Hello, friend!

Thanks for clicking in. We’re here to cluck a bit and maybe help lift a curse. And because this one is longer than usual, there’s a bonus topical chicken at the bottom, as a treat.

You have something to say, so…

There are a couple seats still available this week in Presenting with Confidence, May 7 & 8. Get in there!

It’s about gaining the confidence to meet your audience where they are, and hold their attention without feeling fake. So everyone gets what they need.

Keep reading for more on that.

Do you know what they don’t?

When he was 11 years old, future actor Alan Alda posed a question to his teacher.

“What’s a flame?”

She paused, then answered “Oxidation.”

This perfect example of a factually correct—yet utterly unhelpful—answer stuck with him for decades.

After M*A*S*H, Alda went on to host the PBS series Scientific American Frontiers. And following years and years of televised conversations with scientists to help the public better understand science, he went to work helping the scientists communicate better with people outside their field.

In 2009, he co-founded the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. And then in 2012 the flame came back in The Flame Challenge, a contest asking scientists around the world to explain what a flame is in a way a kid could understand, as judged by kids. You can see the winner for yourself.

Our human brains are great in a lot of ways. We love feeling smart about it, too. Unfortunately, many built-in human brain shortcuts for survival are mismatched to the modern world, making it harder to deal with people and information in the present day. Wayward shortcuts show up as pesky cognitive biases that can lead to very bad outcomes.

Whenever we learn things, we forget what it’s like not to know those things. This is the “curse of knowledge.” The more you know, the more you expect other people to know. And if you become a real expert in a topic, forget it. You will, in fact, totally forget what it’s like to lack basic concepts.

It’s easy to blame non-experts for believing non-facts, but that’s just a way we let ourselves off the hook. As consultants, we’ve been in a lot of rooms working to get smart people to accept the importance of making their instructions, their marketing, even their survey questions, more intelligible.

Why is it a struggle at all? There are three big barriers to communicating across experience and expertise. For one, it is actually hard, nuanced and effortful. Knowing a thing and knowing how to communicate about a thing or teach a thing are totally different skills. Conflating ignorance with unintelligence leads to arrogance, and no one is going to listen to anyone condescending to them. If only it were as simple as summarizing, which it isn’t. (For fun, try running text through a readability analyzer. Eye opening.)

Because it’s a cognitive bias, you may never even realize it’s happening, especially if you mostly associate directly with people who share your knowledge and perspectives. We once worked with a healthcare organization that produced patient information they’d never reviewed with anyone but a panel of medical specialists. The results were impenetrable.

And, as with many similar situations, status comes into play. Experts resist changing their communication style because they’re afraid their peers will think less of them. (And there can be real career penalties in academia.) Or it might feel like hard-won knowledge has less value if it becomes easier to gain. For people with a lot of success in one area, it can be difficult to admit they lack sufficient skill in another. What’s effective for other audiences might be mighty uncomfortable.

Because everything comes in threes, here are the keys to overcoming the curse.

1. Know your goal, in terms of behavior and outcomes

   “Informing” is not enough. You need to be clear on how you want the behavior of your audience to change based on what you’re telling them. And state the changes you expect to see more broadly. Otherwise, you won’t know if you’ve succeeded.

2. Be interested in your audience and listen to them

   If you want real people to care about, understand, and even act on what you have to say, you need to be genuinely enthusiastic about hearing from them first. Shut up and listen before you try to inform or influence. There is no way around this. Otherwise you will stay cursed forever. As Dale Carnegie famously said "become genuinely interested in other people." Experts with facts on their side hate to be told they’re in sales. And then the liars who are good at sales get all the attention.

3. Seek feedback, not approval

   Remain ready to find out how you’re missing the mark, always and forever. As you develop your perspective and your skills, cultivating the right attitude will ensure you learn the difference between useful feedback and those superficial reactions that make you feel a certain way. It’s the only way to get better instead of doing more of the same.

And next time you see someone online (or in your work chat) complaining about anyone being ignorant, take a moment to think about how far empathy goes in creating a healthier information ecosystem.

Tangentially related to Meryl Streep

This weekend I grabbed a first edition of novelist John Fowles’ assorted essays in the bargain bin at Fabulosa Books. $5.52! What a deal. I like Fowles even more after reading his personal commentaries.

He is probably most famous for writing The French Lieutenant's Woman, an “unfilmable” postmodern novel that became a movie based on a script by playwright Harold Pinter. If you like books and movies and arguing about adaptations of one into the other as much as I do, here’s one novelist’s perspective:

The one practical advantage the novel factory (or novelist) has over his or her cinema equivalent lies in simplicity of production. The actual process of making a narrative film, however few the characters and simple the locations, is hideously complicated, and expensive; and the greatest gift a good screenwriter can give a director is not so much a version “faithful” to the book as a version faithful to the very different production capability (and relation with audience) of the cinema.

I think of the present script not as a mere “version” of my novel, but as the blueprint (since of course this pudding’s proof must lie finally in the seeing) of a brilliant metaphor for it. I approve entirely of this approach and not only because I believe original authors have no right to interfere once they've got the scenarist and director they want, but even more because I am sure the viable transitions from the one medium to the other need just such an imaginative leap. Neither a good film nor a good novel has ever been made on a basis of safety.

— “The Filming of The French Lieutenant’s Woman” (1981) reprinted in Wormholes:Essays and Occasional Writings (1998)

As promised:

Whew!