Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Chip Heath

And here is where our classic villain, the Curse of Knowledge, inserts itself. A researcher named Beth Bechky studied a manufacturing firm that designed and built the complicated machinery used to produce silicon chips. To build such machinery, the firm needed two sets of skills: engineers who could create brilliant designs, and skilled manufacturing people who could transform those designs into complex physical machines. If the firm was to succeed, these two sets of people had to be able to communicate smoothly. But, not surprisingly, they spoke different languages. The engineers tended to think abstractly—they spent their day agonizing over drawings and blueprints. The manufacturing team, on the other hand, tended to think on a physical level—they spent their day building machines. What’s most revealing for the Curse of Knowledge is what happened when something went wrong on the manufacturing floor. The manufacturing folks would sometimes run into a problem—something didn’t fit or perhaps wasn’t receiving enough power. The manufacturers would bring the problem to the engineers, and the engineers would immediately get to work. Specifically, they’d get to work fixing their drawings. For example, the manufacturing team might find a part that didn’t fit on the machine. When the team showed the part to the engineers, they wanted to pull out the blueprints and move things around on the drawing. In other words, the engineers instinctively wanted to jump to a higher level of abs...