Curse of Knowledge

Once you know how the sanctions engine works, you can't un-know it — and the one-page summary you wrote for the steering committee will quietly assume twenty things the committee does not, in fact, know.

This is why engineer-written docs read as cold, designer-written docs read as abstract, and legal-written docs read as Latin.

Your job is to be the professional beginner in the room — the person who reads the draft at the reading level of the most distracted stakeholder on the list, and flags every acronym, every unstated assumption, every step that got compressed because 'obviously'.

The good version of this is a discipline, not an insult. You're not calling anyone stupid. You're admitting that the author has stared at the thing for eight weeks and can't see it fresh anymore.

The test: give the doc to someone outside the squad with a five-minute time budget and ask them to summarise it back to you. Whatever they miss is what the doc isn't saying clearly.

A compliance PM writes a memo to the CRO explaining why the new periodic-review cadence needs a 90-day extension. The memo mentions 'SIF thresholds', 'enhanced due diligence triggers', and 'Article 22 obligations' without defining any of them.

It's correct, precise, and fatally unreadable for its audience. The CRO's background is treasury, not AML, and the memo assumes eight concepts she hasn't had reason to learn.

She reads two paragraphs and forwards it to her chief of staff asking 'can you summarise in a few bullets?' The chief of staff, also not an AML specialist, produces a summary that misrepresents the core ask.

By the time the decision is made, it's a decision on a document three steps removed from the original argument.

The fix costs twenty minutes: rewrite the memo with one parenthesised definition per acronym, one example of a user the rule applies to, and a 'bottom line' at the top. Same content, ten times the hit rate.