Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Chip & Dan Heath
Description
In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the human scale principle, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating curiosity gaps. Along the way, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds--from the infamous "kidney theft ring" hoax to a coach's lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony--draw their power from the same six traits.
Key words: Change, strategy
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My Notes
Chip & Dan figured out a way to communicate the idea so that people would listen and care.
Snapshot summary
Principle 1: Simplicity
The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.
Principle 2: Unexpectedness
We need to violate people’s expectations. We can use surprise – an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus – to grab people’s attention.
We can engage people’s curiosity over a long period of time by systematically “opening gaps” in their knowledge – and then filling those gaps.
Principle 3: Concreteness
How do we make our ideas clear?
We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions – they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images – ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors – because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.
Principle 4: Credibility
How do we make people believe our ideas?
A president asked simple questions that allowed voters to test for themselves: “Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago”.
Principle 5: Emotions
How do we get people to care about our ideas? - We make them “feel” something.
We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions.
Principal 6: Stories
How do we get people to act on our ideas? - We tell stories.
Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.
Had John F Kennedy been a CEO, he would have said, “Our mission is to become the international leader in space industry through maximum tam-centered innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives”. Fortunately, JFK was more intuitive than a modern-day CEO; he knew that opaque, abstract missions don’t captivate and inspire people.
Read on for further information on each principle
Simple
He believes that plans are useful, in the sense that they are proof that planning has taken place.
The Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander’s Intent (CI).
CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plan’s goal, the desired end-state of an operation.
As soon as people know what the intent is they being generating their own solution?
Officers arrive at the Commander’s Intent by asking themselves 2 questions:
If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must ______.
The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is ______.
No plan survives contact with the enemy.
What we mean by “simple” is finding the core of the idea.
“Finding the core” means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence. To get to the core, we’ve got to weed out superfluous and tangential elements.
Herb Kelleher (the longest serving CEO of Southwest) once told someone, “I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are THE low-fare airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can.
“THE low fare airline” and the other stories in this chapter aren’t simple because they’re fall of easy words. They’re simple because they reflect the Commanders’ Intent. It’s about elegance and prioritization, not dumbing down.
Burying the Lead
The first sentence, called the lead, contains the most essential elements of the story.
After the Lead, information is presented in decreasing order of importance. Journalists call this the “inverted pyramid” structure – the most important info (the widest part of the pyramid) is at the top.
Journalists obsess about their leads. Don Wycliff, a winner of prizes for editorial writing, says, “I’ve already been a believer that if I’ve got two hours in which to write a story, the best investment I can make is to spend the first hour and fourt0five minutes of it getting a good lead, because after that everything will come easily.”
“Burying the lead” occurs when the journalists lets the most important element of the story slip too far down in the story structure.
Finding the core and writing the lead both involve forced prioritization. Support you’re a wartime reporter and you can telegraph only one thing before the line gets cut, what would it be? There’s only one lead, and there’s only one core. You must choose.
This tendency to gravitate toward complexity is perpetually at war with the need to priorities.
“If you say three things, you don’t say anything”. There has to be message triage.
“It’s the economy, stupid”, was the lead of the Clinton story – and it was a good one.
Prioritization rescues people from the quicksand of decision angst, and that’s why finding the core is so valuable.
Core messages help people avoid bad choices by reminding them of what’s important.
Avoid Burring the Lead. Don’t start with something interesting but irrelevant in hopes of entertaining the audience. Instead, work to make the core message itself more interesting.
Simple = Core + Compact
The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be.
Simple ideas: short sentences (compact) drawn from long experience (core).
Compact ideas help people learn and remember core message. But they may be even more important when it comes time to help people act properly, particularly in an environment where they have to make lots of choice.
The Palm Pilot became a successful product “almost because it was defined more in terms of what is was not than in terms of what it was”
The block of wood became a visual reminder to do a few things and do them well.
Our messages have to be compact, because we can learn and remember only so much information at once.
In round 1, you were trying to remember raw data. In round 2, you were remembering concepts: John F Kennedy, the FBI, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, UPS, NASA, the IRS.
The concept of JFK, and all its associations, is already embedded in our memories. What we’re remembering is simply a pointer to this information – we’re posting a little flag on the terrain of our memory.
So, to make profound idea compact you’ve got to pack a lot of meaning into a little bit of messaging. And how do you do that? You use flags. You tap the existing memory terrain of your audience. You use what’s already there.
Explanation 1: A pomelo is the largest citrus fruit. The rind is very think but soft and easy to peel away. The resulting fruit has a light yellow to coral pink flesh and can vary from juicy to slightly dry and from seductively spicy-sweet to tangy and tart.
