How the knowing-doing gap turns plans into losses

knowing-doing gap – From Pixar’s culture lesson to the collapse of grand public promises like new electric car chargers, the piece traces how “knowing” rarely becomes “doing” without sustained follow-through. It ties organizational friction, accumulated complexity, and leadership

A director at Pixar heard a book praise what worked inside the company—and still felt a painful mismatch the moment he spoke up.

“That’s a great book… I wish I worked at that company.”

The exchange landed with Stanford Professor Bob Sutton. a management writer whose work often focuses on what separates brilliant ideas from the results they’re supposed to produce. Sutton was at Pixar’s corporate headquarters not long after the launch of his memoir subject Ed Catmull’s bestselling book. Creativity Inc. Yet even amid Pixar’s celebrated success. the director’s remark carried a quiet warning: theory can travel farther than execution.

That gap—between knowing what to do and actually doing it—has a name. About a quarter century ago, Sutton documented it with Jeffrey Pfeffer in The Knowing-Doing Gap, arguing that spotting the right strategy isn’t enough. The real test is whether it gets carried out.

Sutton and Pfeffer put it bluntly: “There is only a loose and imperfect relationship between knowing what to do and the ability to act on that knowledge.” They also drew on research from Ernst & Young showing that less than a third of executives felt their organizations incorporated new knowledge into decision-making and embedded what they learned into processes. products. and services.

The same problem doesn’t stay trapped in boardrooms. Researchers have described a broad and pervasive KAP-Gap. where changes in knowledge and attitudes do not necessarily lead to changes in practices. Studies have examined it across fields as diverse as environmental protection, social psychology, consumer choice, and family planning.

Another way to frame the failure is the information deficit model, which first rose in science communication. The idea was simple: if people were scientifically informed, they would change behavior. Yet study after study found cognitive biases, social factors, and other externalities often matter more than new information.

The pattern shows up beyond organizations too—especially in public efforts that depend on people translating belief into action.

Consider Washington, D.C. Many people look back to the 1963 March on Washington as a model for change. But roughly 300 marches on Washington have happened, and that one success remains rare. If change is the goal—whether in business, activism, or elsewhere—the failures are just as instructive as the victories.

What imitators miss, according to Sutton’s framing, is that the 1963 march wasn’t the opening move. It was part of an endgame.

The NAACP was founded in 1909 and focused on lawsuits and legislation. The Montgomery Bus Boycott began in 1955 and was resolved eight years later through a Supreme Court decision. The Nashville sit-in happened in 1960, and the Freedom Rides followed in 1961. Each effort, in this telling, was meticulously prepared and executed by activists trained over weeks or months.

The 1963 march, meanwhile, was designed to support civil rights legislation proposed by a sympathetic President Kennedy. It was also described as a targeted message: aimed at middle-class fence-sitters in the North, not the racist antagonists in the South.

Even with that kind of planning, the lesson isn’t comfortable. Great achievements, the argument goes, don’t unfold on stage for the cameras. Great athletes master their craft during lonely hours after everyone else goes home. Successful businesses get built one customer at a time. Meaningful personal bonds can be forged in the darkest hours. And when you’re already winning. it’s easy to look impressive—what proves mettle is what happens after a painful defeat.

That distinction helps explain why some policy promises don’t survive the shift from announcement to implementation.

In 2021. the Biden administration passed an infrastructure bill that included funding for 500. 000 electric car chargers as part of its plan to jumpstart the green revolution and build a sustainable future. By the end of his administration, only eight had been built. On Inauguration Day in 2025, President Trump announced he was ending the program.

The comparison is stark, but the point lands closer to execution than politics. The piece contrasts the charger outcome with California’s proposed high-speed rail system. Under 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—wasn’t expected to be completed until 2030.

So how do projects like these drift so far from the timetable that sells them?. One explanation offered comes through mathematician Sam Arbesman’s framework in Overcomplicated. He describes two processes: accretion and interaction. Accretion is how laws and rules accumulate to solve one problem—such as unelected bureaucrats like Robert Moses running roughshod over the public interest. Interaction happens when those accumulated layers collide with real-world conditions and produce unexpected results.

That’s the mechanism that makes “good ideas” fragile. In a messy, complicated world, what starts as a simple and elegant proposition can get bogged down as new layers stack on top. Over time, the original plan can be swallowed by complexity.

The same forces, the piece argues, show up in leadership and organizational change. Michael Morris, a cultural psychologist, is cited through his work in Tribal, explaining how people are driven to emulate peers, copy what’s successful, and build on work that came before them.

Yet as ideas stack on ideas, accretion and interaction can create complexity. Norms, rituals, and behaviors can form in ways that protect what already exists rather than what could be. The status quo, then, gains inertia and doesn’t give up its power gracefully.

The story doesn’t end with diagnosis. It turns to what leaders can do to close the gap.

Sutton and Huggy Rao’s Friction Project is used to recommend “subtraction tools”—ways to remove requirements or procedures that get in the way. Amazon, the piece says, developed the concept of single threaded leaders to limit troublesome interactions.

It also points to a growing wave of attention on the knowing-doing gap, citing recent books: Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson; Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka; Why Nothing Works and Hack Your Bureaucracy by Marc Dunkelman, Marina Nitze, and Nick Sinai.

Still, the central takeaway returns to leadership. People rarely come to work without wanting to achieve something meaningful. Their ability to perform is, in large part, the result of the culture leaders create—how they prepare, and how they empower people to succeed.

In other words, the gap isn’t just a problem of information. It’s a problem of follow-through—of removing the friction between what leaders say they know and what their organizations actually do.

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