If you know what works, why is it so hard to make it happen?
Why the knowing-doing gap appears and what it takes to bridge it
Hello and welcome to 2026 and the first Cognitive Download of the new year.
In case you missed it, we closed out 2025 with some pretty big news: Brink is now part of Africa Practice.
Part of why this acquisition makes so much sense for us is that Africa Practice not only shares our belief that people are the route to progress, but they also have the policy expertise and the geopolitical insight, which means they can shift systems at scale. That makes them a perfect partner for our work with ventures and entrepreneurs and our ability to design and test change on the ground.
This combination allows us to do something neither of us could do alone: to unblock systems and create the conditions for change that sticks, working across multiple perspectives at once rather than handing off between them.
That’s a capability we think matters now more than ever. So, in this first issue of 2026 we wanted to dig into a pattern we’re seeing across health programmes, education initiatives and climate projects, and the quiet concerns shared by many people working in these areas (and many of you reading this newsletter).
You have the evidence, the research is clear, and yet you can’t get rid of the nagging suspicion that your efforts won’t make a lasting difference.
So many of you that we speak to and work with are confident about what can work. You have the evidence, the research is clear, the pilots are working to prove it… And yet you can’t get rid of the nagging suspicion that your efforts won’t make a lasting difference. Those fears are borne out by the numbers. McKinsey recently found that 84% of pilot projects stay stuck in pilot mode for over a year, and healthcare shows a persistent 17-year gap between empirical discoveries and the actual implementation of those discoveries.
We think this gap occurs because of two human behavioural patterns that, in social impact settings, amplify each other. And we think what makes the Brink-Africa Practice combination so exciting is that it’s built to bridge that space.
The knowing-doing gap
There are two human patterns at play here, and in social impact settings they create compounding problems.
The first is about how our brains handle complexity. Humans have a strong cognitive bias toward simple, individual-level explanations for behaviour - what psychologist Lee Ross called the "fundamental attribution error." We consistently underestimate situational factors and overestimate personal disposition when explaining why people do what they do. When someone fails to use a health service, we assume they lack motivation rather than looking at whether the system makes it accessible; or when a policy doesn’t translate into change, we blame implementation capacity rather than questioning whether the policy acknowledged ground-level reality.
The second is about how organisations are structured. Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton at Stanford spent years documenting how organisations routinely fail to act on knowledge they already possess, not because people are lazy or stupid but because the capability to know sits in one part of the organisation while the capability to do sits somewhere else, and those two places don’t talk to each other. This structural separation is what creates the knowing-doing gap.
Organisations routinely fail to act on knowledge they already possess, not because people are lazy or stupid but because the capability to know sits in one part of the organisation while the capability to do sits somewhere else.
You only have to look at maternal care in Sub-Saharan Africa to see both patterns feeding each other. There are decades of research and documented interventions on the clinical requirements needed for saving mothers’ lives. And yet a 2010 review identified both a “science to policy” gap and a “policy to practice” gap that keeps decision makers’ work at one level, and practitioners’ work at another. Because people struggle to think across both simultaneously, each group diagnoses the problem differently - policy makers blame poor implementation, practitioners blame unrealistic policy… And around and around we go.
It’s possible to know and do at the same time!
This is not a simple problem to solve (a 2022 study into maternal health services in Sub-Saharan Africa confirmed that knowledge still wasn’t being translated into real progress because of disconnected health systems), but that doesn’t mean it’s unsolvable.
The Pakistan-based startup Taleemabad (who we worked alongside as part of the FCDO-funded EdTech Hub) spent seven years selling directly to teachers and schools while simultaneously learning what it would take for government to adopt their platform. So when they finally hit the ‘institutional inflection point’ and went from reaching 20,000 children to 136,000 in a single year, they were ready. It’s similar work to what we’re doing now with Enabel’s Innovation Hub, supporting organisations across sub-Saharan Africa to scale by working across community, organisational, and governmental levels simultaneously.
But this practice remains rare in impact-focused organisations because their organisational structures won’t allow it. Funders typically fund at one level - either research, or policy, or implementation. Teams are organised by specialism - the policy experts sit separately from the practitioners, who sit separately from the researchers. Incentives reward depth at a single level rather than coordination across them.
The knowing-doing gap persists because the organisational architecture makes coordination structurally difficult.
We’re building the Brink-Africa Practice combination to work differently. Over the coming months, we’ll be tackling questions in ways we couldn’t before: how impactful nonprofits can build sustainable business models via both innovation models and policy environments, how capital flows to Africa could support rather than hinder development, or how to move from observing AI’s impact on education systems to actually shaping better outcomes.
We’d love to hear your stories too - where are you seeing organisations successfully work across multiple levels? What’s made that possible? Hit reply and let us know.
This month’s mystery links
Your reward for reading down this far…
Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security.
Narrative is not about word play or spin. Narratives shape the policies which shape the world.
There are currently 1,693 people receiving this newsletter. 1693 is a prime number - and better yet, it’s a twin prime with 1691 (primes separated by just 2). Theoretically, there are infinitely many twin primes, but no one has been able to prove that yet. Another example of the knowing-doing gap?
If you’d like to help our numbers grow a little, then click the button to send this issue to a friend or colleague: