You may know someone like this. The engineer who understands the system better than anyone. The analyst who can see the shape of the numbers before the spreadsheet has finished loading. The specialist people turn to the moment something goes wrong.
Plenty of people like this are superb presenters, but for some, something strange happens when they stand up in front of a room. Ask them a question over coffee, and they are brilliant: precise, insightful, often fascinating. In front of an audience, the slides multiply, the detail deepens, and the sentences fill with terms that half the room quietly doesn’t understand. The people who most needed to hear what they know can leave knowing very little more than when they arrived.
You may well have heard some version of this yourself: “They’re one of the cleverest people we have. Why can’t they get it across?”
When that happens, the answer is rarely what people expect. It usually isn’t a lack of confidence or charisma. Very often, the thing getting in the way is the very thing that makes them so valuable.
Their knowledge.
This isn’t, of course, confined to engineers and analysts. It can catch any of us, the moment we know a subject well enough to forget what it was like not to.
THE TAPPERS AND THE LISTENERS
A simple experiment explains this better than anything I could say. In 1990, a Stanford psychology student named Elizabeth Newton asked people to tap out the rhythm of a well-known song, such as “Happy Birthday”, on a table, while a listener tried to guess the tune. Before the listeners guessed, the tappers were asked to predict how often they would succeed. They said about half the time.
Across 120 songs, the listeners guessed correctly just three times. The tappers thought they would get their message across one time in two. In reality, it was one time in forty.
Think about what was happening in that room. As the tappers knocked on the table, they could hear the melody playing in their heads, the words, the harmony, every note. The listeners heard only knocking, and the tappers couldn’t understand why something so obvious to them was so baffling to everyone else.
Once we know something, it becomes remarkably hard to imagine what it is like not to know it.
Psychologists call it the curse of knowledge, and I have never come across a better description of what happens to so many experts the moment they stand up to present.
WHAT THE CURSE SOUNDS LIKE
You will recognise the signs. The presentation that starts in the middle, because the beginning seems too obvious to mention. The acronyms nobody explains, because to the presenter, they’re simply words. The leap from point three to point seven, because points four, five and six feel self-evident. The thirty slides of careful evidence for a conclusion the room was never quite told.
None of this stems from carelessness or arrogance. If anything, it stems from the opposite: a deep respect for the subject and a genuine wish to do it justice. The tune is playing so clearly in their heads that they can’t hear how it sounds from the other side of the table.
This is the most important part: an audience that struggles to follow doesn’t just miss details; it also experiences a sense of disconnect. It feels lost, then a little foolish, and then, quietly, it stops listening. Nobody enjoys feeling slow in a room full of colleagues, and nobody asks the question that might reveal it. So, the room nods politely, the expert assumes the message has landed, and both sides leave believing the other understood.
WHY TAPPING HARDER DOESN’T HELP
When an expert’s presentations aren’t landing, the natural instinct is to focus on delivery. More confidence, more energy, a stronger voice and better slides.
All of those things have their place, but polishing the delivery of a message the audience can’t follow is a little like asking the tapper to knock more beautifully. The rhythm may improve, but the listener still can’t hear the song.
The real work is translation: helping someone hear their own knowledge the way their audience will hear it, and then building the bridge between the two. That isn’t a technique you bolt on at the end. It begins long before you write the first slide, with a few honest questions.
FOUR QUESTIONS THAT BREAK THE CURSE
What does this room already know? Not what they should know, or what you’d like them to know, but what they actually know as they walk through the door. That is where the presentation has to begin, even if it feels painfully basic to you.
If they remember only one thing, what should it be? Experts can see a hundred things that matter, and they want to share them all. The audience can carry far fewer. Choosing is not dumbing down; it’s an act of generosity.
What do I want them to do with it? Knowledge alone rarely moves anyone. If you can’t say what you want the room to decide, approve, change or watch out for, the room won’t be able to either.
How would this sound to someone clever who isn’t in my field? Not someone slow, someone bright and busy who simply doesn’t share your vocabulary. Every term they wouldn’t use, every step they couldn’t take, is a place where the room will quietly get lost.
A SIMPLE TEST WORTH TRYING
If you want to see the curse at work, here is a test that takes about five minutes. Before an expert’s next important presentation, ask them to explain it in two minutes to a capable colleague from a completely different part of the business. Then ask the colleague just two things: what’s the main point, and what are we being asked to do?
If the colleague can answer both, the expert is in good shape. If they can’t, you have found the real development need, and it isn’t confidence or delivery. It’s translation. The encouraging news is that translation can be learned, often far more quickly than people expect, once someone can finally hear what the listeners have been hearing all along.
WHY THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WORTH INVESTING IN
Your experts hold some of your organisation’s most valuable knowledge, but knowledge only creates value when it travels: when it reaches the people who need to understand it, believe it and act on it. Knowledge that can’t leave someone’s head is worth very little to the organisation that is paying for it.
That’s why helping your most knowledgeable people present well is rarely about polishing them. It’s about making sure what they know actually reaches the room.
Your experts don’t need to know less. They need to remember what it was like not to know.
If you found this useful, I’d be grateful if you would share it with a colleague, or with someone who knows far more than they can currently get across.
HOW I CAN HELP
If you would like help with this in your own organisation, there are three ways I work with people:
- Presentation skills training for teams: small groups working on the real presentations they give, from the weekly update to the board.
- One-to-one coaching: for experts and specialists preparing for an important presentation, or stepping into bigger rooms.
- Public speaking courses: open one-day courses in London.
If you would like to talk about what might help your people, I would be glad to hear from you at [email protected].
Further reading
Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2006). The curse of knowledge. Harvard Business Review, December 2006. https://hbr.org/2006/12/the-curse-of-knowledge
