Nearly ten years ago, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton wrote the book, The Knowing Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action. A decade later, their ideas still resonate as companies struggle to execute.

But I’ve seen another gap emerge, one that complements the Knowing Doing gap. This new gap is the Committing Doing gap. This is when leaders not only know what do but also commit to it and yet don’t see any change. How many people in your organization are “committed” to reducing costs, improving employee engagement, developing the workforce, or encouraging innovation?

The main problem is that tend to commit to ideas rather than actions or outcomes. I think there are four reasons for this:

First, figuring out actions takes time which most leaders believes they don’t have. Yet interestingly, allocation of time is one of the best proxies for level of commitment. Too many meetings end before real commitments for actions and results are made. Instead, once everyone agrees upon some high level platitudes, the meeting ends.

Second, actions create personal accountability and the opportunity to fail. It’s easy for me to “commit” to reducing organizational costs. It’s another to commit to reduce my department’s budget by 30% or to start using corporate support resources rather than my own. You can tell if I’ve actually delivered on those latter two commitments. For the former, I just need to continue to talk a good game.

Third, committing to action requires understanding of what to do. Leaders don’t like to set themselves up for failure. We’ve all been taught to under promise and over deliver. But that’s not what leadership is about. Leadership is about accepting responsibility to make problems go away. It’s about managing ambiguity. Most problems have a finite window of opportunity to solve. Commit to solving them within that timeframe. Then go figure out how to make it happen.

Fourth, we don’t hold people accountable. Accountability also takes time and effort. In any organization, the things to which people are implicitly and explicitly held accountable are the true measure of that organization’s commitments. If your organization doesn’t feel that it can “stomach” additional accountabilities, perhaps it is casting its vote for what matters.

It’s time to change our question from “Do we all agree?” to “So, when are we going to do it?”