The curse of knowledge (video)

When we have a lot of knowledge, we underestimate how hard it is to communicate this to people who don’t know.  This is called the “Curse of Knowledge” – a cognitive bias that leads to people trying to convey knowledge in bullet points, or in fuzzy statements which are meaningless to others, or by writing knowledge assets which are incomprehensible to the unknowledgeable reader.

The video below by Jeff Walker, the Sales guru, illustrates this cognitive bias in more detail. As the YouTube caption says –

Ever have an “expert” try to explain something to you, only to be left more confused than when you started? They’d forgotten how to be a beginner… and lost most of the ability to teach along the way… here’s how to not make the same mistake yourself.

The video is aimed at sales staff, for whom the curse of knowledge is just as much a barrier to communication as it is in Knowledge Management, but the message is the same –

You cannot communicate knowledge properly unless you account for the Curse of Knowledge.