The research
Knowing is not doing.
The science says so.
Anchor stands on a well-documented truth: the distance between seeing a problem and acting on it is one of the most studied failures in human behavior. Psychologists call it the intention-behavior gap. Management calls it the knowing-doing gap. We call it the Action Gap. These are the sources that inform how we think and what we build.
A note on honesty: these references describe the problem and the science of acting on it. They are not claims about Anchor’s own results. Every source is linked to its primary so you can read it yourself.
Part one
The gap, named and measured
The distance between knowing and doing is not an opinion. It has a name, a literature, and a measurable size.
Jeffrey Pfeffer & Robert I. Sutton, 2000 · Harvard Business School Press
The book that named the gap: organizations fail not from missing knowledge but from never turning it into action.
Paschal Sheeran & Thomas L. Webb, 2016 · Social and Personality Psychology Compass
The canonical review showing that intention explains only a fraction of behavior. Knowing, and even meaning to, is not doing.
Thomas L. Webb & Paschal Sheeran, 2006 · Psychological Bulletin
The hard proof. Across 47 experiments, a large lift in intention produced only about half as much change in actual behavior.
Icek Ajzen, 1991 · Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
The framework that made intention the central predictor of behavior, and the baseline every gap study works from.
Part two
Why knowing is not doing
The cognitive and behavioral reasons insight stalls, and what actually moves a person from understanding to action.
Daniel Kahneman, 2011 · Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The two-system account of judgment behind why people so often fail to act on what they already know.
Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein, 2008 · Yale University Press
How the way a choice is presented, not just the information behind it, decides whether people act on it.
Chip Heath & Dan Heath, 2010 · Crown Publishing Group
Change holds only when the rational mind, the emotional mind, and the environment around them all move together.
Peter M. Gollwitzer, 1999 · American Psychologist
The evidence that a vague intention becomes action once it is turned into a specific plan: when this happens, I will do that. It is the mechanism behind handing someone the exact next move and the words for it.
Part three
From insight to action inside organizations
The same gap, scaled up to companies and institutions, and the frameworks built to cross it.
Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan & Charles Burck, 2002 · Crown Business
Execution is a discipline, not a memo: the real work of turning a decision into a result.
Ian D. Graham et al., 2006 · Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions
The Knowledge-to-Action framework, now a standard map for moving proven knowledge into everyday practice.
E. Andrew Balas & Suzanne A. Boren, 2000 · Yearbook of Medical Informatics
The origin of a sobering benchmark: it takes roughly seventeen years for proven findings to reach routine practice. The gap is real, and it is slow to close.
Part four
Retention and the manager
What the evidence says about why good people leave, what it costs, and where the leverage actually sits.
Gallup (Randall Beck & Jim Harter), 2015
Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement. The relationship with the direct manager, not the company-wide score, is where retention is won or lost.
Gallup (Shane McFeely & Ben Wigert), 2019
Replacing one employee costs between one-half and two times their annual salary, called a conservative estimate. And 52% of people who left said their manager or organization could have prevented it.
Heather Boushey & Sarah Jane Glynn, 2012 · Center for American Progress
Across thirty case studies, the cost of losing someone runs from about a fifth of their salary at the median up to 213% for the most senior and specialized roles.
Richard P. Finnegan, 2023 · SHRM
The stay interview: a structured conversation that surfaces what would keep a person while there is still time to act on it. It is the conversation a good retention practice is built around.
The discipline is free. We just made it easier to run.
Closing the Action Gap is a practice anyone can adopt. The Field Kit hands you the tools to start. Anchor is what runs the practice at scale, one person at a time, without asking your managers to hold it all in their heads.