continental Airlines

Pfeffer and Sutton go on to say “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 to substitute for implementation. People achieve status through their talk, not their deeds”

One of the things that strikes us, looking back on much of our own work as well as that of our clients, is wondering how much more we could have achieved if we had been creating and following though actions for say half the time that we were in meetings.

Points to ponder. Which is the next meeting that you could sacrifice in favour of immediate action? Who do you need to push into action next?

4. There is no doing without mistakes.
What is your company response?Much of Pembroke’s work centres on the need to understand the relationship between risk and benefit, and in particular, on the perspective of short term and long term benefit. One might argue that the best short term route is always to take the easiest, least painful, least threatening route – avoid responsibility, shift the blame, say ‘it wasn’t my fault’… There’s a company called PSS/World Medical in the States that guarantees a ‘soft landing’ for anyone who makes a mistake in the business.

Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, in their book Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge, give this great example about Tom Watson Sr., IBM’s founder and CEO for many decades:
“A promising junior executive of IBM was involved in a risky venture for the company and managed to lose over $10 million in the gamble. It was a disaster. When Watson called the young executive into his office, the young man blurted out, “I guess you want my resignation?” Watson said, “You can’t be serious. We’ve just spent $10 million dollars educating you!”

The one thing that seems to keep coming around in this area of taking risks and making mistakes is that of intent. The next time that someone makes a mistake that has a negative impact on you, take a moment to reflect on what his or her likely intent was. If you can get your head around the possibility that they were acting with good intent, you are less likely to start blaming them and will be in a better frame of mind to start looking for solutions.

5. Fear fosters Knowing-Doing Gaps, so drive out fear.
What more is there to say? What can you do to drive out fear in the organisation and make sure that fear isn’t stopping you contribute as much as you are capable?

Pfeffer and Sutton paraphrase a pretty typical reason why high performance culture is understood but doesn’t get implemented: “we may not be doing very well, but at least our performance is predictable. And, no one has gotten fired for doing what we’re doing. So why should we try something new when there is risk involved?”

The main reason that we can think of doing something new is best understood by the idea of risk being a continuum that stretches from the risk of doing something at one end to the risk of no doing something at the end. Sure, there’s a risk attached to doing something new, but what’s the risk attached to not doing something new – in the longer term?

Putting values about people first on our agenda and eliminating fear requires getting your priorities right; even when, and particularly when, business is tough, it is critical that you still support your staff and ensure that integrity is never compromised.

An example of how this works comes from our own experience of working with Lucas SEI a few years ago.
A new General Manager, Simon Thane came in to run the site at Ystradgynlais in South Wales, taking over from an ‘old school’ autocratic predecessor. Within a couple of years, Simon had turned the site around to a level at which measures for quality and productivity were being exceeded in most areas of the business. Despite this, a group-level decision was made to close the site and relocate the business to Poland. The management team kept the whole site informed of what was happening, invested heavily in outplacement and made sure that there were no secrets. At no stage until the day that the site closed did the levels of productivity drop; the trade union representatives gave Simon a carriage clock as a small token of their thanks for his effort. This tale from Lucas is in no way unique however for us it is a great illustration of the effect of passion, trust, vision and a preparedness to take a few risks.

If fear starts or stops at the top, consider the role that you are playing for your time – which way are you pushing?

6. Beware of false analogies; fight the competition, not each other.
We’re not suggesting for a moment that competition is a bad thing and there are times when it is hard to beat the buzz of a good contest. However, and it is a big however, the game is to be clear about who it makes sense to compete with. It’s the short-term, long-term thing again. When you compete against people that you know, you probably have a pretty good understanding of the outcome – a bit of a lack of communication and cooperation, a few lost opportunities and nothing much lost apart from that – in the short term.
Competing against people that you don’t know so well us another game entirely; if you upset them, you never know what might happen. They might push back; they may bite; they might upset the apple cart on which your livelihood depends. Do you want to stick with what’s safe and compete against the people you know…or focus on what is more important in the longer term and compete against the people who are important & #8211; the competition?

7. Measure what matters and what can help turn knowledge into Action.
Greg Brenneman, who turned around Continental Airlines: “The foundation of any successfully run business is a strategy everyone understands coupled with a few key measures that are routinely tracked”. How many measures do you have in your area of work at the moment? How many pages of Excel spreadsheets do heads of departments need to get to grips with at the end of each month?

Dale Williams, a Director at LEIG, a UK-based performance management consultancy who we work with, is passionate about the need for the right balance between the kinds of measures that you work with. Dale helps his clients make the shift from being predominantly ‘backward’ – driving a business forwards on the basis of measures of things that have already happened, towards a more balanced approach that combines some historical date, some current data and some forward looking measures.

Pfeffer and Sutton suggest that you measure levels of knowledge implementation, rather than levels of knowledge per se. Work on finding ways of measuring the gap between what you know and what you do.

8. What leaders do, how they spend their time and how they allocate resources, matters.
Writers such as Kjell Nordstrom talk about the knowledge gap – how small the gap really is between what business leaders know and what their top managers know. Nordstrom also proposes that ‘the secret is out’ - that all of your competitors have access to the same business schools, conferences and consultants as everyone else; if this is the case, what do leaders need to be doing when they are not spreading the same knowledge that other people already know.

There is a good example of Dennis Bakke of AES in The Knowing-Doing Gap; he’s quoted saying that in 1997, he only made one decision. Without being facetious or cute, he understands that his job is to not to know everything and decide everything, but rather to create an environment where there are lots of people who both know and do.

Andy Middleton is managing director of the TYF Group with whom Brefi Group has a strategic alliance.