Tappers and listeners

I've been writing about the workplace for more than five years now, checking out new studies, reports, books and interviewing people in high tech and low tech jobs, scrambling to be creative in a topsy-turvy environment or glowing with success because they were in the right place at the right time with the right skill set. So much goes on here and so much needs to be said.

Here's one idea.

In any workplace, communication is critical. That's the opinion of brothers Chip and Dan Heath, a couple of writers worth attention -- one is a professor of organizational behaviour at Stanford University, the other a consultant at Duke Corporate Education. They also write for Fast Company magazine and have authored a book about getting your ideas across.

These are "ideas that stick" but one of the biggest problems with developing them is what the Heaths call “the curse of knowledge.”

It’s beautifully illustrated by a study done in 1990 by Stanford PhD student Elizabeth Newton using a simple game in which she assigned people to be tappers – they tapped out assigned songs like Happy Birthday to You by knocking on a table – and other people to be listeners, who were to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped. Over the course of Newton's experiment, 120 songs were tapped out.

Before they got the score, Newton’s tappers predicted that the odds were 50 per cent the song would be guessed correctly. In reality, instead of getting the song one time in two, the listeners got them one time in 40. Listeners guessed only 2.5 percent of the songs.

The discrepancy, Newton realized, was that the tapper is hearing the song in her head. The listener is only hearing tap-tap-tap.

For the tapper, the song is obvious. She can’t believe the listener is so stupid. That’s because she can’t imagine what it’s like not to hear the song.

This is the curse of knowledge, and this experiment is reenacted every day across the world, write the Heaths. “The tappers and listeners are CEOs and frontline employees, teachers and students, politicians and voters, marketers and customers, writers and readers.

Unless you pay attention, the smarter you get at something, the harder it is to communicate.