A colleague told me about a previous school: a very famous international school known for academic excellence, often cited among the top schools globally. Her year group team was outstanding. Tight coordination. Strong coherence. Real execution. Results that spoke for themselves.
Then leadership split that team across other year groups.
She called it poor management. I called it a scaling decision.
Both of us were right. Both of us were wrong. The decision itself was strategically sound. The communication of the decision was operationally catastrophic. And that gap between decision and narrative is where excellent schools lose their best people.
The Strategic Logic
If one team has built excellence, keeping them together forever protects comfort, not the school. It concentrates capability in one place while other year groups struggle. It creates dependency on a single high-performing unit rather than distributing that capability system-wide. It rewards the team for their success by eventually limiting their impact.
Spreading that competence can raise the standard everywhere. The teacher who developed exceptional formative assessment practices moves to a year group where those practices are absent. The coordinator who built genuine collaborative planning takes that methodology to a team that has never experienced it. The culture of excellence, previously concentrated, becomes systemic.
That is not sabotage. That is leadership.
But leadership is not merely decision-making. It is meaning-making. And this is where the story fractures.
When the Story Fractures
The decision was strategically strong and operationally weak because it was communicated poorly. The team read separation as loss, not recognition. As disruption, not trust. As politics, not purpose.
Research on the curse of knowledge explains why this happens so predictably. According to MIT Sloan research, experts in a given domain often have a hard time communicating with non-experts because they "dive into the weeds; they ignore context; they talk over heads and beyond interest". The researchers describe a three-step communication process: encoding, transmission, and decoding. The challenge arises because one brain encodes information, but many different minds decode it. "Decodings that seem obvious to experts can be difficult for or misinterpreted by other people".
The curse of knowledge is not arrogance. It is a cognitive bias. Once we know something, we cannot "unsee" it. We forget what it was like not to know. As Chip and Dan Heath note, "Lots of us have expertise in particular areas. Becoming an expert in something means that we become more and more fascinated by nuance and complexity. That's when the curse of knowledge kicks in, and we start to forget what it's like not to know what we know".
In this case, leadership knew the logic of scaling. They had assessed the concentration of excellence. They had mapped the distribution of capability. They had calculated the systemic benefit. To them, the decision was obvious. The team was not being punished. They were being entrusted.
But the team did not receive this meaning. They received only the decision. And without the meaning, the decision landed as betrayal.
They felt misunderstood. They felt betrayed. Eventually, they all left the school within a year.
That is what happens when leaders explain the move but fail to translate the meaning. They communicate the decision without encoding the story that makes the decision comprehensible.
The Translation Gap
Not everyone in a team sees the full system. That is normal. Most people experience school through their immediate reality: their year group, their routines, their people. They do not experience the institution as a strategic entity. They experience it as a place where they work, where relationships matter, where their daily context shapes their understanding.
Research on high-performing teams in complex environments confirms this. A 2025 study of senior military leadership identified clarity, connection, and communication as critical for cultivating and sustaining high-performance teams. The research found that "clarity, foundational to alignment, goes beyond removing ambiguity to ensure shared goals, roles, and visions". Connection fosters cohesion through "cognitive diversity, trust, and shared purpose". Communication requires "tailored, candid dialogue, repetition, mutual language use, and decisiveness".
The absence of any one of these competencies undermines success. The school leadership in this case had clarity for themselves. They lacked the communication to translate that clarity for their team. And without communication, connection fractured. The team did not feel entrusted. They felt discarded.
If leadership wants buy-in, it must make the bigger picture concrete. It must show why this trade-off exists and what it protects. Not through abstract mission statements. Through specific, tangible, personal meaning.
The Message That Was Never Heard
This was the real message they should have heard:
You were not separated out of disruption, but on the contrary, out of recognition. You were separated because your way of working had become a benchmark worth spreading across other year groups. What you built was not being dismantled. It was being entrusted with a larger mandate.
The language matters. "Recognition" rather than "reorganisation." "Benchmark" rather than "redeployment." "Entrusted" rather than "dissolved." These are not euphemisms. They are accurate descriptions of the strategic intent that the team never received.
Research on change communication confirms the mechanism. According to McKinsey research, 70% of change programmes fail, and the main causes include lack of employee involvement and poor communication. The research found that "without the right communication plans, creative ideas and authentic messages, employees can become uncertain and remain resistant to change". Conversely, when senior managers communicate openly about transformation progress, respondents are 8.0 times as likely to report a successful transformation. Good communication has an even greater effect at enterprise-wide transformations, where company-wide change efforts are 12.4 times more likely to be successful when senior managers communicate continually.
