Tapping
The communication gap
Have you ever played the tapping game among friends? One person taps out the rhythm of a well-known song while others try to guess it. Watching others struggle, you think, "My turn will be different—everyone will recognize my tune in a heartbeat!" But when it’s your turn, your friends give you the same blank stare, just as they did for others, unable to recognize what seems crystal clear to you.
This isn’t just a party game phenomenon—it has been studied in academic research. Stanford researcher Elizabeth Newton demonstrated this bias in her Tappers and Listeners experiment.
Tappers predicted that listeners would guess their songs more than 50% of the time. The actual success rate? A mere 2.5%. Nope, it’s not a typo: 2.5%! Chip and Dan Heath, in Made to Stick, use this to illustrate the curse of knowledge—our tendency to assume others have the same context we do.
Why do I share this?
I've noticed that this same bias is one of leadership’s greatest blind spots too.
As leaders, we live and breathe our vision. The path ahead feels obvious to us, so we assume our teams see it just as clearly. And when they don’t, we’re left wondering why execution falls short.
I feel great leaders recognize this gap. They understand that while they hear the full song in their heads, their teams may only catch a few verses of it. There’s a saying: "When you’re tired of saying it, people are just starting to hear it." The difference between a good leader and a great one often isn’t in the quality of the vision alone—it’s in the ability to communicate, reinforce, and and turn it into action.
So next time you think, "Why hasn’t my team gotten it by now?"
Pause.
You might be tapping, but your team may not be hearing the tune.
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