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.

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