Knowing-doing Gap Research Articles

Knowing "What" to Do Is Not Enough: Turning Knowledge into Action

Why, in light of all the substantial resources firms devote to improving their performance, do so few management practices actually change? In fact, knowledge management at many companies often makes the knowing-doing gap worse. This article explains why firms find it so difficult to translate knowledge into practice and offers a set of guidelines that address the sources of this problem. Knowing what to do is not enough; the challenge for managers is to figure out how to do what they know needs to be done.

Workshops to Combat Sexual Harassment: A Case Study of Changing Attitudes

In 1980, the affirmative action office at the University of Michigan established a sexual harassment task force to begin developing a multifaceted attempt to combat sexual harassment on campus. "Tell Someone," as the resulting program came to be known, has as one of its components a training workshop for engaging in personal and institutional battle with sexual harassment.' At the center of the workshop is a set of twelve trigger tapes (thirty-second videotaped dramas), six focused on student settings and six focused on employment settings. The tapes are designed to demonstrate the variety, complexity and genuine uncertainty typically surrounding incidents of sexual harassment, and they examine several basic forms: (1) male harassing female; (2) female harassing male; (3) heterosexual harassing homosexual; and (4) homosexual harassing heterosexual.2 With the help of trained facilitators, work-