Curse of Knowledge and the Challenge of Talking About Privacy & Ethics

My earlier post about "being off the mark" in the way I see privacy and ethics in digital marketing and analytics reminded me of an article I wrote in 2008. I realized it was still quite relevant so here is a revised and augmented version of this old article.

Some books had an impact on my professional or personal life more than others. That's what happened in 2008 when I read Made to Stick: why some ideas survive and others die. Being an entrepreneur, consultant, speaker and teacher, this book joined my extensive bookshelf, beside Blink, The Tipping Point, The Attention Economy Becoming a Technical Leader and many others.

Here are some tidbits of wisdom I gathered from the book which are still relevant more than a decade later.

The Curse of Knowledge

The curse of knowledge is "a natural psychological tendency that consistently confounds our ability to create ideas." Research in psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we not only become lousy communicators, it also becomes harder to be more imaginative.

Whether you are a professional in digital marketing, analytics, or any discipline, putting ourselves in the shoes of a beginner or non-expert is important. This is similar to being empathetic. The curse of knowledge comes into play whenever we need to communicate to clients, colleagues or managers who are less knowledgeable than we are ourselves.

The term was coined in a 1989 Journal of Political Economy article to describe a cognitive bias that makes people project their own knowledge and experience of the world onto others. The curse of knowledge makes it really hard to accurately reconstruct our own previous, less knowledgeable state of mind in which we did not know or understand something. In effect, we have a strong tendency to unknowingly assume that others know what we know or that it would be easier to learn it than it actually is.

This bias is most commonly associated with the domain of teaching, where it occurs primarily when experts in a certain field struggle to teach beginners.

Keeping the curse of knowledge in mind acts as a guardrail that helps become a better communicator.

When I share my opinion about privacy & ethics, I am constantly reminded how difficult it is to grasp for most digital marketers and analysts I've met. This is also exemplified when someone says it's up to the users to educate themselves and learn about ways to protect their privacy - assuming "normal" people know as much, or should know as much as they do about this topic.

Additional resources on this topic:

• The Curse of Knowledge: What It Is and How to Account for It, Effectiviology.com
• The Curse of Knowledge, HBR, Chip Heath & Dan Heath, December 2006

WIIFY & ETDBW

WIIFY "What's In It For You", and the other one I really like is "ETDBW" which stands for "Easy To Do Business With," which was very well introduced in The Agenda by Michael Hammer. Let go self-interest, you typically don't build a website or launch a new marketing campaign for yourself...

One of my great work experience was for BRP.com. Our boss was constantly hammering the ETDBW mantra, pushing us to find ways to improve the website for our users. The site was a tremendous success. It worked because we were not doing it for us, we didn't think WIIFMe, we thought WIIFY all the time.

Anyone who has suffered from confusing consent popups or has gone to the self-inflicted torture of reading a privacy policy can easily relate to this idea. The concept typically refers to customer experience and being customer centric, but I would argue the growing interest for "privacy by design" and its seven foundational principles also perfectly exemplifies the WIIFY and ETDBW ideas.

Privacy by design helps make it easy to do business with.

Additional resources:

• Want A Powerful Customer Experience? Make It Easy For The Customer, Forbes, Blake Morgan, January 2015
• How to Make Yourself Easy to Do Business With, Inc., Thomas A. Stewart & Patricia O'Connell, September 2017

Authority is the Sum of Attention, Honesty & Trust

Some people have the authority to demand attention. Regardless of your age, your mother usually has some level of authority. The policemen who stopped you on the highway had the authority and all your attention... Most of the time, though, we can't demand attention; we must attract it.

Digital analysts often suffer from an "attention deficit"... they struggle to get attention from their peers and managers. They often complain of not being able to instill change. According to the Heath brothers in Made to Stick, increasing attention relates to honesty - such as when communicating bad news - and trustworthiness of our sources, in this case the raw data we transform into new information and knowledge.

Attention, honesty and trust complements each other to increase authority.

Made to Stick, Analytics and Ethics

I found many quotes that perfectly relate to analytics in Made to Stick. Novices perceive concrete details just as such: concrete details. "Experts perceive concrete details as symbols of patterns and insights that they have learned through years of experience." We've all seen it: pages and pages of data, graphs and charts. It's often too much detail, what we need is the insight. "It's more important for people to remember the relationship than the number. Statistics aren't inherently helpful; it's the scale and context that make them so." But "don't make up your mind and then go looking for the numbers to support yourself"...

We keep hearing people say, "it's not about the numbers, it's about the story." The problem is "ethically challenged people with lots of analytical smarts can, with enough contortions, make almost any case from a given set of statistics." It goes back to the honesty and trustworthy concept.

Ethically challenged people with lots of data can, with enough contortions, find justifications to do almost anything.

Solve Problems when they Need to be Solved

The last thing I wanted to share comes from Common Craft. "If you're about to start something new, don't spend weeks trying to make the first attempt perfect. Get started as quickly as possible and learn as you go. Tinker, experiment and look for the big things you can tackle as you go. Solve problems when they need to be solved and you won't feel as overwhelmed by all the things that could be fixed." I like that!

This is exactly what I did when I opened my notes about privacy and ethics. They were far from being perfect and collectively, we learned and shared our knowledge. Honestly, the whole project evolved into something I didn't expect.

Discussions amongst professionals shows how confused, unequipped and uninformed we are about privacy, ethical considerations and legal implications.

The quick polls I shared over the past several days were a continuation of that effort. They are not intended to provide a definitive answer or any kind of legal advice. All I hope is people will take a step back and think whether they feel comfortable with a given scenario.

And now I'm moving ahead and pushing forward.

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Photo credit: Photo by Lysander Yuen on Unsplash