A free, burnout resilience newsletter for Architects. One actionable tactic each week to help you overcome chronic burnout, engineer self-awareness, and build a thriving career in architecture.
The thing holding your firm back 😅
Published about 2 months ago • 6 min read
Did someone forward this to you? Join our valued community of ambitious Architect subscribers. Learn more→
June 29, 2026
Hey, Architect.
Your expertise might be the very thing keeping your team from growing.
I picked up Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath a while back, and one idea from it has been living rent-free in my head ever since. It’s called the Curse of Knowledge.
The more you know about something, the harder it becomes to remember what it was like to not know it.
You’ve spent years (maybe decades) mastering your craft. The construction documents, the code research, the client conversations, the coordination headaches.
Getting really good at something has a side effect, though—you stop remembering what it felt like not to know it. When you turn around to explain something to your project Architect or your intern, you’re speaking from a place they haven’t reached yet. You’re three floors up, and you’ve pulled the ladder behind you without realizing it.
Here’s what that looks like in practice. You walk past a set of drawings and say, “That detail doesn’t work.” Then you move on. In your head, you’ve communicated clearly. In their head? They’re left with a vague sense of failure and no idea what does work or why. You’ve been doing this long enough that the answer is obvious. It’s not obvious to them. At least, not yet.
Left unchecked within a firm, this quietly chips away at morale, slows your team down, and breeds a culture where people are afraid to ask questions. Left long enough, that silence becomes the culture.
What we’ll unpack today:
Why the Curse of Knowledge shows up in firm leadership more than most people realize
What it costs you when your team is operating in a fog
Three specific ways to break the curse and actually reach your staff
Let’s get into it.
Always feel like you're running on empty? Take the Free Resilient Architect Burnout Assessment 55 carefully designed questions built around the specific pressures Architects face—the creative depletion, the impossible triangles, the workplace dynamics, the physical toll of a career that demands everything from you. At the end, you’ll get a total burnout score and individual scores across 8 categories to help guide you where to focus your energy next.
When you ask your staff to do something a certain way, how often do you explain why? Not the technical rationale. Rather, the human rationale.
Why does it matter to you?
Why does it matter to the project?
Why does it matter to the person on the other side of that decision?
Experts lead with the what because the why feels obvious.
It’s not.
When your team understands the reason behind a standard, a process, or a preference, it clicks differently.
They can make judgment calls that align with your thinking even when you’re not in the room. That’s leverage. That’s how a firm grows without the principal becoming a bottleneck.
Take something simple, like how you want a drawing set organized. You probably have strong feelings about it. But if you’ve never told your team why that organization matters…
How it affects the contractor’s ability to find information in the field
How it protects you during permitting and construction
How it reflects on the firm’s reputation
…you’re asking them to follow a rule they don’t understand.
Share the reason once, clearly, and your team can make the call without you next time.
If you're a Firm Leader: Pick one standard practice in your office this week. Write down the reason behind it in two or three sentences. Then share it in your next team meeting. Not as a correction, just as context.
2. Create a baseline before you build
Here’s something I noticed when I came into my firm.
There were processes that had gone unexamined long enough that they’d hardened into assumptions. The people were good. But the way things were done had calcified into the way things had to be done, and nobody had stopped to question it.
The Curse of Knowledge doesn’t just affect how you communicate. It affects how you lead.
When you’ve been running a firm for a long time, you develop a kind of operational fluency that’s invisible to you. You just know how the project delivery process flows. But your newest team members are watching you operate and trying to reverse-engineer what you’ve never spelled out.
Before you can share knowledge effectively, you need to know where your team actually is. Not where you assume they are.
What do they actually understand about how the firm works?
What standards are ingrained in their day-to-day?
What parts of the process are fuzzy for them?
You might be surprised. A simple one-on-one conversation, “What’s the hardest part of your role right now?” can reveal knowledge gaps you didn’t know existed.
If you're a Firm Leader: Schedule brief one-on-ones with two or three of your staff members this month. Don't come in with an agenda. Ask what's unclear, what feels murky, and where they feel like they're guessing. Listen more than you talk.
3. Simplify what you share and be deliberate about when to go deep
Not every conversation needs everything you know.
This is maybe the hardest lesson for someone who has spent a career building expertise. You’ve earned the right to go deep. But depth, applied at the wrong moment, overwhelms before it illuminates.
Think about client communication for a second. You know enough about building enclosure systems to write a dissertation. Your client wants to know if the roof will leak. You know enough about building enclosure systems to write a dissertation. That knowledge is yours to hold.
What your client needs is a clear answer, delivered with confidence. The same principle applies internally.
Your Summer intern needs enough to complete the task.
Your project manager needs enough to make a good decision.
Your senior associate needs enough to mentor the intern. The level of detail changes depending on who’s in front of you.
Start thinking about communication in layers.
Layer one covers what everyone needs to know: the basics of what you’re doing and why it matters.
Layer two is what the people closest to the decision need.
Layer three is what only you need to know, or what becomes relevant later when context makes it useful.
Most of what you’re defaulting to is layer three. Most of what your team needs is layer one.
If you're a Firm Leader: Before your next project kickoff or staff conversation, ask yourself: What does this person need to know right now to move forward? Write it down. Then leave the rest in your head for when it becomes relevant.
Final Thoughts
The Curse of Knowledge is quiet. It doesn’t show up as arrogance. It shows up as confusion.
As teams that keep making the same mistakes, as people who seem capable but can’t quite take initiative. It builds slowly in firms where the principal’s expertise has outpaced the system for sharing it.
Think back to that moment in the drawing review. The one where you said “this doesn’t work” and moved on. That’s not bad leadership. That’s unexamined leadership. With a little intention, it’s completely fixable.
Here’s what you took away today:
Your expertise can become a barrier when your team is working from assumptions you never spelled out
Teach the why behind your standards. A team that understands the reason can execute without you in the room
Find out where your team actually is before assuming they’re keeping up
Before your next project kickoff, ask: what does this person need to know right now to move forward?
The knowledge isn’t the problem. Getting it out of your head and into their hands is.
Your Resilient Next Step (One Small Way to Build Resilience in Your Archi-Life Right Now 🧱)
Pick one process, standard, or expectation in your firm that you’ve never fully explained out loud.
This week, write down the why behind it in three sentences or less.
Then find one moment to share it with your team (not as a correction, but as context).
That one act of translation might be worth more than a dozen performance reviews.
That's all for now. Stay resilient, my friend.
Mike LaValley AIA, LEED AP BD+C
→ For daily(ish) insights on burnout resilience, follow me on LinkedIn → Forwarded this email? Sign up here.
And whenever you’re ready, there are 3 other ways I can help you:
Speaking at Your Firm or Event: Bring these conversations to your workplace with workshops tailored to your team's specific challenges
1-on-1 Coaching: Work directly with me to develop personalized strategies for sustainable practice and career longevity.
Monthly Q&A: Have a question about burnout or your Archi-life? Submit it, and I'll try to answer it in an upcoming issue of The Resilient Architect Newsletter!
A free, burnout resilience newsletter for Architects. One actionable tactic each week to help you overcome chronic burnout, engineer self-awareness, and build a thriving career in architecture.