Gallup research reinforces this with stark figures: only 13% of U.S. employees strongly agree that their organisation's leadership communicates effectively with the rest of the organisation. Just 15% strongly agree that leadership makes them feel enthusiastic about the future. Behind these statistics is "a swamp of employee skepticism, anxiety and uncertainty" that prompts resistance to new ideas and lack of traction from middle managers.
The school in this case was not an outlier. It was following a common pattern: making a strategically sound decision, communicating it poorly, and losing the very excellence it sought to spread.
The Curse of Knowledge in Leadership
Many leaders fail here for a predictable reason. When you know the logic too well, it feels obvious. So you assume others see what you see.
They do not.
Research on the curse of knowledge in organisational settings identifies the specific failure mode. Experts "have difficulty fully suppressing the content of their knowledge when trying to convey it to someone with a less informed perspective". They experience "fluency misattribution," where something feels easy to remember because they have seen it before, so they mistakenly think it must also be easy for everyone else to know.
In leadership terms: the strategic logic of scaling felt obvious to those who had spent weeks analysing it. It was not obvious to the team who heard about it in a single meeting. The leaders had forgotten what it was like not to know. They had forgotten that their months of assessment were invisible to the people affected by the decision.
And it is not their job to think like leadership. It is leadership's job to make the vision understandable.
RAND research on strategic leadership storytelling emphasises this responsibility. Leaders must "move beyond crisis-driven communications and refocus on developing long-term communication strategies that embrace narrative pluralism". This means curating stories that resonate with stakeholders, building trust, guiding perceptions, and shaping responses. Core value narratives reinforce commitment to principles. Contextual narratives provide historical perspective. Interactive narratives engage stakeholders directly. Motivational narratives inspire collective effort. Logical narratives outline clear explanations of management actions.
The school leadership delivered a logical narrative. They explained the decision. They failed to deliver contextual, motivational, or interactive narratives. They did not help the team see the history that led to the decision. They did not inspire enthusiasm for the expanded mandate. They did not engage the team in dialogue about their concerns. The result was communication without connection.
The Meaning of Trade-offs
In schools, a trade-off without meaningful explanation feels like punishment. A trade-off with meaning feels like trust.
The same structural change, communicated differently, produces entirely different stories. The team that hears "we are splitting you up" experiences loss. The team that hears "we are entrusting you with a larger mandate" experiences recognition. The decision is identical. The story is different. The outcome is different.
Research on narrative and change management confirms this dynamic. Successful organisational change requires a strong narrative that communicates the "what" and "why" of change. When researchers asked employees of 20 major, high-performing corporations to identify their employer's strategy from among six choices, just 29% answered correctly. The gap between leadership intention and employee understanding is vast. Closing it requires not more communication but better translation.
Translation means encoding the message in language the recipient can decode. It means anticipating misconceptions and addressing them proactively. It means recognising that the same words land differently depending on the listener's context. It means checking for understanding rather than assuming it.
The school leadership in this case did none of these. They announced the decision. They answered questions. They did not proactively shape the narrative that would make the decision comprehensible, let alone inspiring. They did not recognise that their expertise created a knowledge gap that only they could bridge.
The Leadership Imperative
The story of this team is not a story of bad strategy. It is a story of incomplete leadership. The leaders made a correct strategic choice. They failed to lead their people through it.
Research on military leadership in high-stakes environments offers a final insight. The study found that "the dynamic interplay of clarity, connection, and communication competencies shifts with situational demands, and the absence of one undermines success". Leaders must balance "accountability, interpersonal connection, and transparent communication" to lay "the foundation for cohesive, adaptable, and resilient teams".
The school leadership achieved accountability. They made a decision that served the institution. They sacrificed connection and communication. They lost the team.
The imperative for educational leadership is clear. Decisions are not enough. They must be translated. The logic that feels obvious to leadership must be made obvious to everyone affected. The meaning that leadership sees must be encoded in language that others can decode. The story must be told, retold, and checked for understanding.
Otherwise, the same decision becomes a different story. And the different story becomes a different outcome. Not because the strategy was wrong. Because the narrative was missing.
The team left. The excellence they built left with them. The school that sought to scale capability instead lost it. All because leadership knew the answer but failed to share the meaning.
This is the curse of knowledge in action. And it is leadership's job to break it.