Explanation 2: A pomelo is basically a supersized grapefruit with a very think and soft rind.
Explanation 2 sticks a flag on a consent that you already know: a grapefruit. When we tell you that a pomelo is like a grapefruit, you call up a mental image of a grapefruit. Then we tell you what to change about it: “It’s supersized. “ You visuals grapefruit grows accordingly. We’ve made it easier for you to learn a new concept by tying it to a concept that you already know.
Complexity from Simplicity
Schemas help us create complete messages from simple materials.
If a message can’t be used to make predictions or decisions, it is output value, no matter how accurate or comprehensive it is.
To a CEO, “maximizing shareholder value” may be immensely useful rule of behavior. To a flight attendant, it’s not. To a physicist, probably clouds are fascinating phenomena. To a child, they are incomprehensible.
People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.
A pomelo is like a grapefruit. A good news story is structured like an inverted pyramid. Skin damage is like ageing. Analogies make it possible to understand the compact message because they invoke concepts that you already know.
In Hollywood, people use core ideas called “high-concept” pitches. You’ve probably heard some of them. Speed was “Die Hard on a Bus”. 13 Going on 30 was “Big for girls”. Alien was “Jaws on a spaceship”.
The proverb “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” gives us a tangible, easily processed statement that we can use for guidance in complex, emotionally fraught situations.
Unexpected
The first problem with communication is getting people’s attention.
The most basic away to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern. Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns.
Two essential questions:
How do I get people’s attention? And, just as critically,
How do I keep it?
We can’t succeed if our messages don’t break through the clutter to get people that we won’t succeed if we can’t keep people’s attention.
Surprise gets our attention.
Interest keeps our attention.
Surprise makes us want to find an answer – to resolve the question of why we were surprised – and big surprises call for big answers. If we want to motivate people to pay attention, we should seize the power of big surprises.
To be surprising, an event can’t be predictable. Surprise is the opposite of predictability.
The twist makes sense after you think about it, but it’s not something you would have seen coming.
Surprise happens when our guessing machines fail. The emotion of surprise is designed to focus our attention on the failure, so that we can improve our guessing machines for the future.
The easiest way to avoid gimmicky surprise and ensure that your unexpected ideas produce insight is to make sure you target an aspect of your audience’s guessing machines that relates to your core message.
So, a good process for making your ideas stickier is:
Identify the central message you need to communicate – find the core;
Figure out what is counter-intuitive about eh message – i.e. what are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally?
Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical, counter-intuitive dimension.
To make message stick, you’ve got to push it beyond common sense to un-common sense.
Journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn’t enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered.
Mysteries are powerful, Cialdina says, because they create a need for closure. “You’ve heard of the famous Aha! Experience, right?” he says. “Well, the Aha! Experience is much more satisfying when it’s preceded by the Huh? Experience”
Mystery is created not from an unexpected moment but from an unexpected journey. We know where we’re headed – we want to solve the mystery – but we’re not sure how we’ll get there.
“Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posting questions and opening situations. ”
Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.
Lowenstein argues that gaps cause pain. When we want to know something but don’t, it’s like having an itch that we need to scratch. To take away the pain, we need to fill the knowledge gap.
They naturally create knowledge gaps. Take movies for instance. McKee’s language is similar to Lowenstein’s: McKee says, “Story works by posing questions and opening situations”. Movies cause us to ask, what will happen? Mystery novels cause us to ask, who did it? Sports contests cause us to ask, who will win? Crossword puzzles cause us to ask, what is a six-letter word for ‘psychiatrist’? Pokémon cards cause kids to wonder, which character am I missing?
One important implication of the gap theory is that we need to open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts. The trick to convincing people that they need our message, according to Lowenstein, is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they’re missing.
Punch Line: To hold people’s interest, we can use the gap theory of curiosity to our advantage. A little bit of mystery goes a long way.
To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from “what information do I need to convey? To “What questions do I want my audience to ask?”
He made them commit to their preconceived ideas and then pulled the rug out from under them.
If curiosity arises from knowledge gaps, we might assume that when we know more, we’ll become less curious because there are fewer gaps in our knowledge. But Lowenstein argues that the opposite is true. He says that we gain information we are more and more likely to focus on what we don’t know.
Set the context and give people enough backstory that they start to care about the gaps in their knowledge.
Knowledge gaps create interest. But to prove that the knowledge gaps exist, it may be necessary to highlight some knowledge first. “Here’s what you know. Now here’s what you’re missing”.
When we fell that we’re close to the solution of a puzzle, curiosity takes over and propels us to the finish.
