Inside blind

The longer you run a business, the harder it gets to see it the way a stranger does. That isn’t a character flaw, and trying harder won’t shift it. It has a name, it’s been studied, and once you understand how it works you can at least plan around it.

The curse of knowledge

Three economists, Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber, wrote it up and tested it in the Journal of Political Economy in 1989. They called it the curse of knowledge.

What they found comes down to this. Once you know a thing, you can’t put that knowledge down again when you try to judge somebody who doesn’t have it. Better-informed participants got the judgements of less-informed participants wrong, and they got them wrong in the direction of what they themselves knew. They couldn’t get back to not knowing.

It’s why experts write terrible instructions and why every parent thinks their directions were perfectly clear. And it’s why you can’t read your own sales path through a buyer’s eyes.

Here’s the uncomfortable part. The effect gets stronger with competence, not weaker. Whoever knows the business best is the worst placed to judge it from outside.

Where it hits inside a business

Always in the same kind of spot. Wherever something is obvious to you.

The price isn’t on the page, because it depends on the job. From where you sit, it does depend. From where they sit, it means one thing only. They can’t tell whether they can afford you. And they don’t ask. They leave.

The form asks for company size, because you need it to prepare properly. To you it’s a field. To them it’s the third question they’ve answered before finding out what they get.

You reply on Thursday, because Wednesday is workshop day. To you that’s the same week. To them it’s two days of silence, and two other people answered inside it.

None of those is a bad decision. The trouble is that no decision was ever made. It’s a habit, and nobody in the building can see it any more.

Three signs in yourself

You explain something on your page instead of changing it

If you have to explain what your page means, you’ve just proved it doesn’t say it.

You have a step with no number, and it doesn’t bother you

Every step you measure is one you looked at once. The ones with no number are the ones you never looked at, which is precisely why their absence doesn’t register.

Your answer to weak numbers starts with “we should probably”

That sentence nearly always ends in something new. A finding would have started with “at this step”.

What helps and what doesn’t

Thinking harder won’t get you there. The effect doesn’t care how thoroughly you think, because it sits upstream of the thinking, in whatever you’ve already filed as given.

Two things do. A measurement, because a number has no idea what you take for granted. And somebody from outside who asks the question you skipped, on the grounds that you already knew the answer.

Both are uncomfortable, and both take less time than you’d guess.

You can’t see the leak because you’re standing in the middle of it. That isn’t a weakness. It’s what everything you’ve learned costs to keep.