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 practices—across fields as diverse as environmental protection, social psychology, consumer choice, and family planning.
A related concept is the information deficit model, which first arose in science communication. Based on the notion that, if people are scientifically informed they will change their behavior, it focused on communication to win support for scientific exploration and new technologies. Yet study after study found that cognitive biases, social factors, and other externalities usually have more influence over our behavior than new information.
Why marches on Washington almost always fail
People often look back at the 1963 March on Washington as a model for change. But there have been roughly 300 marches on Washington, and that one remains the rare success. If we want to drive real change—in business, activism, or anywhere else—we need to study not just the rare wins, but all the failures too.
What the imitators miss is that the 1963 march was part of the endgame, not the initial step. The NAACP was founded in 1909 and focused on lawsuits and legislation. The Montgomery Bus Boycott took place in 1955—eight years earlier—and was resolved by a Supreme Court decision. The relatively small-scale Nashville sit-in was in 1960 and the Freedom Rides took place in 1961.
Each of these was meticulously prepared and executed by activists trained over weeks or months. The 1963 march was designed to support civil rights legislation proposed by a sympathetic President Kennedy. It was a way of showing support based on the years of disciplined activism that came before and targeted the middle-class fence-sitters in the North, not the racist antagonists in the South.
Great achievements don’t happen in public. Great athletes master their craft during the lonely hours after everyone else has gone home. Successful businesses are built one customer at a time. Meaningful personal bonds are often forged in the darkest hours. Anyone can be impressive when they’re winning. You show your mettle when you pick yourself up after a painful defeat.
What happened to all the chargers?
In 2021, the Biden administration passed the infrastructure bill, which included funding for 500,000 electric car chargers as part of its plan to jumpstart the green revolution and build a sustainable future. Yet by the end of his administration, a grand total of only eight had been built. On Inauguration Day in 2025, President Trump announced he was ending the program.
And that’s actually impressive progress compared to California’s proposed high-speed rail system. As part of President Obama’s stimulus package in 2009, a $10 billion bond was issued to fund a 500-mile high-speed line between Los Angeles and San Francisco by 2020. As of September 2025, little track has been laid, and the first section, between Bakersfield and Merced, isn’t expected to be completed until 2030.
In Overcomplicated, mathematician Sam Arbesman explains how things go awry in terms of two processes. The first is accretion. Laws get written to solve a particular problem, such as unelected bureaucrats like Robert Moses running roughshod over the public interest. The second, interaction, happens when these accumulated layers collide with real-world conditions and produce unexpected results.
That’s why ideas have limited value. The world is a messy, complicated place. Even good ideas can go bad over time, as things are added on top of them and they begin to interact with other, overgrown systems. What starts out seeming like a simple and elegant proposition often gets bogged down and eventually swallowed up in complexity.
Closing the gap
The human superpower is collaboration with other humans. We’re not particularly fast or strong, we can’t fly, and don’t have sharp claws or teeth. Yet, in Tribal, cultural psychologist Michael Morris explains how we are driven to emulate our peers, copy what’s successful ,and build on the work of those who came before us.
The problem is that as we build ideas on top of ideas, the forces of accretion and interaction can create complexity, and things begin to get bogged down. This, in turn, creates norms, rituals, and behaviors that favor what’s come before rather than what could be. That’s why the status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully.
Yet there are also a number of strategies that leaders can employ to help their organizations incorporate and act on new knowledge, while also avoiding needless complexity that gets in the way of getting things done. In the Friction Project, Sutton and Huggy Rao recommend building subtraction tools, such as “good riddance reviews, in order to get rid of requirements or procedures that get in the way. Amazon developed the concept of single threaded leaders to limit troublesome interactions.
Increasingly, the knowing-doing gap is being recognized as a serious and important problem. There have also been a slew of books that have come out about it recently, including Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance, Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America, Marc Dunkelman’s, Why Nothing Works and Hack Your Bureaucracy, by Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai. All offer helpful insights and suggestions.
But the most important thing to remember is that the knowing-doing gap is, above all, a leadership challenge. It is very rare for people to come into work without wanting to achieve anything meaningful. Their ability to perform is, in large part, a result of the culture you create and you prepare and empower them to succeed.