Why Knowing What to Do Doesn’t Mean We’ll Do It

I’ve spent a large part of my career trying to understand why people behave the way they do, particularly when what they do seems to be completely at odds with what they know.

I find that gap fascinating because we experience it all the time. I know I should go to bed earlier, exercise consistently and probably spend less time looking at my phone. A leader can genuinely understand that they need to listen more and still dominate the next meeting. An organization can invest enormous amounts of time and money introducing a new system, explain exactly why it matters, train everyone to use it and then discover six months later that half the organization is still managing its work in spreadsheets.

In all of those examples, the problem isn’t necessarily that anyone needs more information. We can know exactly what we should do and still not do it.

Yet one of our most common responses when behavior isn’t what we want it to be is to explain again. We communicate more, provide more information, run another training session, share the evidence or remind people why something matters. We do it to ourselves too. We read another book, listen to another podcast, download another app or go looking for more information about something we already know we should probably be doing.

There seems to be an assumption buried somewhere in all of this that if we know better, we should do better.

Behavioral science tells us it is considerably more complicated than that.

Knowing something is only part of what shapes what we do

Think about something you know would be good for you that you don’t consistently do. Exercise is an easy example because most of us don’t need any more information about the benefits of physical activity. We know exercise is good for us, and many of us genuinely intend to do more of it.

You might go to bed on Sunday night completely committed to getting up and exercising before work on Monday morning. Then you sleep badly, it’s raining, your first meeting has been moved forward and when the alarm goes off, staying in bed suddenly feels like a much better idea.

Nothing happened overnight to change your knowledge about exercise. You didn’t wake up believing it was bad for you. You didn’t forget all the reasons you wanted to do it. In that particular moment, though, there were other things influencing your behavior and they won.

That is what makes human behavior so interesting. What we know matters, but it is only one of many things competing for influence over what we actually do.

Our habits matter. Effort matters. Emotion matters. What other people are doing matters. What we have done successfully before matters. What feels easiest in the moment matters. What gives us an immediate reward can matter more than something we know will benefit us at some point in the future.

Once you start looking at behavior this way, you begin seeing the knowing-doing gap everywhere.

Organizations do this all the time

I have seen countless versions of the same problem in organizations throughout my career. A new process or system is introduced, everyone is told why it matters, training is delivered and there is a reasonable expectation that people will now work differently.

Then they don’t.

Imagine an organization introduces a new project management system because it wants better visibility of projects across the business. Everyone receives training and understands that projects should now be managed through the new system. Six months later, people are still using a mixture of spreadsheets, emails, Teams messages and whatever individual approach they have developed over the years.

It is very tempting at this point to decide that people are resistant to change, or perhaps that they didn’t understand the training, and therefore the answer is another round of communication or education.

I would be much more interested in finding out whether they actually know what they are supposed to do.

If I sit down with someone and they can explain the new process to me perfectly, tell me why the organization introduced it and even agree that it is a sensible idea, then I have learned something important. Knowledge probably isn’t the problem.

That means repeating the message more loudly, more frequently or in a prettier PowerPoint presentation is unlikely to solve it.

Now I want to understand the gap between what that person knows and what they actually do.

Perhaps the spreadsheet is quicker. Perhaps their manager still asks for a separate report, so using the new system creates more work rather than less. Perhaps they have been doing something the same way for ten years and can complete it almost without thinking, while the new process requires conscious effort every time. Perhaps everyone around them is still using the old approach, so there is very little social pressure to change. Perhaps there is no consequence whatsoever for ignoring the new process.

There could be any number of explanations. The point is that I don’t know which one matters until I stop assuming the problem is a lack of understanding and become curious about the behavior itself.

We can be surprisingly unforgiving of ourselves

I think the same distinction is useful when we look at our own behavior because we can be remarkably judgmental about the gap between what we know and what we do.

We tell ourselves that we should know better. Sometimes we even use the fact that we do know better as evidence that there must be something wrong with us when we don’t follow through.

I know this is good for me, so why don’t I do it? I know this relationship isn’t working, so why do I keep going back? I know I feel better when I exercise, so why can’t I make myself do it? I know I need to have this conversation, so why am I still avoiding it?

Those are actually interesting questions, as long as we ask them with curiosity rather than using them as another way to criticize ourselves.

If I already know something and knowledge hasn’t been enough to change my behavior, then perhaps learning the same thing for the fifteenth time isn’t where I need to focus my attention. I might learn considerably more by asking what happens in the moment when my intention and my behavior part company.

That is the bit I want to understand.

Sometimes we need to stop explaining and start observing

None of this means information and education are unimportant. Of course they matter. If someone genuinely doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t understand why something matters or doesn’t have the skills to do it, then providing information or training may be exactly the right intervention.

The mistake is assuming that because the behavior hasn’t changed, the information hasn’t landed.

Sometimes it has landed perfectly well.

That is why one of the simplest things we can do before trying to change a behavior is establish whether there is actually a knowledge gap. If there is, address it. If there isn’t, continuing to explain the same thing is probably keeping us focused on the wrong problem.

Instead, I want to know what is happening in the space between knowing and doing. What happens at the moment someone intends to behave one way and behaves another? What makes the existing behavior easier, more familiar or more rewarding? What is competing with the behavior they intended? What are they getting from the current behavior that we haven’t noticed?

We don’t have to answer every question about human behavior at once. In fact, I think that is where the previous version of this article was trying to do too much.

For me, the useful idea here is much simpler.

The next time someone isn’t doing what they are supposed to do, and that someone can just as easily be us, it is worth checking whether they already know.

Because if they do, explaining it again probably isn’t the answer.

The much more interesting question is: if they already know, what else is going on?

That is usually where I want to start.