The Curse of Knowledge: How to Foster an Inclusive Culture of Learning
Hi Team,
I once led a sales executive who had been in software for 20 years. Let’s call him Nigel.
He had an amazing resume and had been a successful sales ‘road warrior’ closing deals for some of the biggest SaaS companies in the world.
Needless to say, this guy had seen it all.
The downside was, he expected that everyone else around him to have ‘seen at all’ as well. Despite the fact that most people on the team (myself included) were figuring this out for the first time.
I remember this tension once culminated in a pretty fiery conversation between him and one of his sales managers. Let’s call them Mark.
Mark was becoming increasingly frustrated at the complete lack of empathy he was receiving from Nigel about not knowing ‘the obvious way of doing things’.
Mark said something to the effect of: “This is completely unfair and unacceptable. You’re holding me to standards that I didn’t even know existed and you’ve never even communicated them.”
Nigel was a little taken aback. His response takes the cake.
He said “I’m sorry… that’s on me. I guess I just thought you were more mature.”
Yikes.
There’s a few things going on in this story.
First off, Nigel is just a bit of a jerk.
But secondly, and this is what I want to unpack today, is something called ‘the curse of knowledge’ or sometimes called ‘the curse of expertise’.
The concept is that it’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming that others around you have the same knowledge or expertise as you, even if they lack the same experience.
Practically this looks something like this:
Person A:
“Hey, I don’t know how to sum up these numbers in google sheets.”
Person B:
[Internally: 🤨 seriously?]
Externally: “Oh, really? Okay sure. Just type in =sum(A2:A5)”
Person A leaves the conversation thinking: “well, thanks for making me feel stupid.”
Person B leaves the conversation thinking: “how in the world did they not know that. No one ever had to teach me that!”
The thing is though… Person B WAS taught that at some point in their life by someone. Even if they had to teach themselves. However, now it’s something that’s so ingrained in them and so obvious to them, that they forget that and lose empathy for others.
What’s the thing that you’ve done over and over and over that’s so obvious to you but perhaps not so obvious to others?
And here’s the real kicker to that☝️. What if they know they don’t know… but they don’t feel comfortable asking someone else for fear of looking stupid.
How many teams are inadvertently slowing their growth because (a) knowledge or expertise isn’t being shared around and (b) people are too afraid to speak up?
To take this a step further, this week, I challenge you to start two different conversations with a colleague.
Hey this may seem obvious, but can you tell me {what this means} or {how to do this} or {why we do that}
2. Hey they say to never assume, so I just want to make sure, do you know about ______.
Remember, we were all beginners once! 🌱. So, let’s commit to breaking the curse of knowledge. We’ll all be better off for it.
Thanks for reading,
MT