OUR UNIQUE APPROACH TO TEACH FINANCIAL LITERACY AND BUSINESS ACUMEN
Neville Joffe, the founder of BizWisdom was not a trained educator. He was a seasoned manufacturer with a strong accounting background and a passion for engaging his employees on many levels. He soon discovered how difficult it was to impart his knowledge to his employees who were trained in different skills. Refer to About Us.
When people asked him about his Unique Approach when educating and engaging his employees, he had difficulty explaining his methodology. One day, he read a book called Made to Stick in which the authors referred to Elizabeth Newton and her concept called the Curse of Knowledge.
The Curse of Knowledge
Do your manager's nod in agreement and understanding while listening to your CFO explain your company's financial results?
Source Harvard Business Review - READ HERE
In 1990, as a Stanford University graduate student in Psychology, Elizabeth Newton illustrated the curse of knowledge by studying a simple game in which she assigned people one of two roles: "tapper" or "listener." Each tapper was asked to pick a well-known song, such as "Happy Birthday" and tap out the rhythm on a table. The listener's job was to guess the song.
Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only three of the songs correctly: a success ratio of 2.5%. But before they guessed, Newton asked the tappers to predict the probability that listeners would guess correctly. They predicted 50%. The tappers got their message across one time in 40, but they thought they would get it across one time in two. Why?
When a tapper taps, it is impossible for her to avoid hearing the tune playing along to her taps. Meanwhile, all the listeners can hear is a kind of bizarre Morse code. Yet the tappers were flabbergasted by how hard the listeners had to work to pick up the tune.
The problem is that once we know something—say, the melody of a song—we find it hard to imagine not knowing it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. We have difficulty sharing it with others because we can’t readily re-create their state of mind.
For the past 23 years, we have educated more than 20,000 people, and this is reality. Non-financial business operators, including executives at the C-Suite level, are LESS than 40% financially literate.
Our multi-sensory, engaging, and award-winning courses are sensitive to the difficulties that non-financial managers face when learning about finance-related topics. Learning about a topic and being able to apply the knowledge is different.
THIS IS WHERE WE EXCEL!