The curse of knowledge

Experts are poorer communicators in their own domain than nonexperts, MIT Sloan’s Miro Kazakoff says, and he offers ways to reverse that curse.

“One of the critical challenges of professional communication is to recognize and internalize the variety of ways that people decode things,”

“When we see a pattern or recognize something or know something, we forget what it was like before we knew that thing. We can’t unsee [it],” he said. “This is why experts struggle to communicate about their own domain to nonexperts. There is a tremendous amount of context and knowledge that makes it hard to recognize what it was like before we knew what we now know. “