The Curse of Knowlege

In researching this challenge, I thought about a few of the great leaders for whom I’ve served.  I can remember listening to them communicating their ideas to managers and workers only to have their message lost in a general lack of understanding.  Why does this happen.  It may just be that top executives have had years of immersion in the practical conventions of the business world, so when they communicate their ideas, they are simply summarizing their vast experience which resides in their minds. Frontline employees though, who have no access to the underlying meaning, hear only opaque phrases. The end results?  Strategies being touted just don’t stick.  Just like the selling example above.  Great ideas that could make a positive difference end up falling on deaf ears.

So what’s going on?  In trying to understand this issue I ran across a fascinating study, called “The Curse of Knowledge.”   In 1990, a Stanford University graduate student set up an experiment to explore why we sometimes fail to effectively communicate our ideas.  She set up a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: “the tapper” or “the listener.” All tappers were asked to pick a well-known song, such as “Jingle Bells,” or “Here comes the Bride” and tap out the rhythm on a table. The listener’s job was to guess the song.  Before the experiment began, the “tappers” were asked to predict the probability the listeners would be able to name the songs.  They predicted 50%.  As the experiment unfolded, songs were tapped out a combined 120 times. To the “tappers” surprise, the listeners guessed only three of the songs correctly!  That’s a paltry success ratio of 2.5%. The tappers only got their message across one time in 40, but they thought they would get it across one time in two. Why? As a tapper taps, it is impossible for them to avoid hearing the tune playing along in their heads. (try it)  Meanwhile, all the listener can hear is a kind of bizarre Morse code. Yet the tappers were amazed and frustrated by how hard the listeners had to work to discern the tunes!

So here is the answer… once we know something, like the melody of a song, we find it nearly impossible to imagine not knowing it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And we have difficulty sharing it with others, because we can’t put the “music” we have (experience, context, etc) inside their heads.

In the world of business, leaders and employees, salespeople and customers, corporate headquarters and the front line, all rely on ongoing communication but suffer from enormous information imbalances just like the tappers and listeners.  The “curse of knowledge” is on full display in most, if not all the communications these groups share.

So how can this challenge be overcome?

A good example of a business that has translated their message effectively is Trader Joe’s, a specialty food chain whose mission states:  “to bring our customers the best food and beverage values and the information to make informed buying decisions.” That’s the company’s abstract umbrella statement that, on its own, falls quickly into the realm of blah, blah, blah. But shopping at Trader Joe’s is nothing like shopping at your typical grocery store, and its aisles are full of inexpensive but exotic food items like Moroccan simmer sauce and red-pepper soup.

Trader Joe’s beats the curse of knowledge and gives real meaning to its strategy by using concrete language elsewhere. It touts its reputation as the “home of cheap thrills,” describing its target customer as an “unemployed college professor who drives a very, very used Volvo.” The image is a simplification to be sure, as at any given moment, there are probably zero of these “target customers” in Trader Joe’s. But because it simplifies a complex reality, the description ensures that all the employees of the organization have a common picture of its customers. Would the professor like the red-pepper soup? Yes.

So in the world of sales, if we want to avoid this “curse of knowledge” we should learn to translate our message into the concrete, recognizable language of our prospects. We should find ways to step into “their” world.  And from that perspective, we share our ideas.  We need to completely eliminate industry slang, jargon and acronyms.  For example, when we use an acronym like “BPO” we are actually alienating our prospect.  They likely don’t know what BPO is and the moment you start saying anything they don’t understand, you are losing rapport, losing trust and losing the sale.  It’s not so hard to just say “Business Process Outsourcing” followed by a simple description of what it is and how it benefits the prospect.

We need to frame every one of our solutions using the prospects situation.  Simply put, our focus needs to be on them, not us.  It’s much easier said than done but the good news is any level of effort you put into making these changes will likely yield positive results.   We all love the solutions we sell (if you don’t, change jobs) and we believe in them completely.  But in our passion to share our message, we might just be shutting down our prospects.  Take that passion and place it into your prospects world.  Then bring the solutions forward from “their” perspective, in their words.  Doing this well could be one of the most important and effective communications skills you’ll ever develop.

Onward & Upward!