He was one of the smartest people I’d ever coached. Which turned out to be part of the problem.
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Media commentary by Steve Dunlop
About a decade ago, I was asked to work with a senior executive at a Fortune 100 company known for hiring the best and the brightest.
The smarter the executive, the more susceptible they may be to information overload. Photo courtesy of EuropeInvest via Unsplash.
On paper, he had it all: intelligence, experience, impeccable credentials, and a résumé that would impress anyone.
Yet whenever he had to deliver a major speech or sit for an important media interview, he reverted to an extraordinary ritual.
His staff prepared briefing books that were sometimes an inch thick—hundreds of pages of background material, charts, graphs, talking points, and possible questions. The night before an appearance, he would stay up late, studying them as if he were cramming for a final exam.
At first, I admired his diligence. Eventually, I realized something else was going on.
Despite his expertise, he didn’t trust himself to know what he already knew.
I’ve come to recognize this pattern repeatedly among highly accomplished leaders. The smarter and more knowledgeable the executive, the more susceptible he or she may be to information overload.
Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon: the “curse of knowledge.” In a landmark 1989 study, economists Colin Camerer of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, George Loewenstein of the University of Chicago, and Martin Weber of the University of Mannheim in Germany found that experts often become prisoners of their own expertise. They know so much that they struggle to distinguish between what audiences truly need to know and what can safely be left unsaid.
Educational psychologist John Sweller expanded on that insight with his pioneering work on Cognitive Load Theory. Sweller found that when working memory becomes overloaded, performance deteriorates. The problem is not a lack of intelligence; it’s that the brain’s processing capacity is finite.
And the same problem exists on the receiving end. In 1956, Princeton psychologist George Miller demonstrated that listeners have surprisingly limited capacity to process information at one time. Yet many executives still attempt to prepare for high-stakes appearances by memorizing mountains of detail.
When I first began working with my exec who knew too much, progress was slow. Very slow.
But over time, he adopted a different approach: instead of memorizing information, he learned how to organize it. Once he could distill complex ideas into a few clear, memorable stories, his confidence soared. He eventually left his senior leadership role at the firm – and became the CEO of another major company in the same industry.
The experience taught me an enduring lesson: many communication problems are not really communication problems. They are confidence problems.
At some point, every leader has to stop studying for the exam and trust what they already know.
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