Concrete
Even the most abstract business strategy must eventually show up in the tangible actions of human beings.
Understanding Subtraction
If you can examine something with our senses, it’s concrete. A V8 engine is concrete. “High performance” is abstract. Most of the time, concreteness boils down to specific people doing specific things.
“World-class customer service” is abstract. A Nordic ironing a customer’s shirt is concrete.
If you’ve got to teach an idea to a room full of people, and you aren’t certain what they know, concentrates is the only safe language.
This is how concreteness helps us understand – it helps us construct higher, more abstract insights on the building blocks of our existing knowledge and perceptions.
Concrete is Memorable
Concrete ideas are easier to remember. Take individuals works, for instance. Experiments in human memory have shown that people are better at remembering concrete, easily visualization nouns (“bicycle” or “avocado” than abstract ones (“justice” or “personality”.
The Velcro Theory of Memory
Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory. You childhood home has a gazillion hooks in your brain.
Elliot turned prejudice into an experiment.
The Path to Abstraction: The Blueprint and the Machine
They were suffering from the Curse of Knowledge. They had lost the ability to imagine what it was like to look at a technical drawing from the perspective of a non-expert.
Rather, the moral of the story is to find a “universe language”, one that everyone speaks fluently. Inevitable, that universal language will be concrete.
Concrete Allows Coordination
Stone Yamashita is a master of using concrete techniques to help organizations create change. “Almost everything we do is visceral land visual”. Keith Yamashita says. The “product” of most consulting firms is often a PowerPoint presentation. At Stone Yamashita, it’s much more likely to be a simulation, an event, or a create installation.
Stone Yamashita, working with HP’s engineers, turned a message about the befits of collaboration – what could have been a PowerPoint presentation – into a living, breathing simulation.
They took abstract ideas from their research labs and turned them into a family picture on a roller-coaster ride.
Concert Brings Knowledge to Bear: White Things
Even people who list whiter anything’s often feel that the refrigerator test is “easier”.
Why does this happen? Because concreteness is a way of moiling and forcing your brain. For another example of this phenomenon, consider these two statements:
Think of five silly things that people have done in the world in the past 10 years.
Think about five silly things your child has done in the past 10 years.
“It had been magically transformed from a stationary-store accessory into a symbol of the future of technology”.
The presence of the portfolio made it easier for the venture capitalists to brainstorm, in the same way that focusing on “white things in the refrigerator” made it easier for us to brainstorm. When they saw the size of the portfolio, it sparked certain questions. How much memory could you fit in that thing? Which PC components will shrink in the next few years, and which won’t? What new technology would have to be invented to make it feasible? This same process was sparked in Sony’s Japanese engineering team by the concept of a “portable radio”.
Concreteness creates a shared “turf” on which people can collaborate. Everybody in the room feels comfortable that they’re tackling the same challenge.
Making Ideas Concrete
But being concrete isn’t hard, and it doesn’t require a lot of effort. The barrier is simply forgetfulness – we forget that we’re slipping into abstract peak. We forget that other people don’t know what we know. We’re the engineers who keep flipping back to our drawings, not noticing that the assemblers just want us to follow them down to the factory floor.
Credible
Finding Credibility
Let’s pose the question in the broadest possible terms: What makes people believe ideas? How’s that for an ambitious question? Let’s start with the obvious answers. We believe because our parent or our friends believe. We believe because we’ve had experience that led us to our beliefs. We believe because of our religious faith. We believe because we trust authorities.
If we’re trying to persuade a skeptical audience to believe a new message, the reality is that we’re fighting an uphill battle against a lifetime of personal learning and social relationships.
As the contaminated bananas show, authorities are reliable source of credibility for our ideas. When we think of authorities we can add credibility, we tend to think of two kinds of people. The first kind is the expert – the kind of person whose wall is covered with framed credentials: Oliver Sachs for neuroscience, Alan Greenspan for economics, or Stephen Hawking for physics.
Celebrities and other aspirational figures make up the second class of “authorities”. Why do we care that Michael Jordan likes McDonalds? Certainly he is not a certified nutritionist or a world gourmet. We care because we want to be like Mike, and if Mike likes McDonald’s, so do we. If Oprah likes a book, it makes us more interested in that book. We trust the recommendations of people whom we want to be like.
The takeaway is that it can be the honesty and trustworthiness of our sources, not their status that allows them to act as authorities. Sometimes antiauthority’s are eve better than authorities.
The Power of Details
A person’s knowledge of details is often a good proxy for her expertise.
By making a claim tangible and concrete, details make it seem more real, more believable.
