Essay · ~15 min read

The Curse of Knowledge at Work: Why Experts Can No Longer Explain Things Simply

Astrid Groenewegen · SUE Behavioural Design Free Beginner

This piece names the exact bias behind the question: once you know a field cold, your brain literally cannot simulate not knowing it, so you assume the customer shares your context. It is written for practitioners, not academics, and ties the bias straight to product, onboarding, and communication decisions. A useful starting point for a domain expert who suspects their own fluency is hiding the real job.

• The curse of knowledge is structural, not a willpower problem: telling an expert to just explain more simply does not work, so you need outside reviewers and fresh eyes built into your process.
• Deep expertise makes you overestimate what customers already understand, which is the same mechanism that makes you misread which job they are actually hiring you for.
• Concrete fix: put recent newcomers (or non-expert customers) in the room before you lock in a product decision, because they still remember what confusion feels like.