 What you're about to see is the fifth law in the six laws of facilitation that I teach in my facilitation trainings. And this one often stands out to people as something they'd never heard of before. And it's something that it's a mindset shift that if you can really internalize it as a facilitator, as someone who helps teens collaborate, it's something that's just going to make you so much more successful at what you do. It's called the curse of knowledge. It's something I learned from the book called made to stick. And again, it's not something that people usually hear about in the facilitation space because I kind of took it from somewhere else. I think it's going to be super useful for you. The only thing I ask is if you like this, just hit the like button and hit the subscribe button that helps the channel to grow. And that's it. I hope you like it. I have very different hair in the video that's coming up because it was recorded for another training. That's it. See you. Bye. Law number five, beware the curse of knowledge. Now this might sound dramatic, but it's not dramatic. You are cursed. I am cursed. And all of my employees are cursed with the curse of knowledge. And I see it coming up all the time. And the thing is this curse is so strong that it's almost impossible to break. Luckily you bought this program. So we're going to be able to break that curse. No problem. So for me, this is one of the most important laws. The reason is it's something that everyone has a problem with. This curse of knowledge is a killer for workshops. It's a killer for facilitators. And it's one of the most common mistakes that facilitators, workshoppers make. So what is the curse of knowledge? Let me read a quote straight from the book made to stick where the curse of knowledge was coined. The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual communicating with other individuals unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand in a nutshell, because you know about workshops and because you know about what you're doing. Because you know how to run the exercises that you're telling your participants about. It means that you think that they also know how to do it as well. And therefore you're cursed with the curse of knowledge. You're cursed because you know how to do these things. And it makes you worse at explaining things to other people. There's a really cool experiment to prove this. And in this experiment, let me show you how this works actually. Oh, so I'm going to tap a song here and I want you to guess what song it is. Okay. All right. So I tapped a song right now. And because I can hear this song playing in my head while I tap it, it's super obvious to me what this song is. And there's a high likelihood that you don't know what song I just tapped. The song I just tapped was Jingle Bells. Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle all the way. But I could hear that playing in my head. You couldn't hear that playing in your head. You could just hear tapping. Some of you might have gotten Jingle Bells, but I could have chosen something a bit more complicated, whatever you get the point. The interesting thing in this study is that 50% of the tappers thought that the other people would actually guess the song, but only 2.5 of the listeners, 2.5% of the listeners actually guessed it. That's a clear example of the curse of knowledge. I know what song I'm tapping. They don't know what song I'm tapping, but I believe that they should be able to understand it because I'm the one tapping it. Now, back to workshops. What you need to take away from this is because you know how to run these exercises, it means automatically that you're really not the best person to be describing it, unless you know how to control the curse of knowledge. Even multiple years into an employee working at AJ & Smart, I was at a workshop with an employee and I saw him ask the client to create some How Might Wees without explaining how to do the How Might Wee exercise. I couldn't believe he was explaining like this, but I realized I probably also do things like this and just expect the other people in the room to understand it. That's the curse of knowledge in action. You're not explaining things to a person as if they've never heard about it. You're explaining things to a person assuming that they have similar knowledge to you. Now, if you don't take care of the curse of knowledge, you're just going to be a bad facilitator because people won't understand how to do the exercises or you'll eventually get them to do the exercises. But because you're not able to understand that you have this curse, you'll have to keep repeating yourself over and over again to get them to understand. However, if you realize that the curse of knowledge is a problem, then you're going to be able to deal with it up front. Tip number one, when you're creating your slides or your boards or whatever when you're creating your workshop, make sure you're creating it with the beginner's mindset in mind. Imagine you're creating this for people who've never heard about design sprints, who've never heard about workshops, who've never heard about these exercises. So make sure you're designing it so that you're explaining this from scratch to someone for the very first time. You have to put yourself into the shoes of a beginner to be able to actually create materials that are going to be