Inside blind

The longer you run your business, the harder it gets to see it the way a stranger sees it. That is not a character flaw. It cannot be fixed by trying harder. It has a name, it has been studied, and anyone who understands it can at least allow for it.

The curse of knowledge

Three economists, Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber, described and tested it in 1989 in the Journal of Political Economy. They called it the curse of knowledge.

The core of their finding: once you know something, you can no longer set your own knowledge aside when judging others. Better-informed participants predicted the judgements of less-informed participants systematically wrong, and in the direction of their own knowledge. They could no longer reconstruct what it is like not to know.

That is why experts write bad instructions and why parents believe their directions are unambiguous. And it is why you cannot read your own sales path with the eyes of a prospect.

The uncomfortable part is the direction of the effect. It increases with competence, it doesn’t decrease. Whoever knows the business best is least able to judge it from the outside.

Where it hits inside a business

Always at the same kind of place. Wherever something is self-evident to you.

The price is not on the page, because it depends on the situation anyway. For you it does depend. For the prospect it means one thing. They do not know whether they can afford you. So they do not ask. They leave.

The form asks for company size, because you need that to prepare. For you it is a field. For them it is the third question before they know what they get.

You answer the inquiry on Thursday, because Wednesday is workshop day. For you that is one week. For them it is two days of silence in which two other people answered.

In each of those cases the mistake is not a bad decision. It is that there was never a decision at all, only a habit nobody sees any more.

Three signs in yourself

You explain something on your page instead of changing it

If you have to tell somebody what your page is supposed to mean, you have just produced the proof that it doesn’t say it.

You have a step with no number, and it doesn’t bother you

Every step you measure, you looked at once. The ones without a number you never looked at, and that is exactly why you don’t notice.

Your answer to weak numbers starts with “we should probably”

That sentence almost always ends with something new. A finding would start with “at this step”.

What helps and what doesn’t

Thinking harder does not help. The effect does not depend on how thoroughly you think. It sits before the thinking, in what you treat as given.

Two things help. One is a measurement, because a number doesn’t know what you take for granted. The other is a person from outside who asks the question you skipped, because you believed you knew the answer.

Both are uncomfortable. Both take less time than you think.

You can’t see the leak because you’re standing in the middle of it. That is not a weakness, it is the bill for everything you have learned.