The Curse of Knowledge

Craig is based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and has worked with ProjectManagement.com for the last six years developing the various HEADWAY processes (Project, Change and Portfolio). He has hosted a series of webinars and is a business intelligence subject matter expert.

  Communications Management   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

Projects fail all the time. One of the key reasons why so many projects are not successful is because they fail to understand the impact that the final product will have on the end user, and how that end user will actually handle that change. On many projects, these are never really addressed directly by the project team--and the critical change management activities required to ensure the successful adoption of the final product are given short shrift or all but ignored.

A lot of assumptions are made by the project team about the end users, and this leads to a lot of problems down the road. In the end, the results are typical--failed projects. One of the reasons for this may be a concept that is important for project managers to be aware of, as it can have a significant impact it can have on their projects.

Have you ever had someone try to explain an unfamiliar concept to you--and their explanation only provided more confusion? What was it about their description of the concept that you found confusing: The terminology and jargon? The complexity of their description? Maybe it was their lack of a solid example. Or was it something else? Regardless of what it was, you did not understand the concept, despite how hard they tried to explain it. This may have been the result of the Curse of Knowledge--something that could be having a substantial impact on your projects …

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