4/17/2023 0 Comments Stanford google drive upload rateLeaders can thwart the curse of knowledge by “translating” their strategies into concrete language. In the business world, managers and employees, marketers and customers, corporate headquarters and the front line, all rely on ongoing communication but suffer from enormous information imbalances, just like the tappers and listeners. We have difficulty sharing it with others, because we can’t readily re-create their state of mind. The problem is that once we know something-say, the melody of a song-we find it hard to imagine not knowing it. Yet the tappers were flabbergasted by how hard the listeners had to work to pick up the tune. Meanwhile, all the listener can hear is a kind of bizarre Morse code. When a tapper taps, it is impossible for her to avoid hearing the tune playing along to her taps. The tappers got their message across one time in 40, but they thought they would get it across one time in two. But before they guessed, Newton asked the tappers to predict the probability that listeners would guess correctly. Listeners guessed only three of the songs correctly: a success ratio of 2.5%. Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. The listener’s job was to guess the song. In 1990, a Stanford University graduate student in psychology named Elizabeth Newton illustrated the curse of knowledge by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: “tapper” or “listener.” Each tapper was asked to pick a well-known song, such as “Happy Birthday,” and tap out the rhythm on a table. As a result, the strategies being touted don’t stick. But frontline employees, who aren’t privy to the underlying meaning, hear only opaque phrases. Top executives have had years of immersion in the logic and conventions of business, so when they speak abstractly, they are simply summarizing the wealth of concrete data in their heads. “Achieving customer delight!” “Becoming the most efficient manufacturer!” “Unlocking shareholder value!” One explanation for executives’ love affair with vague strategy statements relates to a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge. Many sensible strategies fail to drive action because executives formulate them in sweeping, general language.
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