The Curse of Knowledge

As promised I am continuing to share a few highlights from Made to Stick by the Heath brothers. The Curse of Knowledge is something that I suffer from desperately. It truly does make it difficult for me to communicate with others (you might also call it pride, but anyway). Basically this curse works against you in a few ways when you are trying to communicate with other people. First, having too much knowledge about a subject can make it difficult to get to the core issue. You see all the nuances and it ALL seems important. Knowing too much about a subject can make it difficult to boil it all down - so you overwhlem people. Again you tell them three things instead of one and they actually remember NONE of it. Another issue is that you have trouble communicating the basics because you assume more knowledge than other people have. So you think you are sharing the basics - but even these "basics" are over your listeners head. You assume to much about what other people know. Good communication requires you to go back to square one to be effective.

In fact, sometimes people (no one I know of course) prefer to stay in thier brainy world instead of interacting with the real world. The example in the book talks about engineers and frontline workers. The frontline workers would identify a problem and ask the engineers to come down to floor, look at it, and fix it. However, the engineers preferred to consult their drawings and correct the paper version - not the real version of the problem. This sort of smacked me in the face - because I do this all the time - try to correct the theory instead of dealing with the problem in the real world. It's the curse, I tell ya.

They recommend using the question "why" to break through the curse of knowledge. This might be why we find toddlers so exasperating. They are constantly breaking down the things we thought we knew with their questioning. They are beating away at our comfortable knowledge in their effort to learn more about the practical, visible world around them. Some of their questions seem downright silly - but mostly because they aren't practical in the way we think of practical knowledge.

So, to be good communicator you have to overcome this curse and get back to basics.