Here’s the bad news: The deeper your understanding of an issue and the stronger your conviction about the solution, the worse you often become at persuasion.
It’s due to a cognitive trap that the fields of behavioral economics and neuroscience have spent decades documenting: the curse of knowledge. In other words, your knowledge has fundamentally altered your perception of what you believe others are experiencing. It applies to your persuasion—especially when you are the well-informed expert in the room.
Here’s how this curse blindsides you in persuasion. You’ve spent weeks developing a proposal to solve a complex problem. You’re now completely convinced of the way forward. By the time you present your proposal to decision-makers, you’re already deep in the curse of knowledge. You cannot accurately imagine what your proposal sounds like to anyone who’s encountering it for the first time.
Now you can start to understand the baffling experience all of us have had: presenting what feels like an obvious and clear case for an idea and watching it hit a brick wall. From our perspective, everything is clear, logical, and persuasive. To further complicate matters, we become invested in a solution—our solution.
Pride of ownership deepens our commitment. When stakeholders start to raise challenging questions, we say to ourselves: They must not be listening carefully. They must be resistant to change or protective of the status quo. The possibility that we’ve failed to build a bridge from their knowledge to ours doesn’t even occur to us, because we cannot see the gap.
How to vanquish the curse of knowledge
There is an antidote to the curse of knowledge. You must abandon your mental model of persuasion as first and foremost a solution-centric activity. Masterful persuasion starts with problem definition, not solution definition.
It’s not an easy perspective to accept. After all, you want to solve a problem efficiently and quickly. And who can resist the ego rewards of “pride of ownership” and the public recognition of how clever you are? Instead, with problem-centric persuasion, you’ll experience a different kind of reward: meaningful collaborations with colleagues in solving truly thorny problems. But this approach requires far more from your curiosity and skills of engagement, and, at the start, far less from your expertise and advocacy skills.
Truly effective persuasion begins with curiosity, not certainty. It begins with questions, not answers. It begins with exploring problems, not advocating solutions. At a certain point later in the process, you will make a pitch and advocate for a particular solution. But this will occur only after you’ve gathered intelligence and built a rich understanding of the problem through others. Then you absolutely need to advance a clear recommendation. But the sequence matters profoundly. Questions first, pitches second.
Not so surprisingly, one of the trademark traits of leaders who are masterful at persuasion is that they’re instinctually curious. Before they try to change your mind, they work to understand it. They ask about your concerns, your priorities, your constraints, your resources, your values. Foundational to their curiosity is their capacity to listen.
What can we conclude from our exploration into the curse of knowledge and its associated traps?
First, resist the temptation to go solo in researching the problem you’re confronting. At the start, make it a collaborative process. Engage a breadth of stakeholders, both decision-makers and implementers. Before you formulate your pitch, formulate your questions. Design them to go deep—to understand the problem from multiple angles and the implications for all your stakeholders. Ask yourself: What do I need to understand about this person’s situation, preferences, values, identity, resources, and constraints? Then go ask them.
This discovery process will at times feel like a setback; your original perspective on the issue or a solution you’re contemplating just became irrelevant. That’s progress. You’ve avoided wasting your persuasive capital on an argument that would have fallen flat. And you’ve conducted the reconnaissance needed to see the problem more fully and to craft a solution that will be enthusiastically supported and implemented.
That’s the paradox at the heart of persuasion: The fastest path to changing someone’s mind is to first spend time truly understanding it.