We all remember our school days when teachers used to bombard us with proverbs which underlined the idea that knowledge is power.

Some back-benchers scoffed at them while the nerds embraced the latter, sticking them up their walls. As psychology evolved and became more apt at understanding the complexities of the human brain, human beings began to doubt the fact that possessing a substantial amount of knowledge proved to be solely advantageous. In fact, psychologists have found that knowing too much or possessing too much expertise in a particular field proves to be a serious drawback when it comes to communicating and sharing knowledge.

It seems to me that Einstein was right when he said: “The more I learn, the more I realise I don’t know.” Some might say that Einstein wished to underline the fact that the more knowledge you acquire, the more you realise that there is still so much more knowledge to acquire but my own interpretation of this quote is that the more knowledgeable you are, the less you know how to communicate and share this knowledge…

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton conducted a simple but brilliant experiment to help individuals fathom, to a greater extent, how come knowing too much could have dramatic consequences. For the purpose of her experiment, Elizabeth divided her sample of individuals into two distinct categories: the tappers and the listeners. The tappers were asked to tap the rhythm of a well known tune on the table whereas the listeners had to identify the latter, a seemingly easy task considering the fact that the songs were famous, which probably explains why, when asked for the probability that the listeners got the song right, the tappers answered 50 percent. The interesting part of this experiment is that, in reality, the listeners could only figure out the tune about 3 percent of the time. ‘How could they be so dumb?’ the tappers probably asked themselves. What the tappers did not know was that they had been victim of the ‘villain’, as Dan and chip Heath call it in their book Made to stick: the Curse of Knowledge. The problem is that tappers cannot imagine what it is like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than the song which plays in their head when they’re tapping.

But what exactly is the Curse of Knowledge and how could knowledge possibly be a curse to us? Well, succinctly, the Curse of knowledge refers to the natural psychological tendency to forget what it is like not to know something once we have become expert at it. As a result, it becomes virtually impossible for us to share our knowledge with others since we are incapable of re-creating our listeners’ state of mind. The Curse of Knowledge is the root of many workplace problems.  It affects communication between employees and with customers, and it can cause all your good intentioned new products to fail. It''''s why designing for someone who isn''t like you can be so difficult.

The tapper/listener experiment is re-enacted all over the world, everyday. The tappers and listeners are CEOs and frontline employees, teachers and students, politicians and voters, marketers and customers, writers and readers amongst many others. All of these groups depend greatly on ongoing communication but, unfortunately, like tappers and listeners, they suffer from gigantic information imbalances. For instance, when a CEO discusses ‘unlocking shareholder value,’ there is a tune playing in his head which, sadly, the employees cannot hear…

But how to beat this serious problem? According to Dan and Chip, there exists only two reliable ways to do so: the first is not to learn anything and the second is to take your ideas and thoughts and transform them. I guess most of us will be turning to the second possibility.

Some of you might be wondering how come I switched from MID to the Curse of Knowledge in a few weeks. Well, in fact, I wanted to use this concept to make our decision makers understand that once again, the big problem in the implementation of the MID project lies in the fact that the experts we seek help from are incapable of passing their understanding and knowledge to the population and that because of this, the MID project stalls. What we need are individuals who certainly are experts but who, at the same time, are capable of re-familiarizing themselves with the thought-pattern of the population and who are capable of embracing, like Taoists call it, the beginner’s mind. As Suzuki Roshi said in the prologue to Zen Mind Beginner''s Mind, "In the beginner''s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert''s there are few." As an expert, you''ve already got it figured out, so you do not need to pay attention to what''s happening. What a real pity…