useful for the people learning from you or from the people in your workshops. So tip number one, get into the beginner's mindset and break this curse of knowledge. You almost have to imagine you don't know any of the stuff that you know. That's really the first tip for solving the curse of knowledge. The second tip is that you have to understand your participants don't know the big picture of the workshop. They just see lots of individual exercises one after the other, but they don't really know how they all stick together. They don't know why are we doing this exercise? Now this exercise, why is this one coming after this one? Like, how does this all stick together? It's your job to make that clear to them. It's your job to explain why the exercises fit together. And this is something you'll have to constantly do during your workshops. If you're doing the map exercise, for example, you have to tell them, why are you doing this exercise? How does it fit into the rest of the workshop? Will we be using the outcomes of this exercise somewhere else? Some of the worst workshops I've run have been the workshops where I just plow through the exercises and at lunchtime someone says, what was the point in doing the how might we's? What was the point in doing the lightning demos? We never came back to it. And I'm like, oh, yeah, no, no, we'll come back to it later, but they don't know this. They don't know the big picture. The curse of knowledge makes you assume they know the big picture. The curse of knowledge makes you assume they understand how all these exercises are sticking together. You cannot assume that you have to help them through these workshops, as if it's their first time. They don't see the big picture. Keep this in mind. My final tip for you is to watch your language. Language is basically your tool of facilitation and a lot of facilitators take this for granted. There are a lot of really simple mistakes you can make with your language that can completely mess up the workshop and add unnecessary confusion to your participants. Two things in particular I want to talk about here. One is the use of jargon. So the use of terminology that other people won't understand. Right? If you're talking about, hey, let's create some HMWs, right? How might we's? How might we's is even jargon. People don't understand what that is. That's something that you understand. Right? You have to really watch what you're saying and make sure this is terminology that other people understand. Hey, we're going to do a straw poll vote. Nobody understands what a straw poll vote is, right? You have to be really careful that you're not replacing plain English things that are easy to understand with jargon that only you or your team understands. The second thing, and this is a bit more sensitive and this is a bit more hard to watch out for, and you're going to have to ask other people for feedback on this. But I've seen it kill a lot of workshops and I have a hard time telling people this to their face. But using local colloquialisms, meaning basically using special language to your country or to your friend group or to your city that doesn't translate globally, especially when you're working with global clients, is a complete nightmare, especially things that just don't translate across the world. We have a lot of people from a lot of different countries that age and smart. I'm from Ireland. One example of something that we say in Ireland that people don't say in other countries is it will be grand. This means everything will be fine. That's an example of something that absolutely does not translate into other languages. And there's even colloquialisms that might build up in your corporate environment. A good example of that and something I really don't like hearing is let's take this offline. Let's take this offline in corporate speak means let's not discuss this in this room right now. We'll discuss it at a different time. Instead of saying let's take this offline, say let's not discuss this in this room right now. Let's discuss it another time. It's better to actually use plain, simple, easy to understand English rather than trying to shorten things down to the weird colloquialisms and corporate speak that you might have learned on your journey. But the only way to learn that is by asking other people for feedback. Right. I'm able to do this course right now. I'm able to teach you because I've gone through years of learning how to get rid of certain colloquialisms that I was using and weird corporate speak and weird things that I was saying that just people didn't understand. But the only way I learned that was by people saying John, I don't understand what that means. What does grand mean? Like, why are you even saying that word? How am I supposed to interpret that? So really watch your language and don't assume other people know what you're talking about. And that is law number five. Beware the curse of knowledge. Oh, you should put some lightning. OK, that was it. The curse of knowledge. I would recommend reading that book made to stick if this topic was interesting to you. It's very, very interesting. We don't have an affiliate link or anything. We don't do that on this channel. If facilitation and learning facilitation from AJ and Smart is something interesting to you, just go to AJSmart.com. You can find out more there. And I hope you like the video. See you.