The curse of knowledge (or why the obvious isn't obvious)

Here's something I've had to admit to myself lately. After years of being deep in change research – the post-it notes, scribbles, the studies, the notebooks, the late-night rabbit holes – a lot of it now feels obvious to me. Of course we resist change. Of course we need to pause before we act. Of course the messy middle is where the real work happens.

Except it isn't obvious. Not to most people. And the moment I forget that, I stop being useful.

Its the ‘curse of knowledge’. And I read a brilliant article about it and it helped remind me about what my job really is.

The tappers and the listeners

So the curse of knowledge!, Who knew that what you know might be the thing that holds you back. A deceptively simple experiment run at Stanford in 1990 by a psychology graduate student called Elizabeth Newton highlighted this ‘curse’. (Chip and Dan Heath later made it more widespread in the Harvard Business Review and their book Made to Stick.)

She split people into two groups: tappers and listeners. The tappers were given a well-known song – Happy Birthday, say – and asked to tap out the rhythm on a table. The listeners had to guess the song.

Before they started, the tappers predicted the listeners would get it right about half the time. Over 120 songs, the listeners guessed three. One in forty.

Here's why. When you tap out a song, you can hear the whole tune playing in your head. The melody, the words, the lot. The listener hears… knocking. Somebody banging on a table. And the tappers were genuinely baffled – frustrated, even – that something so obvious wasn't landing.

Once you know something, you can't easily un-know it. You can't remember what it felt like not to know. So you assume everyone else can hear the tune too.

I am a tapper

I feel this one. Properly.

When I'm sharing ideas about change, there's a pull to go deep, over explain, go into the detail – to bring in the research, the nuance, the "ah, but it's more complicated than that". That's the stuff that lights me up. But my job isn't to impress the people who already know this world. It's not to talk to the other tappers.

My job is to offer the simplest way in. To find the door that someone who has never thought about change in this way can actually walk through.

And that's the hard bit about sharing any kind of expertise. Simple isn't the same as dumbed down. Simple takes work. You have to be really focused on who you're talking to. Where are they right now? What do they need? What's the one thing that would help them take the next step – not overwhelm them with All The Things?

Ease them in. (Note to self: ease them in.)

It's not training

This is why, in my Change Mastery workshops, I say the same thing at the start of every session: you're looking for one takeaway. Just one.

Not all the tools. Not the whole model memorised by lunchtime. Change Mastery isn't training in that sense – it's not a thing you do once, tick off and "get". If you leave trying to remember everything, you'll probably end up using nothing.

One idea that lands. One thing you try on Monday. That's plenty.

And then you come back to it. Again and again. Because the thing about change is that you're never standing in the same place twice. The first time you meet the idea of Pause, it might simply mean taking a breath before replying to that email. A year later, in the middle of a restructure or a big life decision, it might mean something entirely different.

It's the same with the book. Read it now, read it again in two years, and it will say something different to you. The words won't have changed. You will.

Back to the listener

So if you're someone with knowledge to share – a leader explaining a strategy, a manager introducing a new way of working, an expert of any kind – it's worth asking yourself:

• Who am I actually talking to?

• What do they already know (really know, not what I assume they know)?

• What's the one thing they need from me today?

And if you're on the receiving end, feeling like everyone else can hear a tune you can't? You're not slow. You're a listener, and someone's just tapping on the table. It's OK to ask them to hum.

Because the curse of knowledge isn't really about knowing too much. It's about forgetting what it felt like to know nothing at all.

So – what's your one takeaway from this?