🤯 The curse of knowledge

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been writing about cognitive biases on LinkedIn. One post explored the curse of knowledge: once we know something, we struggle to imagine what it’s like to not know it.

We then communicate assuming that everyone else has the same level of knowledge as us. In many (most?) situations, that is a flawed assumption.

There are endless examples of people tripping up over this. Perhaps the most relatable: we have all been in a room where someone is using acronyms that we do not know. In most cases, the speaker is not trying to be clever; it is unimaginable to them that people wouldn’t know what this assortment of letters refers to.

So while the speaker continues with their point, the listener is distracted—their brain whirs into action pondering what the acronym means, trying out different words combinations that could explain it, and wondering whether they are the only one in the room who doesn’t get it. The speaker’s argument is lost in the noise.

It’s even worse when there are double meanings—when you think you know what someone is saying, but it just isn’t adding up. Some of my favourites: CSIS or CSIS? CPS or CPS? IEA or IEA?

This bias afflicts us all, including the Government—as Anna’s recent research shows. I especially enjoyed Anna’s points around the futility of announcements, the use of meaningless words, and the lack of imagination when it comes to narrative shaping.

My challenge to you is to think about your organisation when reading her comments: these challenges are not unique to government.

Tom
P.S. Our clients at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies are on the hunt for a Communications Officer. Could it be you?

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Announcements do not signal ‘delivery’

Government announcements aren’t a credible signal of action anymore for the public.

This isn’t just to do with the current government, it has been a relatively long-running trend. There are just so many of them and they don't cut through.

The government announces hundreds of things every year and most things capture a tiny bit of attention for maybe 24 hours, and then attention flatlines and doesn’t return. Words just aren’t enough.

Maybe because the words themselves don’t mean anything 

We did a piece of research looking at the language the government uses just before Christmas which was called “What are you talking about?” We did the research because so much of the language that comes out of government just doesn't exist in the real world.

I got a bit of pushback from some in government who argued “Well, sometimes we're speaking to the voters and sometimes we're speaking to elite circles and we use different language for different places.”

The problem is that that ‘elite’ language then becomes commonplace in how we speak in government, and that then drifts into how people speak because they think it's normal. It’s not normal. 

Who has ever said “joined-up care pathways” or “outcome-based commissioning?” No one speaks like that. If you wouldn’t say it at the pub, don’t put it in your public communications.

In this really low-trust world that we live in, it just sounds evasive. Using plain language—speaking in feelings and experiences—is key.

Should you even be using words to talk about policy?

There’s a quote that stuck with me from a focus group I did. The question was, “What can Starmer do to regain or gain your trust?” And the guy said, “There is nothing that Starmer can say to earn my trust. He’s going to have to physically show me.”

That “physically show me” bit is important. When you’re planning your policy and you know where you want to get to—let's say it’s a million and a half homes in five years—what are the milestones along the way to get there and what are going to be the opportunities to show that we're getting there?

The government needs to think about how it is going to communicate progress. And it needs to embrace visual storytelling.

Even when there is a real opportunity to use imagery or video to tell a story, the government doesn’t seem to want to. My favourite example was the government announcing that they were going to use drones to identify fly tippers, and they were going to crush their cars. And then they never spoke about it again. 

Come on! Where are the videos of Starmer on a 4x4 or a monster truck crushing cars? It can't be that hard to think of these moments that are novel and show the policy in action in a visceral, exciting way.

The government grid incentivises short-term media hits

The error that they've made is that they don't use the grid strategically enough. They don't think about how they're going to announce something once, and then at what point they're going to return to things. It’s very much a method for that first press release.

And even when they come back to it once or twice over the next 12 months, it still feels like they're trying to make it a new story. But because of that, it doesn't feel like it builds on anything. The repetitiveness that you need to have a really coherent narrative gets lost in the grid because it's just “what's the next new thing?”

It seems that they are thinking that “as long as our grid is really busy and we look really busy then we’ll look really purposeful.” But without that bigger thinking of what sits above it, what that narrative is, it just doesn't work.

I should say that I don't think we should drop the grid. It is important because loads of stuff happens in government, it’s a chaotic place. You don't want departments announcing big things at the same time and the grid helps with discipline. There are lots of benefits to the grid–but it does need to be used strategically as well as tactically.

It’s also a question of who is hired into government comms roles

When you’ve been trained in that newspaper room environment, your ultimate goal is to get the headline that day. That’s the goal. But strategic communications is a completely different skill set. It’s a completely different muscle that needs to be used to build a narrative and then have the perseverance to keep going on essentially the same thing.

It can be boring because it is boring when it is just ‘breakfast clubs, breakfast clubs, breakfast clubs.’ But that is what you need to do if you want to create a narrative. You can’t keep jumping around to new shiny things.

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