Action Gaps vs. Information Gaps
Trust and shared ownership are crucial for organizations to act on existing data; without inclusive interpretation processes, information gaps often mask deeper action gaps that hinder decision-making.
Staff at one museum didn’t distrust their visitor research — they distrusted the summaries their colleagues produced from it. The data was fine. The interpretation felt like someone else’s conclusion, arrived at behind closed doors, handed down as settled.
That gap between information and the conditions surrounding its interpretation is well-documented. “We need better data” is a familiar refrain in museum leadership, and a reliably misleading one. It frames the challenge as an information gap: if we just had the right research, the right metrics, the right evaluation, we’d know what to do. But most organizations already possess far more information than they act on. The gap is usually an action gap, and the constraint is trust and shared ownership, not data quality.
The relationship works multiplicatively: informational value × relational capacity = organizational action. Organizations can’t act on flawed data regardless of trust, but flawless data goes nowhere when the people expected to act on it had no hand in shaping the questions or interpreting the answers. Museums tend to reproduce exactly these conditions. Research gets commissioned by leadership, interpreted by a small team, and presented to staff who played no role in either process. Szulanski’s work on knowledge transfer found that only 14% of organizations rate their internal knowledge transfer as satisfactory, and relationship quality between source and recipient predicts transfer success at every stage. Museums that want research to drive decisions have to design for it: shared interpretation, visible methodology, contestable reasoning. That’s process work, not data work, and it’s usually where organizations stop short.
Procedural justice research across 183 studies finds that process effects on trust are strongest when outcomes are unfavorable. People accept difficult conclusions they helped interpret. Staff skepticism about handed-down findings isn't irrational; it reflects appropriate doubt when the methodology is opaque and interpreters have a stake in the conclusions. The dynamic shifts when reasoning becomes visible, contestable, and jointly owned.
Sources:
- Colquitt et al., Justice at the Millennium: A Meta-Analytic Review (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2001)
- Szulanski, Exploring Internal Stickiness (Strategic Management Journal, 1996)