The Curse of Knowledge: Why Your Messaging Brief Makes Perfect Sense to You — and No One Else

Every strategist, comms lead, and department head writes their briefs from the inside out. There's a name for what happens when they do, and it's costing your organisation more than you think.

My six-year-old niece has been lying completely still, face down on the floor for three minutes. We're playing charades. The timer ran out two minutes ago. Her sister is getting frustrated. We keep guessing — aeroplane? Chocolate bar? Phone? — throwing out random objects like we're bidding at an auction nobody told us we'd entered.

Eventually, she gets up laughing and flips the card over to show us her word.

Ironing board.

And suddenly it all makes sense, the stillness, the outstretched out arms.

But in the moment, what was crystal clear to her was completely invisible to us. She couldn't understand why we weren't getting it. We couldn't understand what we were even looking for. 

This is the Curse of Knowledge at play. It stems from a simple premise: the more you know about a subject, the harder it becomes to imagine what it's like not to know it.

Authors Chip and Dan Heath, in their book Made to Stick, described the curse of knowledge as "Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has 'cursed' us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind."

The experiment that should worry every comms writer

In 1990, Stanford researcher Elizabeth Newton ran a now-famous study. She divided participants into two groups: tappers and listeners. Tappers were asked to tap the rhythm of a well-known song on a table. Listeners had to identify it from the tapping alone.

The Tappers predicted listeners would guess correctly 50% of the time.

The actual success result was 2.5%, just 1 in 40 songs was correctly identified.

The reason: When tappers tapped, they could hear the full melody playing in their heads. They could not imagine what the tapping sounded like to someone who couldn't.

In every messaging brief, every internal announcement, every carefully composed update, the people doing the writing are just like the tappers. And the organisations they're writing for are the employees.

Why messaging briefs are especially vulnerable to the curse of knowledge

Messaging briefs are written by the people closest to the work: comms leads who have been in every strategy meeting, department heads who authored the initiative, HR business partners briefed within an inch of their lives. These are, without exception, the people most at risk of the Curse of Knowledge.

And the cruelest part of the curse is that it is invisible to the person it has afflicted. You don't notice the moment your brief stops making sense to someone reading it fresh. You just keep writing — confident, clear in your own head — completely unaware that you left your audience behind three paragraphs ago.

The feedback rarely makes it back to you directly. Employees don't reply to the all-hands email to say they had no idea what it meant. They don't raise their hand in the town hall to admit they're confused. They do something quieter and more damaging: they disengage. They scroll past. They forward it to a colleague with a single word — "thoughts?" — hoping someone else will translate it. Or they fill the gap themselves, with assumptions that may be entirely wrong.

Three ways the curse shows up in briefs

The jargon trap. When you've spent months inside a project, the language of that project becomes your native tongue. Phrases like "the new TOM will be rolled out following Phase 2 of the workstream" are complete sentences to you. To a significant portion of your organisation, they are locked doors with no handle.

The reader doesn't always know they're missing context, sometimes they assume the confusion is their fault, that they missed the email where it was explained. So they don't ask. But over time, jargon signals belonging and exclusion. It tells people, without meaning to, that this brief wasn't really written for them.

The confidence that reads as arrogance. When you know a subject deeply, you write with certainty. That certainty can be reassuring — but it can also land as dismissive. An announcement that doesn't acknowledge complexity, doesn't name the hard parts, and makes no room for questions can feel tone-deaf even when written with the best of intentions. Look at the difference:

Lands badly

"We are excited to announce a new and improved process for performance reviews."

Lands better

"We're changing how performance reviews work. Here's what's different, why, and what to expect."

The slow erosion of trust. A single poorly written brief doesn't break trust. But a pattern of communications that consistently assumes too much, explains too little, and speaks from the inside out — that compounds. Employees begin to read announcements with a certain weariness. Once that belief sets in — that these updates are written for leadership, not for them — your best briefs will have to fight an uphill battle just to be read fairly.

