When Experts Speak: The Curse Of Knowledge

A Story Of What Happens When Experts “Explain” Complexity

I’ll start this story in the middle.

I was sitting in my comfortable seat awaiting a speech/lecture from “the expert”. Given what I do, this is not an unusual situation for me, although this was, as you’ll read later, a slightly different situation.

He started off quite brightly, with a nice professorial style and shared a few stories about his life, his mother and why he loved his job. He asked us a few questions and overall interacted very well with the audience. So far, so good – plus the food was wonderful.

Then he got into the real content of his talk, and also started using supporting media. At this point things went downhill.

1. He started using terminology which most of the room didn’t understand. Within 83 seconds the cell phones appeared as people were checking email.
2. His PowerPoint slides had a dizzying mottled grey background and his company logo was plastered over each slide.
3. Videos and graphics were small and hard to read.
4. He used a flip chart to illustrate both a good and a bad case of a common “pain” he discussed. But both were in the same color, hard to differentiate – and he talked to the chart and to his audience (the money).
5. He told us five things we had to worry about, setting up the “pain” but never summarized or recapped each point.
6. He finished with “Thank You, Any Questions?” instead of a summary of benefits.

All-in-all a very disappointing showing.

Now the beginning of the story. This is not about a Technical Sales Engineer, it’s about a Financial Guru.

Maybe the big data machine now has me tagged, but over the past year I’ve been getting a lot of mail concerning “Worried About Retirement?”, “Don’t Understand Social Security?” or “Why $2 Million Isn’t Enough!” They all offer a free dinner at a nice local restaurant and the opportunity to hear a financial planning guru speak about retirement planning. All these invitations end up in the round filing cabinet (rubbish bin) as:

a. I’m not ready for retirement and

b. they’re all blatantly selling their services.

However, a few weeks ago I received an invitation from yet another company and I’d actually heard of the speaker, so I decided to go and listen to him. He’s certainly not an “A” list guy, but he’s written a book, and I’d seen him on CNBC, Bloomberg or some other US financial news channel. Off I went.

Well – at least the food was good.

The lessons this apparently successful financial planner needed were the same one we teach Sales Engineers when dealing with non-technical or executive audience.

1. Don’t assume deep knowledge and don’t rely on your media resources as a crutch. Talking about beta volatility and inverted yield curves to the general public is meaningless.
2. You have the credibility, and your (potential) customers want to hear from you – not read poorly designed slides and then stare at your back.
3. No matter how good you think you are (and how many people tell you that) there is always room for improvement. The time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining, not when the storm is at your front door.

This has made me go back and take a second look at many of my materials and put myself in my customer's shoes - do I have the Curse of Knowledge? In some cases - yes I do!!

(For more read : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge )

It's a great question to ask yourself.