Facilitation: The Pitfall of the Curse of Knowledge and 4 Tips to Help Avoid It
Have you ever been to see a doctor feeling that something wasn’t quite right, looking for answers only to have him start throwing in medical jargon to explain what was going was happening to you? Did you look at the doctor a little confused at the end not fully understanding what the issue was? Likely you did or maybe you tried to save face by acting like you understood. Either way, no doubt, it ended up not being as bad as it initially sounded but you probably wished he had explained it to you using plain English in the first place.
“The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand.”-Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
As it turns out, he was suffering from a little known yet common curse. It’s the curse of knowledge. You see, he assumed that because he knew and understood what he was saying that you did too. Don’t fault him though. He didn’t know what he was doing. The thing is we are all cursed! Well, maybe most of us anyway. In this one study, some participants were asked to tap out a song for other participants to figure out the title. Guess what, 50% of the tappers thought that the other people would guess the song but only 2.5% of the listeners actually did.
So what does this mean for facilitators? It means this can happen to facilitators as well. For example, in explaining an exercise a facilitator might use and expression like “straw poll vote” or an acronym like HMW and totally assume that the listeners just get it. Wrong. They would be just as confused as you were at the doctor’s office. If you are planning to facilitate a meeting/workshop, here are a few tips to help you break the curse. Of course, if you always work with the same group of people you can adapt these tips as needed.
Tip 1- Get into a beginners mindset. Be sure to explain the exercises as if the participants have never heard of them before. If you don’t, your explanation will likely only make sense to you.
Tip 2- Explain how the exercises are connected. Like the picture on the front of a puzzle box helps a person put the puzzle together, having an understanding of how the exercises go together helps the participants to understand the big picture.
Tip 3- Repetition for emphasis. Be repetitious in your explanation of where you are in the journey between the exercises. Remember that the participants are brand new at this and haven’t yet fully grasped everything.
Tip 4- Don’t use expressions or acronyms without explaining them first. It’s true that English is the language of business but many are only familiar with business terminology so try to avoid using local or even office colloquialisms.