Every January, gyms fill up. By March, they’re half empty. Not one person who stopped going thought exercise was useless. They knew. They just didn’t do.
Business owners live this every day, only with bigger stakes:
- A restaurant owner knows the 30% discount on the delivery app is eating his margin. The discount is still running.
- A textile trader knows his buyers want a WhatsApp catalogue. His catalogue is still a printed file on the shop counter.
- A clinic owner knows she needs a second doctor so she can take a holiday. She hasn’t taken one in four years.
- A manufacturer paid ₹2 lakh for software his team never uses, because he still asks for reports on paper.
None of them needs another seminar. They need to cross the gap between knowing and doing.
What Is the Knowing–Doing Gap?
It’s the distance between what you know you should do and what actually gets done. Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton gave it its name in their book The Knowing-Doing Gap (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). In big companies, the gap sits between departments. In an owner-led business, it sits inside one person: the business owner.
Three Small Steps to Start This Week
- Pick one. Not five. The one change that would make the biggest difference if it happened.
- Shrink it to 48 hours. “Fix my pricing” becomes “Call my CA tomorrow and ask for product-wise margins.” Small enough that you can’t postpone it.
- Tell someone who will ask. A peer, a friend from your business network, a coach. Ask them to message you in two days: “Hua kya?”
The 30-Second Test
Answer honestly:
- Is there a change you’ve known about for more than six months and still not made?
- Have you learnt something useful in the last year and used almost none of it?
- Does anyone regularly check whether you did what you said you would?
If you ticked the first two and not the third, the problem isn’t what you know. It’s that nobody is helping you do it.
Where a Business Coach Helps
A good coach doesn’t give you more information. You already have plenty. A coach helps you get clear on what matters most, spot what’s really stopping you, and follow through every week until the change sticks.
To be fair, coaching isn’t always the first step. If you genuinely don’t know what to do, an expert consultant may serve you better. But if you know exactly what to do and it still isn’t happening, that’s precisely the gap coaching is built to close.
Quick Answers
What is the Knowing–Doing Gap? The distance between what a business owner knows he should do and what actually gets done.
How is a business coach different from a consultant? A consultant gives you an answer you don’t have. A coach helps you act on an answer you already have.
About the author: Aliakbbar Maimun, Ph.D., is an ActionCOACH-certified business coach and performance psychologist based in Nagpur and Raipur. He works with owners of ₹10–100 Crore businesses across Central India, combining business strategy with the psychology of the person running it.
