How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

OVERCOME THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE

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When we’re trying to get a message across, we often think hard about what we
want to say. But in our zeal to communicate, it’s easy to forget to put ourselves
in the shoes of the person we’re trying to engage. If we don’t stop to think about
what they know or feel, our automatic system takes the 
projection bias
shortcut,
which means we generally assume that others see the world as we do. And that
shortcut can cause us to suffer from what scientists call the 
curse of knowledge
,
where assuming that others know what we know leads us to overestimate how
well we’ve communicated.
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That’s how statements that seem totally clear to us can be interpreted
differently by others. For example, if someone said to you, “Jo hit the man with
the binder,” what would you think? Would you decide that Jo had taken a binder
and whacked a colleague on the head with it? Or would you assume instead that
she’d punched someone who was holding a binder at the time? Both are valid
interpretations; the only thing that’s certain is that you might want to steer clear
of Jo for the rest of the day. Yet when participants in an experiment were given
this kind of ambiguous sentence to say to someone else (after deciding which
interpretation they thought was correct), four out of five speakers overestimated
the chance they’d be understood. The speakers had such a strong sense of their
intended meaning that they believed that listeners would be able to hear things
just as they intended.
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The curse of knowledge creates lots of potential for crossed wires in the
workplace. Sometimes we know when a misunderstanding has occurred: “I’m
sure I told you this was due on Friday. How was it not clear 
which
Friday I
meant?” But on many occasions, we never find out that our message failed to
land as we intended. We simply don’t achieve the impact we’d hoped, and we
don’t really know why. So to make your communication as clear as it is in your
own head: never assume that others know what you know. As Greg says,
“You’ve got to accept the other person’s starting point. I work out how they’re
feeling and what they know, and I go from there.”
In practice, that means:
Before you open your mouth or start typing, always take a moment to put
yourself in the listener or reader’s shoes. Think about what that person is
likely to know or feel about the topic at hand.
If you’re talking to someone in person, find out where he or she is starting
from (“Before I launch in, tell me what you already know about XYZ”), and

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periodically check to see whether you’re successfully landing the points
you’re trying to make (“Let me pause there before carrying on—does that
makes sense? Is there anything I’m missing?”). Don’t talk for more than five
minutes without checking in. Find out what the other person wants to know
next, and respond accordingly.