For centuries we have attempted communication "downward." This, however,
cannot work, no matter how hard and how intelligently we try. It cannot
work, first, because it focuses on what we want to say. It assumes, in
other words, that the emitter communicates.
...unless the recipient "hears," communication has not taken place.
Information and communication are different. Communication has not taken
place unless the emitter is sure that the receiver understands what action
is to be taken as a result of, say, a conversation or a memo.
- Peter Drucker
Sadly, there is a villain in our story. The villain is a natural
psychological tendency that consistently confounds our ability to create
ideas using these principles. It's called the Curse of Knowledge. (We will
capitalize the phrase throughout the book to give it the drama we think it
deserves.)
Tappers and Listeners
In 1990, Elizabeth Newton earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford by
studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles:
"tappers" or "listeners." Tappers received a list of twenty-five
well-known songs, such as "Happy Birthday to You" and "The Star-Spangled
Banner." Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a
listener (by knocking on a table). The listener's job was to guess the
song, based on the rhythm being tapped. (By the way, this experiment is
fun to try at home if there's a good "listener" candidate nearby.)
The listener's job in this game is quite difficult. Over the course of
Newton's experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only 2.5
percent of the songs: 3 out of 120.
But here's what made the result worthy of a dissertation in psychology.
Before the listeners guessed the name of the song, Newton asked the
tappers to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. They
predicted that the odds were 50 percent.
The tappers got their message across 1 time in 40, but they thought they
were getting their message across 1 time in 2. Why?
When a tapper taps, she is hearing the song in her head. Go ahead and try
it for yourself - tap out "The Star-Spangled Banner." It's impossible to
avoid hearing the tune in your head. Meanwhile, the listeners can't hear
that tune - all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a kind
of bizarre Morse Code.
In the experiment, tappers are flabbergasted at how hard the listeners
seem to be working to pick up the tune. Isn't the song obvious? The
tappers' expressions, when a listener guesses "Happy Birthday to You" for
"The Star-Spangled Banner," are priceless: How could you be so stupid?
It's hard to be a tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given
knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine
what it's like to lack that knowledge. When they're tapping, they can't
imagine what it's like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than
a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it
hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has
"cursed" us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with
others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind.
The tapper/listener experiment is reenacted every day across the world.
The tappers and listeners are CEOs and frontline employees, teachers and
students, politicians and voters, marketers and customers, writers and
readers. All of these groups rely on ongoing communication, but, like the
tappers and listeners, they suffer from enormous information imbalances.
When a CEO discusses "unlocking shareholder value," there is a tune
playing in her head that the employees can't hear.
It's a hard problem to avoid - a CEO might have thirty years of daily
immersion in the logic and conventions of business. Reversing the process
is as impossible as un-ringing a bell. You can't unlearn what you already
know. There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge
reliably. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your
ideas and transform them.
This book will teach you how to transform your ideas to beat the Curse of
Knowledge. The six principles presented earlier are your best weapons.
They can be used as a kind of checklist. Let's take the CEO who announces
to her staff that they must strive to "maximize shareholder value."
Is this idea simple? Yes, in the sense that it's short, but it lacks the
useful simplicity of a proverb. Is it unexpected? No. Concrete? Not at
all. Credible? Only in the sense that it's coming from the mouth of the
CEO. Emotional? Urn, no. A story? No.
Contrast the "maximize shareholder value" idea with John F. Kennedy's
famous 1961 call to "put a man on the moon and return him safely by the
end of the decade." Simple? Yes. Unexpected? Yes. Concrete? Amazingly so.
Credible? The goal seemed like science fiction, but the source was
credible. Emotional? Yes. Story? In miniature.
Had John F. Kennedy been a CEO, he would have said, "Our mission is to
become the international leader in the space industry through maximum
team-centered innovation and strategically targeted aerospace
initiatives." Fortunately, JFK was more intuitive than a modern-day CEO;
he knew that opaque, abstract missions don't captivate and inspire people.
The moon mission was a classic case of a communicator's dodging the Curse
of Knowledge. It was a brilliant and beautiful idea - a single idea that
motivated the actions of millions of people for a decade.
- Chip & Dan Heath, Made to Stick
