Concept
Curse of Knowledge
The curse of knowledge is the Heaths' name for the fact that once you know something, you cannot imagine not knowing it — so experts speak in shorthand that sounds like noise to everyone else. It is the villain behind most ideas that fail to land.
The demonstration is the tapping game. One person taps the rhythm of a familiar song on a table; a listener tries to name it. Tappers predicted listeners would succeed about half the time; listeners succeeded once in forty. The tapper hears the melody in their head and cannot un-hear it; the listener hears knocking. Every expert explaining their field is the tapper, and the cure is not to tap harder. The Heaths built their six traits of sticky ideas largely as antidotes: find the core, because the expert wants to say everything; be concrete, because expertise drifts into abstraction; tell a story, because the expert reaches for a principle. The curse also explains why communication inside organisations decays as people rise: the strategy that is vivid to the leadership is a slogan to the floor. The practical test is to explain the idea to someone outside the field and watch their face rather than listening to their politeness. If they cannot repeat it, you have tapped.
A real-life example
A data engineer in Istanbul cannot get funding for 'a unified telemetry layer enabling real-time observability'. Made to explain it to a colleague's mother, she says: 'Now we hear a truck is late from the customer; after this, we hear it from the truck, twenty minutes earlier.' It is funded that afternoon.
How to use it
- 1Explain the idea to someone outside your field and watch their face, not their politeness. If they cannot repeat it, translate again.
- 2Replace every term of art with the thing it refers to: a truck, a phone call, a Tuesday.
- 3Assume that what feels obvious to you is invisible to the listener, and say it.