A friend “lent” me a copy of the December 2006 issue of the Harvard Business Review, in which there was an interesting article about “the curse of knowledge” by Chip and Dan Heath (brothers maybe?). (Unfortunately, I don’t think they have online versions of the HBR without subscription, but you get a copy of the article for $6 at the HBR web site.)
Chip and Dan were arguing that when upper management puts forth vague business strategies and mission statements like “Provide best-of-breed services and products”, they’re not just drinking the kool-aid. They argue that to someone who’s been immersed in the “logic and conventions” of business, those platitudes actually represent a sort of “business shorthand”. To the biz folk, those statements represent vasts amounts of business related knowledge, accumulated over years of b-school and industry experience.
[I supposed that every discipline uses similar shorthand … with designers talking about “envisioning transparent interactivity”, PMs saying stuff like “push back non-critical cycles to open up the critical path”, engineers talking about “shutting down the retention fields to prevent the overloading the Jefferies Tubes”, etc. etc. etc..]
Unfortunately, those business strategies and missions statements have a tendency to come across vague and ambiguous to the rest of us, the ones without all that internalized business acumen.
The problem is further compounded by what’s called “the Curse of Knowledge”. Once you know something, you behave as if you’ve always known it and it’s difficult for you to think like someone who doesn’t know what you know (sounds positively Rumsfeldian).
To illustrate their point, they referred to a 1990 psych study by Elizabeth Newton, then a psych grad student at Stamford. (Unfortunately, the study was included in her non-published dissertation, so it was unable to read the original study. Thanks anyway, Google Scholar.) In her study, Newton divided her participants into two groups, tappers and listeners. Tappers had to tap out a common tune on a table (I imagined them doing this with their fingers or a pencil), listeners had to listen and say which song it was.
Funny thing is I tried this with some friends back when we were kids and it’s incredibly difficult for the listener to pick out a song. Try it with a friend: ask them to identify a tune you’ll tap out, and pick something easy, like Happy Birthday or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
When Newton asked the tappers to predict how often the listeners would guess the song correctly they said that the listeners would get it right about 50% of the time. Since they knew the song they were tapping out, the task seemed incredibly easy for them and they assumed it would be the same for the listeners.
The ACTUAL success ratio was much much smaller. Out of 120 songs, listeners only got 3 right, for a success ratio of 2.5%.
So, back to the biz guy and his grand-yet-incomprehensible-ideas. Chip and Dan argue that there are ways for you to beat the curse of knowledge trap. It’s all rather basic, really. If you’re aware of this curse of knowledge, you’re in a good position to be able to avoid it’s pitfall by translating your ideas back into lay-speak. (Though I guess the challenge would be to do so without coming across as patronizing.)
Chip and Dan suggest using “concrete language” and “stories” to avoid the curse of knowledge and get your point across to other people. Which seems extremely similar to “speak the users language” and “use scenarios and personas” … all things we user research folks try to do with users and designers.
Maybe there’s a market out there for user testing business models and strategies. Damn, maybe I should patent that!