I always hated the game charades as a boy. For those who are unfamiliar with charades, it is when one person tries to help their teammates guess a short phrase using only pantomime. From my very first experience with the game, I thought it was a ridiculous exercise. If you know the title of a book or a song, then just say it. Why intentionally complicate communications with artificial constraints? Furthermore, I realized that the hearing impaired already had sign language that solves for nonverbal communication. To the hearing impaired, charades must seem completely ridiculous. I could not share in the fun that other people experienced because I found the game irrational.

Years later, I discovered that expertise brings with it a permanent form of charades. You know something that other people do not know, and they do not share a vocabulary with you, which is an obstacle to communication. Knowledge is a curse in charades. What is clear and obvious to you is neither clear nor obvious to your audience, and you both lack the communication tools necessary to bridge the knowledge divide.

The curse of knowledge is one of the biggest challenges for SMEs. They often assume that other people understand them, follow their reasoning, and will arrive at the same logical conclusions as them. Th is mental bias of assumptions influences the way experts communicate. When you know something, it can be difficult to pretend you don’t, and it can be difficult to remember what it was like before you knew it. Once they master a subject, experts quickly forget the struggles they experienced gaining the knowledge. Researchers have known for decades that knowledge can create communication problems.14 In his book The Sense of Style, Steven Pinker indicates that “the main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not to know something that you know.”

There are, of course, many things you as an SME can do to remedy the curse of knowledge. First, you must recognize it exists. If you do not realize that people cannot understand you, then you won’t be able to help them. People do not want to appear stupid or uninformed, so they often disguise their confusion and pretend to understand. You should avoid complicated phraseology, jargon, and acronyms (more on that later). Don’t assume that everyone knows what your words mean. Even adding a few words to an explanation can be enormously helpful.

Recognizing that your abstractions are not their abstractions is also important. Your audience has not studied your subject for years or decades the way you have. Consequently, they do not put things in the same buckets or sort things in the same order. As an expert, you should take nothing for granted. Speak to the least informed person in the room and use plain language. Don’t assume they understand you even when they say they do.

Don’t get frustrated with the game of charades. It can be painful when things go wrong, but you don’t have a better choice. You can either bridge the communication divide that accompanies knowledge, or you can speak over the heads of your audience and minimize your effectiveness.