Chip and Dan Heath have a book coming out in January about why some ideas stick and others don’t. They have a brief piece in the “Forethought” section of HBR that talks about it. Specifically, they point out that leaders suffer from what they call the “curse of knowledge.” That is, leaders spend a lot of time and effort developing a strategy for the organization, based on a tremendous amount of knowledge. They then encapsulate their strategy in one or two sentences, which people on the front line hear as too broad or meaningless or corporatespeak. The problem is, those sentences only make sense to the people who have all the knowledge that went into creating them. Without the knowledge, the phrases don’t make as much sense.
But it is VERY difficult for the people with the knowledge to see this. They usually look at the front line people disparagingly. “Why can’t they understand this?!” Really, it seems painfully clear to the leaders. This is the curse of knowledge. The Heaths point to some interesting research to demonstrate their point, and I encourage you to try this out. A researcher asked one person to “tap” (their hand on a desk, for instance) the tune of a simple song that everyone would know (happy birthday was their example), and another person (who was not told which song it was) would have to guess the song. People estimated that the other person would guess correctly 50% of the time, when in reality only about 2.5% of the people guessed right.
If you try this you will understand this curse of knowledge first hand. While you are tapping out the tune, you’re “singing” it in your head. But the other person, without the benefit of your mental singing, just hears boring taps on the desk, and it doesn’t make any sense. It seems so obvious to you and so meaningless to them. Just like those strategy statements.
The Heaths’ antidotes to this curse involve using more concrete language and telling stories. I think it is important to encapsulate those strategies in simple language, and in doing so, you start boiling down concepts to just a few words and that’s where the curse comes in. So you’ll need some translations. Their example was Fedex using a story of a delivery person with a broken down truck that actually convinced a competitor to take him on their truck so he could finish his rounds. This translates that “absolutely positively” must be there overnight concept.
If you have a “strategic plan,” how do you translate it?
This reminds me of web usability, as well. It's such an eye-opener when you do a usability test with members or other site users--there are so many things you thought were obvious or easy to find, but then during the testing you watch an actual member struggle to locate them.
Perhaps there's a way to create "usability testing" for strategy, to see where those gaps in understanding (and expectations) are.
Posted by: Lisa Junker | December 15, 2006 at 08:25 AM
Hey that's a cool idea! And the language of "usability testing" (depending on the audience) could be precisely that concrete language that would help people give more effective feedback.
Posted by: Jamie Notter | December 15, 2006 at 08:51 AM