Five ways to break the curse

1. Use Plain Language

Don't make your audience work to decode your message. If you're unsure how much your readers know, assume less rather than more. Long, dense paragraphs are the enemy. A 40-word sentence carrying three ideas is doing nobody any favours — split it, and let each idea earn its own space. The clearest test: if your brief were printed and handed to a new joiner on their first day, would they understand it?

2. Use the Language Your Employees Already Use

There's a version of company vocabulary that only makes sense to the people who invented it. "Synergistic value delivery," "workstream optimisation," "strategic pillars" — these may be second nature to the leadership team, but they create distance with the very people you're trying to bring along. If your team calls it "the review process," don't suddenly rename it "the performance calibration cycle" in the brief. Consistency and familiarity build trust.

3. Lead with the "So What"

Most briefs bury the point. They open with background, context, and history before eventually arriving at what actually matters to the reader. Flip it. Start with what's changing and what it means for the person reading. "From 1 May, the expenses process is changing — here's what you need to do differently" lands far better than three paragraphs of Finance team backstory before anything actionable appears. Earn their attention, then give them the context.

4. Get Specific

Vagueness creates anxiety, particularly when briefs touch on sensitive or uncertain topics. Specificity signals credibility. Abstraction signals that you either don't know, don't want to say, or haven't thought it through. Compare "We are committed to delivering an excellent employee experience" with "From next quarter, every employee will have a 30-minute monthly check-in with their manager, and all IT requests will be resolved within 48 hours." One is noise. The other is a commitment.

5. Anchor abstractions in familiar examples

Abstract concepts become concrete when you attach them to something the reader already knows. This is especially important for briefs involving structural changes, new processes, or technical systems. Rather than explaining a new project management methodology in procedural terms, describe what a typical Monday morning will look like under the new approach. A well-chosen analogy does more communicative work than three paragraphs of explanation.

A note on technical terms: the threading technique

Sometimes jargon is unavoidable — acronyms, product names, and methodology terms have legitimate places in internal communication. The rule is not to eliminate them but to never leave them unexplained for the first-time reader.

The threading technique is a simple fix: introduce the term, immediately clarify it in plain language, then use the term freely thereafter. The reader now has both the term and its meaning. Like so:

For example: Read these sentences:

Question: Where is the bird? 

Did you have to go back and read it again?

Each sentence requires a new image, which makes your brain work harder to re-engage and understand.

Threading is when you thread your sentences together by connecting a new concept to an old one or one that your audience is already familiar with as a way to explain something complex in a simple way.

By joining the end of a sentence with the beginning of the next sentence, each new concept is linked and helps your audience follow along.

"We're moving to an agile delivery model, a way of working in shorter, iterative cycles rather than long sequential projects, starting in Q3. Under this model, each team will work in two-week sprints, with a clear set of priorities agreed at the start of each cycle."

The term no longer functions as a locked door. You haven't had to simplify the content — you've simply given the reader the key. Used consistently, the threading technique signals respect: it acknowledges that not everyone shares your starting point, without talking down to anyone.

2 Questions to ask before hitting send

Where are we assuming the reader already knows what we know? Look for unexplained acronyms, undefined processes, or references to decisions that were communicated elsewhere but may not have landed.

Which terms or concepts might be too insider for our wider audience? Something obvious to the project team may be opaque to the 300 people receiving the all-hands update.

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Messaging designed to survive the rooms you’re not in

🎯 Hi, I'm Vivien,

I help global B2B communication leaders and teams design messaging that survives across stakeholders, buyers, and employees—so critical decisions move faster, updates don’t get ignored, and your credibility stays intact.

From building systems your team can repeat, to writing the high-stakes brief your exec needs done right.

I pinpoint where your messaging gets distorted and uncover the human filters shaping it. Then I rebuild it so it stays intact as it moves through the people and decisions that matter most.

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