The Gap Between Knowing and Doing

One of the questions I've been asked more than any other throughout my career is why people continue doing the same thing, even when they know it isn't working.

At first glance, it doesn't make much sense. If we know a particular behaviour is damaging relationships, reducing performance or creating unnecessary conflict, surely changing it should be the obvious thing to do.

Yet whether I've been working with the military, elite athletes, teachers or business leaders, I've seen exactly the opposite. Intelligent, capable people often continue behaving in ways they know aren't serving them or those around them. The environment changes, the expectations change, sometimes even the people around them change, yet the behaviour remains remarkably familiar.

 

Why Information Is Not Enough

For a long time, I thought the answer was straightforward. I assumed people simply needed better information. If we could explain things more clearly, provide better leadership programmes or expose people to the latest research, behaviour would naturally follow.

It seemed logical because that's how many of us approach learning. We believe understanding should automatically lead to action.

The trouble is, experience has a habit of challenging theories.

I've watched organisations invest significant time and money in leadership development, communication workshops and culture programmes. The quality of the training is often excellent. People leave the room energised, talking enthusiastically about what they've learned and the changes they're going to make.

There is a genuine sense of optimism that this time things will be different. Yet six months later, many of the same conversations are taking place because very little has actually changed.

 

Asking the Wrong Question

It was only when I started reflecting on those experiences that I realised I'd been asking the wrong question.

Rather than asking whether the training had been good enough, I began asking whether information was ever the thing people were missing in the first place.

Most people already know what good leadership looks like. If you ask them, they'll describe the qualities we all value. They'll talk about trust, honesty and communication. They'll tell you that feedback should be respectful, that people perform better when they feel psychologically safe and that leaders should listen more than they speak.

None of that is new. In fact, most organisations could write those principles on a wall tomorrow and very few people would disagree with them.

So, if knowledge isn't the problem, why do the behaviours remain so difficult to change?

 

Information and Experience

The answer, at least in my experience, lies in the difference between information and experience.

When I look back over my own career, the moments that shaped me weren't the ones in which somebody stood at the front of a room and explained how leadership worked.

I can remember attending courses and reading books, and many of them were excellent, but they weren't the moments that fundamentally changed the way I saw myself as a leader.

Those moments arrived much more quietly than that.

Sometimes they came from watching someone handle a difficult conversation with a level of calm I didn't think was possible.

Other times, they came after I'd made a decision that felt completely justified, only to discover later that I'd misunderstood what the people around me actually needed from me.

Every now and again, they arrived through failure—not the dramatic kind people often talk about, but the uncomfortable moments that stay with you long after everyone else has forgotten them.

The conversations you replay on the drive home. The decisions you wish you could revisit. The moments when you realise that what you've always believed about leadership no longer explains what has just happened.

 

Challenging Our Assumptions

Those experiences changed me because they challenged something much deeper than my knowledge.

They challenged the assumptions I was carrying about how the world worked.

I think that's an important distinction.

Information adds to what we already know. Experience has the potential to reorganise what we believe.

The more I've reflected on this, the more convinced I've become that people rarely change because somebody presents them with a better argument.

They change because they experience something their current thinking can't comfortably explain.

At first, that feels uncomfortable. Our instinct is often to defend ourselves, justify our decisions or blame the circumstances.

But if we're prepared to sit with that discomfort for a little while, certainty gradually gives way to curiosity.

We stop asking, “Why don't they understand?” and start asking, “What if there's something I haven't understood?”

In my experience, that's where growth begins.

 

What People Need to Experience

That way of thinking sits at the heart of everything we've built at ETHOS.

People often ask what makes our approach different, and the honest answer is that we don't begin by asking what people need to know.

We begin by asking what they need to experience.

It's a subtle shift in language, but a profound shift in philosophy.

Knowledge can be delivered in an afternoon. Experience takes longer because it asks something different of us.

It asks us to observe before we judge. To test our assumptions instead of protecting them. To notice how people behave under pressure and become curious about our own responses.

It encourages us to wrestle with situations rather than memorise solutions, because behaviour doesn't change when information is stored; it changes when perspective shifts.

 

Creating the Conditions for Change

That's why we spend less time trying to convince people and more time creating experiences that allow them to reach their own conclusions.

I've seen those moments happen countless times. They rarely announce themselves with applause or dramatic breakthroughs.

More often, they're almost invisible.

Someone sits back quietly, smiles to themselves and says, “I've never looked at it like that before.”

It sounds like a simple sentence, but underneath it, something significant has happened.

An old assumption has been replaced by a new one, and from that point onwards, different behaviour becomes possible because the person no longer sees the situation in the same way.

 

Asking Better Questions

The more I work with leaders and organisations, the less interested I become in delivering perfect presentations.

What excites me now is creating experiences that leave people thinking long after the workshop has finished.

Not because they've been given another model to remember, but because they've discovered something about themselves that wasn't visible before.

Perhaps that's the real role of leadership.

Not to provide all the answers, but to create the conditions in which people begin asking better questions.

Because, in the end, I don't believe people change because they're told to.

I believe they change because experience quietly persuades them that there's a better way to see the world.