Knowing-Doing Gap
The Knowing-Doing Gap is Jeffrey Pfeffer‘s term (from the 2000 book with Robert Sutton) for the chasm between understanding what to do and actually doing it. Pfeffer’s sharper framing in the power context: the primary obstacle to building influence is not a lack of knowledge — almost everyone knows what to do — but the failure to act on it.
Why the gap exists
- Discomfort and fear of judgement. The actions that build power feel socially uncomfortable, so people shy away even while agreeing they work.
- A preference for being right over being effective. It is more comfortable to hold a correct opinion than to do the awkward thing that produces a result.
- Learning evaporates if unused. Knowledge you never apply disappears — the French-class analogy: study French, never speak it, and it is gone within months.
Closing the gap
Pfeffer treats the gap as the real curriculum, not the content. His mechanisms:
- Do the thing (‘Doing Power’). His Stanford course requires students to apply a principle in the real world during the quarter, not merely learn it.
- Practice and coaching, scaled gradually. Move from denial to acceptance the way you’d train any skill — start inside your comfort zone and push out by increments (compare Carole Robin’s ‘15% rule’); you cannot ‘swim the English Channel’ on day one.
- Don’t do it alone. His single most actionable piece of advice: if it’s uncomfortable, get a coach and a personal board of directors who advise, support, and hold you accountable.
- Set goals. The course opens with explicit goal-setting, drawing on the goal-setting research literature.
‘You cannot learn tennis by reading about tennis’ — the gap closes only through repetition under feedback.
In the wiki
- The operational counterpart to the Seven Rules of Power: knowing the rules is inert without doing them, which is why Pfeffer pairs the taxonomy with applied assignments.
- See the deep notes.