The Curse of Knowledge: Why the Best Experts Make for the Worst Leaders

Promoting top performers often leads to managerial failure not due to a lack of empathy, but because the "Curse of Knowledge" makes it cognitively difficult for experts to translate their intuition to their teams.


Introduction

As far as corporate error goes, there is one that is particularly mishandled, and often misunderstood: the promotion of a “technical star”.

This pattern happens staggeringly often. A firm identifies a top performer, whether that is a brilliant engineer or a high-grossing salesperson and rewards them with a management title. While the logic underpinning the decision may seem sound, i.e. they are the best at the job so they are surely the best qualified to teach others how to do the job, that is seldom the case.

Indeed, within six months, one may find the team in revolt. The team’s morale plummets, the number of errors skyrockets and the newly promoted manager is baffled. Resultingly, employee-managerial tensions rise, as the manager views their team as incompetent or unmotivated while the team views the manager as arrogant or vague. It is easy to attribute this failure to a lack of people skills. But the root cause of the issue is not emotional; it is cognitive. Indeed, the manager is not suffering from a surplus of ego, but from a psychological condition known as the “Curse of Knowledge”.

The Science of Un-Knowing

The term “Curse of Knowledge” was coined in a 1989 paper by Camerer, Loewenstein and Weber. Their research highlighted an oft-ignored cognitive bias: once an individual knows something, it becomes difficult for them to simulate the mental state of someone who does not know it.

In their experiments, they found that better-informed agents consistently overestimated how much their less-informed peers knew. The knowledge that an expert possesses fundamentally rewires their brain. The heuristics, shortcuts and connections that allow them to excel at their work became invisible to them. Solutions to problems no longer feel like deductions to the expert; rather they feel like observations. Consequently, an asymmetry emerges in the workplace. A technical expert who gives instructions will be speaking in mental shorthand. While their instructions may seem like a clear directive, the employees will hear a vague abstraction.

The Tappers & Listeners Problem

This phenomenon was illustrated by a Stanford University experiment in 1990 by Elizabeth Newton. Within this experiment, participants were divided into “tappers” and “listeners”. Tappers were directed to tap out the rhythm of a well-known song while listeners had to guess the song. The tappers predicted that listeners would guess correctly 50% of the time, yet the reality was that the listeners were only able to guess correctly 2.5% of the time. This massive disconnect occurred because the tappers could hear the melody playing in their head. On the other hand, the listeners heard nothing but erratic thuds.

In the corporate world, technical, brilliant managers are the tappers; their strategy and instructions are playing clearly in their head. However, the team hears nothing but disconnected thuds.

From Soft Skills to Translation Skills.

There are solutions to the Curse of Knowledge, although they involve more than simply sending technical managers to a generic “empathy training” – as the issue is not that they do not care, it is that they cannot see.

Thus, organisations must frame communication as a challenge of translation. Experts must be taught to decompile their intuition. There are three main elements experts must be trained in to achieve this.

Firstly, they must teach the why before the how. Experts often skip straight to the how because the why is implicit to them. Thus, they must be trained to contextualise the problem despite it seeming obvious to them. Secondly, technical managers must use back-briefing methods. When asked if they understand, employees will almost always say yes, whether they understand or not. However, if the manager demands a back-briefing, it forces employees to externalise their understanding, enabling a swift resolution to any misunderstandings. Finally, teams must be taught to identify acronyms and abstract phrases that experts use as crutches and flag them as words and sentences that require elaboration. This ensures that no issues of comprehension occur in the future.

Ultimately, the Curse of Knowledge is a side-effect of an expert’s mastery. It would be short-sighted and impossible to ask top performers to know less. Nevertheless, if they are too lead, they must remember what it was like when they, too, heard only the tapping.

 References:

  • Camerer, C., Loewenstein, G., & Weber, M. (1989). The Curse of Knowledge in Economic Settings: An Experimental Analysis. Journal of Political Economy, 97(5), 1232–1254.
  • Newton, E. L. (1990). The Rocky Road from Actions to Intentions. Stanford University, Doctoral Dissertation.

 

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