Coaching practices for Colleague Making Up Excuses for Lack of Knowledge
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Colleague Making Up Excuses for Lack of Knowledge, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I keep launching into explanations assuming people are starting from where I picture them, and I’m forever either talking over their heads or boring them with stuff they already know
- I keep trying to imagine how this lands for a total beginner, but I can’t actually un-know what I know
- When someone’s clearly not following, I just keep restating the same idea in more technical detail
- When I try to explain this to someone who knows nothing about it and they keep asking "but why does that happen?" at exactly the spots I’d normally skate over, I get stuck and exposed
- I can get to the right answer but the second someone asks me to explain why I did it that way, I go blank
Practices that may help
- Ask what the audience already knows before explaining
Probe prior knowledge explicitly rather than assuming it.
The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach - Find a genuine novice to test your explanation on
Before the real audience, explain to someone who actually doesn’t know.
The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach - Build a bridging analogy from what they know to what they don’t
Map the new concept onto a structure the audience already understands.
The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach - The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias in which knowing something makes it genuinely hard to imagine not knowing it — causing experts to communicate at a level that loses their audience. Chip and Dan Heath popularized the concept in Made to Stick; the underlying effect is well documented in psychology, though cures require deliberate practice. - Third-party explanation test
Explain the concept to a person who knows nothing about it and let their questions expose your gaps.
Illusion of Explanatory Depth: You Know Less Than You Think - Articulation prompts
Ask learners to explain their reasoning before, during, and after a task to surface and strengthen tacit knowledge.
Cognitive Apprenticeship: Learning by Making Thinking Visible - Say "I don’t know" when you genuinely don’t
Admitting the limits of your knowledge signals intellectual honesty and raises long-term credibility.
The Pratfall Effect, Made Practical - Seek conversations with people from radically different fields
Let a conversation partner from another domain ask the naive questions that expose your hidden assumptions.
Combinatorial Creativity, Made Practical - Work backwards from what the learner needs to do
Start with the decision or action the learner must take, then trace back only to the knowledge that serves it.
The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach - Apply the explanation test to gauge real understanding
If you can’t explain something simply without notes, you probably don’t understand it as well as you think.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect, Understood Clearly
Related concerns
- Curse Of Knowledge Couples
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias in which knowing something makes it genuinely hard to imagine not knowing it — causing experts to communicate at a level that loses their audience. Chip and Dan Heath popularized the concept in Made to Stick; the underlying effect is well documented in psychology, though cures require deliberate practice.
- Curse Of Knowledge
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias in which knowing something makes it genuinely hard to imagine not knowing it — causing experts to communicate at a level that loses their audience. Chip and Dan Heath popularized the concept in Made to Stick; the underlying effect is well documented in psychology, though cures require deliberate practice.
- The Curse Of Knowledge Why Experts Struggle To Teach After A Loss
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias in which knowing something makes it genuinely hard to imagine not knowing it — causing experts to communicate at a level that loses their audience. Chip and Dan Heath popularized the concept in Made to Stick; the underlying effect is well documented in psychology, though cures require deliberate practice.
- The Curse Of Knowledge Why Experts Struggle To Teach At Work
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias in which knowing something makes it genuinely hard to imagine not knowing it — causing experts to communicate at a level that loses their audience. Chip and Dan Heath popularized the concept in Made to Stick; the underlying effect is well documented in psychology, though cures require deliberate practice.
- The Curse Of Knowledge Why Experts Struggle To Teach During Conflict
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias in which knowing something makes it genuinely hard to imagine not knowing it — causing experts to communicate at a level that loses their audience. Chip and Dan Heath popularized the concept in Made to Stick; the underlying effect is well documented in psychology, though cures require deliberate practice.
- When Elaborative Interrogation Explain To The Edge Of Knowledge
Keep asking why of your own answer until you reach a gap, then go fill it.
Push the "why" until you hit what you don’t know
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