In 1990, at Stanford University there was a student called Elizabeth Newton and she was doing a postgraduate degree. Her thesis for her dissertation is an experiment that she published under the title, ‘The curse of knowledge’. For this experiment, she took 240 students and divided them into two parts 120 each. 120 students were called tappers, their job is to tap on a table, the other 120 were called listeners. Elizabeth then told the tappers and the listeners that she would give the tappers a list of very popular English songs, songs that everybody knew, like the happy birthday song for example. The job of the tappers would be to tap these songs that they have randomly chosen from that list on a table. She would then make a pair of a tapper and a listener and the experiment began. When the tappers finished tapping and came back, she asked the tappers one by one individually, “how do you think it went?” and the usual answer was “I think it went off well?” “Why do you think it went off well?” “Oh, it’s such an easy song and I think I did a decent job of tapping.” She then asked them whether they were hundred percent certain that their partner, the listener got it, about 50% of the tappers were hundred percent certain that their partner would have got it. She, then went to the listeners and they took the piece of paper where they had guessed and tabulated the results. Would you like to take a guess of how many of those people got it right? 20%? 10%? No! Less than 2.5% and this is what Elizabeth calls the curse of knowledge. What Elizabeth is basically saying is that when the tune is running in my head then something like a ‘Jingle bells jingle bells jingle all the way’ sounds perfect but if the tune is not running in your head then sounds like some bizarre Morse code. It is impossible for the tapper to not have the tune running in their head when they are tapping and so the listener doesn’t understand, but the tapper thinks it is very clear. When I read this paper, I had an epiphany. I realized that this is what I was doing for the last few years of my corporate life when I was senior enough. On the day of the off-site or the annual conference where I was presenting transformation strategy vision, I didn’t come up with it on the morning of the conference. I had worked with my team or Bane or McKinsey for weeks. If not months by the time I was ready to present, it was a tune running in my head and then I went onstage and did the corporate version of tapping bullet points on a PowerPoint. I came offstage saying easy song decent tap. This is the problem of why messages don’t stick it is a problem where we cannot put ourselves in the shoes of people who don’t have the information we have. It is about sharing the context. Business Points ( Tags ) #storytelling #business #bestseller #stories #communication #Two-waycommunication #Communicationmadetostick #PowerofContext #stanforduniversity #CurseofKnowledge
