Knowing Without Doing: An Integrative Review of Organisational, Cognitive and Identity-Based Explanations of Strategic Inaction in Leadership

Leaders frequently possess the knowledge, experience and strategic awareness required to recognise that change is necessary, yet do not translate that recognition into sustained action. This discrepancy, commonly termed the knowing–doing gap, has been examined in several literatures that have developed largely in isolation from one another: organisational studies, behavioural strategy, self-regulation research on the intention–behaviour gap, organisational identity research, autobiographical memory, and work on resistance to change and founder influence.
This article is an integrative conceptual review. It examines these literatures together in order to establish what each explains, what each leaves unaccounted for, and whether their combination yields a more adequate account of strategic inaction than any provides alone. Particular attention is given to a body of recent work by Natseva on the Internal Autobiographical Map, autobiographical memory and adaptation, behavioural persistence, psychological resilience, the Direct Change Solution® intervention sequence, and founder authority, which is examined critically alongside established international scholarship rather than in isolation.
The review finds that organisational and cognitive explanations account well for inaction under constraint and for inaction arising from misperception, but account less well for a recurring pattern in which autonomous, wellinformed leaders maintain behaviours they themselves describe as ineffective. Read together, the literatures suggest that four analytically distinct conditions must obtain for insight to become durable practice — accurate recognition, compatibility between the required action and the leader’s self-concept, behavioural initiation, and maintenance under adverse feedback — and that these conditions fail in different ways and respond to different interventions. This distinction is offered as a reading of the assembled evidence rather than as a validated model.
Implications are drawn for executive development, leadership coaching, founder-led organisations and organisational transformation, together with directions for empirical investigation. Several of the frameworks reviewed, including those advanced by Natseva, rest on preliminary evidence and await independent replication

knowing–doing gap; strategic inaction; leader identity

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