The difference between knowledge and knowing
The difference between knowledge and knowing
Why is it so hard to act on what we know? Whether it’s exercising more, eating healthier, or tackling urgent problems like climate change, we often struggle to turn intellectual understanding into meaningful action.
This tension — the gap between understanding and action — is something Dougald Hine explores in his book At Work in the Ruins. He draws from Chris Goode’s insights and Kari Norgaard’s observations to distinguish between “knowledge” — the abstract facts we hold at arm’s length — and “knowing,” a deeper, more vulnerable engagement that can change us. While knowledge often remains detached, abstract, and intellectual, knowing is intimate and transformative, involving vulnerability and emotional engagement. Hine suggests that truly "knowing" something has consequences, as it can change us, disrupt our stories about ourselves, and demand action.
As I reflected on this, I realised this gap between knowledge and knowing is deeply relevant to my own work in monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL). In many ways, MEL professionals operate within the realm of translating knowing into knowledge. Working for a funder, I rarely experience the personal lived realities of the people our projects aim to support. On the rare occasions I do visit project partners, however, the experience often feels transformative. I distinctly remember visiting our partner, the Tamkeen Community Foundation, in Morocco, where they had arranged conversations with communities and schools they had worked with. Sitting with people, hearing their stories, sensing their emotions, and witnessing the impact of the work firsthand left me with a depth of understanding I could never have gained from reading reports alone.
As Hine puts it, knowing comes first and last; the arm's-length forms of knowledge are intermediate. In MEL work, we abstract personal, lived experiences into reports or data points that often lose much of their original context. Narratives may preserve context but produce overwhelming amounts of qualitative data, while quantitative indicators are easier to aggregate but strip away richness. In practice, we combine both approaches, though neither fully resolves this tension.
In any case, we are pretty good at the first step, the translation of knowing to knowledge that can be transmitted. Indeed, the MEL world has worked hard over the last decades to become better and better at that, where better means more precise, rigorous, reliable, credible, and even inclusive.
We excel at gathering data and creating reports, transforming the knowing of those on the ground into digestible knowledge for funders and stakeholders. Yet this process often stops short of helping decision-makers reconnect with the raw, lived realities behind the data. How might we reintroduce knowing into our work — creating space for emotional engagement, intuition, or even discomfort that prompts meaningful change? How do we move beyond arm's-length abstractions and create living spaces where data and stories evoke not just understanding, but also action? Perhaps the answer lies not in striving for greater precision, but in embracing the vulnerability of knowing.
Perhaps it means creating more opportunities for decision-makers to engage directly with those on the ground, hearing their stories firsthand — even though we know this approach isn’t without its challenges. Or maybe it involves shifting our focus toward qualitative methods that preserve the richness of context, even if they defy aggregation – I know many of us are trying this, but is it enough? What I'm quite certain of is that it means encouraging reflective practices — asking people to grapple with the raw stories behind the data and sit not only with their intellectual, but also with their emotional responses before jumping to action. But this is hard.
If we want to truly learn and adapt, we need to do more than analyse data or craft reports. We need to create living spaces where knowledge comes alive, sparking the kind of knowing that changes us.
How do you see this playing out in your work? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Reference: Hine, Dougald. 2023. At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All the Other Emergencies. Chelsea Green Publishing.
Photo: Winder has arrived here in Switzerland, at least for a few days. I took the photo this morning from my home.