The Gap Between Knowing and Doing

Most net zero plans I see weren't strategies. They were press releases with a deadline.

I spent an hour last week with Fleur Garius and Chris Grimes for A Procurement Podcast: The Reform Rundown, working through circular economy, climate action, and what it actually takes to move a business from ambition to outcome. The conversation kept circling back to the same question. Why are organisations with brilliant strategies, good data, and genuine intent still stuck?

The gap between knowing and doing is not a data problem. It is a system problem. And that is what we fix.

A few things I've learned working in the trenches.

One. Strategy writers aren't operational people.

There's a disconnect between what gets said on stage and what your head of procurement is measured against in their KPIs. Everyone gets the why. The how is incredibly difficult to carve, even between two companies in the same industry. Cultural, infrastructural, emotional barriers in the way. What works for Company A doesn't work for Company B. This stuff is hard, and it deserves to be treated as hard rather than as an implementation detail.

Two. Better reporting will not save us.

Most companies have spent the last three years collating data and getting genuinely good insights into where they are. Then wondering why their 2024, 2025 and 2026 numbers have barely moved, or have moved in the wrong direction because the fidelity of the data has improved. Data is the baseline. Strategy is the response. Behaviour change is the action. They are not interchangeable.

Three. If everyone is responsible, no one is accountable.

Most organisations don't have an ownership problem at the top. Boards have signed off the targets. Most don't have an ownership problem at the bottom. The shop floor knows what it's doing. The gap is in the middle. The pile of decisions that affect outcomes but don't sit cleanly inside any one job description. Procurement sits across more of those decisions than almost any other function in the business, and rarely gets the airtime to match.

Four. Resilience is the conversation, not sustainability.

For 300 years we built an economic system on the assumption that finite resources are endless and labour is cheap. We now know there are consequences. Cost pressures, geopolitical limitations, material availability. Most of these show up in the supply chain. Most are not on the sustainability team's risk register. They are on the CFO's. That is where this conversation is shifting, and procurement is in the middle of it.

Five. You don't need a perfect plan. You need a start.

We've got into a state where people are paralysed unless they have a perfect data set and a perfect path. That's not how you change a system. Pick a product line. Pick a non-strategic geography. Prove the process at small scale. Understand the operational constraints. Replicate. The first move doesn't need to be elegant. It needs to be in the right direction.

The brands and public sector organisations I'm watching now are doing exactly this. Not because they have all the answers. Because they have the courage to start finding them.

I'll be unpacking all of this at Procurex 2026, Liverpool, 18 June, in the People Purpose and Planet Zone, including a live recording of The Reform Rundown with Fleur and Chris. If you're a procurement leader trying to close this gap, come and find me. I'd rather have a useful conversation than deliver a polished talk.

The gap between knowing and doing is not a data problem. It is a system problem. That is what we fix.