In a previous post on backbriefing, I described it as “a process with which people can check their understanding of the intent of their work and whether their plans will meet that intent”. On reflection, I realised I missed an important element. It is also leadership checking whether they have described their intent with enough clarity. Put another way, backbriefing is leadership checking they have not been struck by the Curse of Knowledge.
What is the Curse of Knowledge?
Wikipedia describes the Curse of Knowledge as “a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand”. This is often the cause of chaos and confusion. The missing information leads to misunderstanding, which leads to people making poor decisions or taking incorrect action.
There is a really simple experiment you can run to demonstrate the Curse of Knowledge. Ask someone to tap out the rhythm of a well-known tune to an audience. Then ask them how many people in the audience will be able to guess the tune. Invariably they will estimate quite a high number. In reality, the number of people who do guess the tune is very low. The individual tapping out the tune has the Curse of Knowledge because they can “hear” the tune in their heads, which the audience cannot.
This experiment was run by Elizabeth Newton at Stanford University in 1990. She found that people estimated that 50% of the audience would guess the tune. In fact, less than 2% actually did.
Another well-known example is the Charge of the Light Brigade. This is described by Tim Hartford in his podcast episode The Charge of the Light Brigade and the Valley of Death. Lord Raglan’s high position gave him a view of the whole battlefield which the troops on the ground did not have. That missing information meant that the orders they received were misinterpreted and incorrectly carried out. His instructions to the light cavalry were therefore misunderstood, resulting in a failed assault and very high casualties. Lord Raglan had the Curse of Knowledge.
How does that relate to backbriefing?
Many leaders in organisations make plans and give out instructions like Lord Raglan. They assume that everyone has the same information that they do. While the results may not be quite as dramatic and fatal as the Charge of the Light Brigade, they can be just as disastrous. Plans get incorrectly implemented because the people doing the work can’t see the full picture.
Thus backbriefing is a technique to discover the Curse of Knowledge early. The curse can then be lifted before too much damage can be done. By asking people to replay their understanding of the brief, along with what their intentions and plans are for action, any missing or confusing information can be identified and cleared up early before its causes any problems.
In other words, backbriefing is as much about improving leadership’s communication, as it is about improving the team’s understanding. As such, I am updating my definition of backbriefing to the following.
“a process by which people can check whether the intent of their work has been clearly described and understood and whether their plans to carry out that work will meet that intent”.