So why did the details make a difference? They boosted the credibility of the argument. If I can mentally see the Darth Vader toothbrush, it’s easier for me to picture the boy diligently brushing his teeth in the bathroom, which in turn reinforces the notion that Mrs. Johnson is a good mother.
What we should learn from urban legends and the Mrs. Johnson trial is that vivid details boost credibility.
We need to identify details that are as compelling and human as the “Darth Vader toothbrush” but more meaningful – details that symbolize and support our core idea.
Beyond War
The use of vivid details is one way to create internal credibility – to weave sources of credibility into the idea itself. Another way to use statistics.
But statistics tend to be eye-glazing. How can we use them while still managing to engage our audience?
I.e. that the world had 5,000 nuclear warheads when a single one was enough to decimate a city. But the problem was that the number 5,000 means very little to people. The trick was the demonstration – the bucket and the BB’s which added a sensory dimension to an otherwise abstract concept. Furthermore, the demonstration was carefully chosen – BB’s are weapons, and the sound of the BB’s hitting the bucket was fittingly threatening.
This is the most important to remember about using statistics effectively. Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.
The Human-Scale Principle
Another way to bring statistics to life is to contextualize them in terms that we more human, more every day.
58% of respondents ranked the statistic about the sun to the earth as “very impressive”. That jumped to 83% for the statistic about New York to Los Angeles. We have no human experience, no intuition, about the distance between the sun and the earth. The distance from New York to Los Angeles is much more tangible.
Then Covey superimposes a very human metaphor over the statistics. He says, “If, say, a soccer team had these same scores, only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 of the 11 would care. Only 2 of the 11 would know what position they play and know exactly what they are supposed to do. And all but 2 players would, in some way, be competing against their own team members rather than the opponent.”
Why does the analogy work? It relies on our schema of soccer teams and the fact that this schema is somehow cleaner, better defined, than our schemas of organizations. It’s more vivid to think of a lack of cooperation on a soccer team – where teamwork is paramount – than in a corporation. And this is exactly Covey’s point: Corporations should operate like teams, but they don’t humanizing the statistics gives the argument greater wallop.
“If you believe you can increase an employee’s productivity by one to two minutes a day, you’ve paid back the cost of wireless”. On this scale, the investment is much easier to assess.
The relevant statistic was that a medium sized bag of popcorn had 37 grams of saturated fat. So what? Is that good or bad?
Art Silverman, of the CSPI, cleverly placed the popcorn’s saturated-fat content in a relevant contact for compassion. He said that one bag of popcorn was equivalent to a whole day’s worth of unhealthy eating. Silverman knew that most people would be appalled by this finding.
Ethically challenged people with lots of analytical smarts can, with enough contortions, make almost any case for a given set of statistics.
Of course, let’s also remember that it’s easier to lie without statistics than with them. Data enforces boundaries.
When it comes to statistics, our best advice is to use them as input, not output. Use them to make up your mind on an issue. Don’t make up your mind and then go looking for the numbers to support yourself.
The Sinatra Test and Safexpress
If you caterer a White House function, you can compete for any catering contract. It’s the Sinatra Test: If you can make it easier, you can make it anywhere.
Both of these are good credibility-boosters. But there is something extraordinary about being the company that carries completed board exams and the latest Harry Potter book. Their power comes from their concreteness rather than from numbers or authority. These stories make you think, “If Self-express can make it there, they can make it anywhere”.
Edible Fabrics
All three of the “internal credibility” sources – details, statistics and the Sinatra Test.
Where the Beef?
Noticing that something different is going on here. This message doesn’t draw on external credibility – Wendy’s didn’t invite Larry Bird to weigh in on burger sizes. (Nor did it use an authority, like an obsess burger-eating giant). It doesn’t draw on internal credibility, either, quoting a statistic like “11% more beef!” Instead, the commercials developed a brand-new source of credibility: the audience. Wendy’s outsourced its credibility to its customers.
This challenge – asking customers to test a claim for themselves – is a “testable credential”. Testable credentials can provide an enormous credibility boost, since they essentially allow your audience members to “try before they buy”.
Testable Credentials
Testable credentials are useful in many domains. For example, take the question “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Ronald Reagan famously posed this question to the audience during his 1980 presidential debate with Jimmy Carter. Reagan could have focused on statistics – the high inflation rate, the loss of jobs, the rising interest rates. But instead of selling his case he deferred to his audience.
Trainers use the analogy of an “Emotional Tank” to get coaches to think about the right ratio of praise, support, and critical feedback. “The Emotional Tank is like the gas tank of an automobile. If your car’s tank is empty, you can’t drive very far. If your Emotional Tank is empty, you are not going to be able to perform at your best”.
