Archives for posts with tag: curse of knowledge

The Parable of the Eggless Omelet

November 17, 2023 //
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Chef 1:- I just… I don’t think it’s fair (talking to Chef 2)

Kiki: Chef!

Kiki: Chef!

Chef 1: Yes, Kiki, what is that?

Kiki: A man on table six wants an eggless omelette. He wants an egg…

Chef 1: Kiki you can’t have an eggless omelette, can you?

Kiki: Why do we not have any?

Chef 1: No, they don’t exist, do they? Because there’s no… Breadsticks, what are they made of?

Kiki: Bread.

Chef 1: Bread, very good. OK, take away the bread, what are you left with?

Kiki: Sticks?

Chef 1: No, Kiki! (Sprinkles a few herbs on an empty plate) There you go, that’s an eggless omelet.

Kiki: Okay (takes plate)

Chef 1: No, don’t take the plate, Kiki, what are you doing? Please!

Chef 2: Kiki, just ask the nice man if he’d like his omelet made with whole eggs or just egg whites. (Kiki smiles and goes to leave)

Chef 2: You can leave the plate.

When I was first shown this scene from the British restaurant-based sitcom “Whites” I found it amusing like I’m sure most of you did. How we can laugh at how silly Kiki is being and how she lacks all common sense. And the scene is funny, but it reflects a real behavior that we see every day, admittedly pushed to extremes.

But this is an attitude that needs to change. Just like to scene where the security guard gets humiliated for not stopping the scruffy young man from entering the fancy building and not recognizing that he in-fact owns the building and is ultimately is the security guard’s employer. The poor guard is just doing his job. Just because you walk around like you own the building does not automatically mean you actually do. We’ve all seen the videos that prove you can get it almost anywhere if you are carrying a ladder. Employees, just like clients, can suffer from being of the loosing end of the curse of knowledge.

The curse of knowledge is where we humans can’t understand that others may not have the same life, education, and training as us and therefore may not know the same things. What is obvious and, in that most awful of phrases, “common sense” may not in fact be widely known or common sense. For more on my hatred of “common sense” you can read this post.

But yet we do this all the time. The client who does not know to vaccinate their new puppy. The coffee drinker who does not know that Starbucks calls its large “Venti” or a regular coffee an “Americano.” There is a whole video just about that too.

With employees a lack of knowledge is a teaching moment. Of course, it can be frustrating and if we find ourselves teaching the same thing over and over again we have a different problem, but we can’t criticize, or worse snap at, for a lack of knowledge – even when we think employees should have this knowledge. In any other environment, we would recognize this behavior for what it is; bullying.

Recognizing that teams need be able to express when they don’t know something helps to create a safe space for learning. Teachable moments should be embraced for what they are – a chance to get better, to improve. Its also just the decent thing do to. There can also be more going on than just not knowing something.

New employees, for example, don’t know the limits of their knowledge yet. So while they may not of heard of something does not mean that it does not exist. We don’t want them to guess – so employees ask. They need to praised for checking and confirming that what we think is obvious is actually not. We all need to be better about this. I for one know that I can be bad at this but, as with most things, recognizing when you have a problem is the first step in fixing it.

The Kiki’s of the world deserve that we try.

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Categories Leadership, Management, personal development, Staff Meeting Resources

Common Sense is Nonsense

January 25, 2020 //
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andreas-fickl-k-7JT9obpJw-unsplash

Photo by Andreas Fickl on Unsplash

What is common sense?

Is common sense to a manager the same as common sense to a veterinarian? Or to a veterinary technician? Or to a customer service specialist? Or perhaps, most importantly of all, to a client?

Common sense should be knowledge that we all share; however, it is rarely used that way. It is often used as a bludgeon on people for not reading our minds. Common sense is short hand for “you don’t know what I know, and I think you should.” The problem is that we rarely recognize that our own common sense is more often than not a point of view with some additional specialized knowledge.

Chip and Dan Heath in their book Made to Stick, talk about the “curse of knowledge.” They outline a simple experiment conducted at Stanford, where by a number of “tappers” were given 120 well know songs to recite using just knocks on a table. “Listeners” would then have to guess which each song was. The Listeners were right only about three times out of 120. What was extraordinary; however, was that when the Tappers were asked whether the Listeners should be able to pick out the song, they replied that they should be able to 50% of the time! The Tappers felt they were being understood more than 47% more than they actually were. The Tappers were hearing the song play along in their heads while tapping it out on the table. The Tappers had knowledge that the listeners did not, and so dramatically over estimated the Listeners ability to recognize the song.

Common sense is a side effect of the curse of knowledge. A team member who may excel in looking after an unhappy customer, or preventing a customer from becoming upset in the first place, may not automatically understand the seriousness of a cat that is straining to pee. Likewise, a veterinarian may not understand the reason why their client is not being immediately shown to an exam room is because of the 12 other people that just walked through the door that the customer service representative is trying to deal with.

Now in both of the above examples, training, proper protocols and procedures, and a commitment to teamwork should solve all of these issues. But when we fall back on common sense, or a lack of it, we are doing a disservice to our team members and even to ourselves. If we replace “common sense” with the words “knowledge and experience” in the phrase “you have no common sense when it comes to dealing with clients” the person at fault switches from being who the phrase is directed to, to the person saying the phrase.

Give it a try – I’ll wait.

Common sense is an excuse for leaving training and continuing education to osmosis. It has no place in management, and really has no place at work at all. Employees are not going to place themselves in shoes of clients without being trained to do so, and they rarely have the knowledge to place themselves in the shoes of managers or veterinarians. Common sense is lazy, overly broad, and does a disservice to the person using it and the person whom it is directed against.

It is time to recognize it for the dysfunctional symptom that it is.

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Categories Customer Service, Leadership, Management, Veterinary