If the stories you tell seem to fall flat, it may well be that you’re cursed.
Whether it’s a story about the value of your business, the new innovation you’ve dreamed up, or the unique talents that make you the perfect candidate for that great job, you’re undoubtedly clear on the message you want to convey and the impression you want to make. Why, then, is it so hard to deliver a story that opens the door to engagement and impact? What are you doing wrong?
The problem may not be what you say, but rather what you fail to say.
It’s called “the curse of knowledge,” and it’s a thief. It robs your stories of their most vivid details and powerful information. And worst of all, it leaves no trace—only a vacuum of confusion and disengagement. Neither you nor your audience may ever even notice the crime.
The “curse” here is a kind of cognitive bias–a flawed way of thinking that leads us to make mistakes in our judgements and assumptions. Specifically, we assume that other people know all that we know and share our knowledge. It’s perfectly logical. And it can make even the smartest people look like fools.
An Overconfident Mindset
In 1990, a PhD candidate named Elizabeth Newton asked a group of Stanford University undergrads to play a simple game. She put them in pairs, assigning one to be a “tapper” and the other to be a “listener.” The job of the tapper was to finger-tap a basic song that everyone knows, such as “Happy Birthday” or “Silent Night.” Critically, the tapper could not sing or hum or nod along; just tap tap tap on a desktop. The job of the listener was to name that tune.
Beforehand, Newton asked the tappers to guess if their songs would be recognized by the listeners. The tappers were understandably confident; they were, after all, brilliant Stanford students, and these were simple songs. A solid 50 percent predicted that their listeners would clue in. Once the tapping was done, however, only three of 120 tunes were identified. Just 2.5 percent of the listeners heard anything more than a frantic sort of Morse code.
“One of our greatest mistakes,” Newton reflected, “Is to believe that others see the world as we see it.”
It’s hard to be too critical of Newton’s tappers. Try it for yourself, and observe how richly the melody plays in your head as you tap. Now try to imagine what it would be like if that soundtrack was completely nonexistent. It’s a bit of virtual lobotomization that requires a unique brand of empathy.
Curing the Storytelling Curse
The curse of knowledge can rob your stories of their greatest impact.
In many cases, people become so immersed in an organizational subculture, a profession, or a group of insiders that they lose awareness of people outside of it. They not only lack the language to connect to anyone beyond their rarefied domains, they see no reason to try. And so they relay information to the uninitiated on the same terms as insiders, and then wonder why it fails.
More typically, people don’t recognize that they fail to deliver certain essential information when telling their story. The experience is so vivid in their minds that they assume everyone sees, hears, and feels it as well. As Newton’s tappers discovered, it can be hard to comprehend that the most important details aren’t obvious to everybody.
Here are three simple ways to keep the curse of knowledge from robbing you:
Capture the details. In my workshops, I require my clients to label every concrete, sensory descriptor, including the names and vivid depictions of every important character and location. These details are the most commonly neglected—and potentially the most evocative.
Identify your assumptions. What pre-existing knowledge do you expect your audience to have? What context do they require? What language or terms will or won’t resonate with them? You must define these in advance, then test them well.
Engage the audience early and often. Build strong relationships and use them to validate your messages and ideas. Then rinse and repeat. Remember, empathy is a permanent practice, not a tax.
