Title: The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge Into Action

Q: The 5 elements that widen the gap
A: 1. When Talk Substitutes for Action
2. When Memory Is a Substitute for Thinking
3. When Fear Prevents Acting on Knowledge
4. When Measurement Obstructs Good Judgment
5. When Internal Competition Turns Friends into Enemies

Q: Why typical knowledge management practices make knowing-doing gaps worse
A: - Knowledge management efforts mostly emphasize technology and the transfer of codified information
- Knowledge management tends to treat knowledge as a tangible thing, as a stock or a quantity, and therefore separates knowledge as some thing from the use of that thing.
- Formal systems can't easily store or transfer tacit knowledge.
- The people responsible for transferring and implementing knowledge managemnt frequently don't understand the actual work bein documented.
- Knowledge management tends to focus on specific practices and ignore the importance of philosophy.

Q: When is it likely to find talk substituting for action?
A: When:
-no follow-up is done to ensure that what was said is actually done
-people forget that merely making a decision doesn't change anything
- planning, meetings and report writing become defined as action that is valuable in its own right, even if it has no effect on what people actually do
- people believe that because have said it and it is in the mission statement, it must be true and it must be happening in the firm
-people are evaluated on how smart they sound rather than on what they do
-talking a lot is mistaken for doing a lot
-complex language, ideas, processes, and structures are thought to be better than simple ones
-there is a belief that managers are people who talk, and others do
-internal status comes from talking a lot, interrupting, and being critical of others' ideas

Q: How organizations avoid using talk as a substitute for action?
A: Using one or more of the following:
- have leaders who know and do the work,
- value simplicity and avoid unnecessary complexity
- use language that mobilize action and follow up on decisions

Q: When do organizations get trapped by their history?
A: - the company has such a strong identity that anything new is viewed as being inconsistent with who they are
- there are pressures to be consistent with past decisions, to avaoid admitting mistakes, and to show perseverance
- people have strong needs for cognitive closure and avoiding any ambiguity
- decisions are made based on implicit, untested, and inaccurate models of behavior and performance
- people carry expectations from the past about what is and isn't possible, and what can and can't be done, into the future

Q: How to drive fear and inaction out of organizations?
A: - Praise, pay, and promote people who deliver bad news to their bosses.
- Treat failure to act as the only true failure, punish inaction, not unsuccessful actions.
- Encourage leaders to talk about their failures, especially what they have learned from them.
- Encourage open communication.
- Give people second and third chances.
- Banish people who humiliate others.
- Learn from, and even celebrate, mistakes, particularly trying something new.
- Don't punish people for trying new things.

Q: How to drive out fear during hard times?
A: - Prediction: Give people as much information as possible about what will happen to them and when it will happen.
- Understang: Give people detailed information about why actions, especially actions that upset and harm them, were taken.
- Control: Give people as much influence as possible over what happens, when things happen, and the way things happen to them; let them make as many decisions about their own fate as possible.
- Compassion: Convey sympathy and concern for the disruption, emotional distress, and financial burdens that people face.

Q: Why ineffective measurement practices persist?
A: 1. Many companies operate using an oversimplified or incorrect model of human behavior.
2. Because that model of behavior is widely shared, it has become institutionalized in certain types of measures and measurement systems, which have assumed a taken-for-granted quality, have become a signal of competent management and are so widely diffused that firms are reluctant not to follow them.
3. The primacy of the capital markets and shareholder concerns creates pressures for measurement practices that are relevant to shareholders' interrests but may be irrelevant or even counterproductive for the ultimate success of the business.

Q: When is internal competition most likely to be prevalent and harmful?
A: - People have incentives to avoid helping others or even to undermine their work.
- Leaders act as if performance comes from the sum of individual actions rather than interdepent behaviors like cooperation, knowledge sharing, and mutual assistance.
- Management acts as if people in the firm are competing in a race or game in which the competitors are within the firm and there are only a few winners and many losers.
- The way that work is managed distracts people from the task at hand because they feel they are under scrutiny, are constantly being compared to others, and are focused on what internal rivals in the company are doing.
- Comparative or relative, rathar than absolute, evaluations are emphasized.
- Leaders are selected because they value competition and have a history of dominating peers in zero-sum contests.
- Little attention is paid to the power of expectations and the self-fulfilling prophecy, so people are labeled as loses or as being part of a bad unit and feel a lack of self-worth and resentment toward the firm

Q: Ways of overcoming destructive internal competition
A: - Hire, reward, and retain people in part based on their ability and willingness to work cooperatively with others for the company's welfare.
- Fire, demote and punish people who act only in their individual short-term self-interest.
- Focus people's attention and energy on defeating external competitive threats, not on fighting each other.
- Avoid compensation and performance measurement systems that create internal competition.
- Have measures that assess cooperation.
- Build a culture that defines individual success partly by the success of the person's peers.
- Model the right behavior via leaders acting collaboratively, sharing information, and helping others.
- Promote people to top management positions who have a history of building groups where members cooperate, share information, and provide each other mutual assistance.
- Use power and authority to get people and units to share information, to learn from each other, and to work collaboratively to enhance overall performance.