Rookie Orientation
But what’s more likely to stick with someone: hearing about someone who fooled someone else, or being fooled yourself?
Emotional
When it comes to our hearts, one individual trumps the masses.
“Drop in the bucket effect”. If people felt overwhelmed by the scale of the problem, their small donations might have seemed meaningless.
The research theorized that thinking about statistics shifts people into a more analytical frame of mind. When people think analytically, they’re less likely to think emotionally. And the researchers believed it was people’s emotional response to Rakia’s plight that led them to act.
Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.
IN the last chapter, we discussed how to convince people that our ideas are credible, how to make them believe. Belief counts for a lot, but belief it’s enough. For people to take action, they have to care.
The goal of making messages “emotional” is to make people care. Feelings inspire people to act.
How do we make people care about our messages?
The most basic way to make people care is to form an association between something they don’t yet care about and something they do care about.
The lesson for the rest of us is that if we want to make people care, we’ve got to tap into the things they care about.
And what matters to people? So far, we’ve dealt with associations but there’s a more direct answer. In fact, it might be the most obvious answer of all. What matters to people? People matter to themselves. It will come as no surprise that one reliable way of making people care is by invoking self-interest.
First and foremost, try to get self-interest into every headline and write. Make your headline suggest to readers that here is something they want.
Caplets says companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits. The most request reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so of their own accomplishments (the world best seed!) that they forget to tell us why we should buy (the world’s best lawn!). An old advertising maxim says you’ve got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures.
He says that the WIIFY – “what’s in it for you”, pronounced whiff-y – should be a central aspect of every speech.
If you’ve got self-interest on your side, don’t bury it. Don’t talk around it. Even subtle tweaks can make a difference. It’s important, Caplets says, to keep the self in self-interest. “Don’t say, ‘People will enjoy a sense of security when they use Goodyear Tires’. Say, ‘You enjoy a sense of security when you use Goodyear Tires.”
IN a sense, the study was more elaborate version of Caple’s advice to avoid talking about abstract benefits (“People will enjoy a sense of security when they use Goodyear Tires”) and focus on personal benefits (you’ll enjoy a sense of security when you use Goodyear Tires”. The Arizona study, though, took it a step further. It asked people to visualize the feeling of security they would get by using Goodyear tires.
“Does Imagining Make It So?” The answer is yes.
It may be enough to promise reasonable benefits that people can easily imagine themselves enjoying.
Maslows hierarchy of needs
- Transcendence: help others realize their potential
- Self-actualization: realize our own potential, self-fulfillment, peak experiences
- Aesthetic: symmetry, order, beauty, balance
- Learning: know understand, mentally connect
- Esteem: achieve, be competent, gain approval, independence, status
- Belonging: love, family, friends, affection
- Security: protection, safety, stability
- Physical: hunger, thirst, bodily comfort.
Subsequent research suggests that the hierarchical aspect of Maslow’s theory is bogus – people pursue all of these needs pretty much simultaneously.
When people talk about ‘self-interest’, they’re typically invoking the Physical, Security, and Esteem layers.
That is, we are motivated by self-esteem, but others are motivated by down payments.
In other words, a lot of us think everyone else is living in Maslow’s basement – we may have a penthouse apartment, but everyone else is living below. The result of spending too much time in Maslow’s basement is that we may overlook lots of opportunities to motivate people.
Dining in Iraq
One of the soldiers who commute to Pegasus for Sunday dinner said, “The time you are in here, you forget you’re in Iraq”. Lee is tapping into Maslow’s forgotten categories – the Aesthetic, Learning and Transcendence needs. In redefining the mission of his mess hall, he has inspired his co-workers to create an oasis in the desert.
The Popcorn of Science
Use two basic models to make decisions. The first model involves calculating consequences. We weigh our alternatives, assessing the value of each one, and we choose the alternative that yields us the most value. This model is the standard view of decision making in economics class: people are self-interested and rational. The rational agent asks, which sofa will provide me with the greatest comfort and the best aesthetic for the price? Which political candidate will best serve my economics and social interests? The second model is quite different. It assumes that people make decisions based on identity. They ask themselves three questions: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? And what do people like me do in this kind of situation?
It’s almost as if people consulted an ideal self-image: What would someone like me do?
What if the marketer had offered to donate $50 to a school’s fire-safety program in exchange for the fireman’s viewing the film? It’s less clear that this offer would have violated the firefighters’ sense of identity.
Create a kind of Pegasus identity. A Pegasis chef is in charge of morale, not food. You can imagine hundreds of decisions being made by staffers in the tent who think to themselves, what should a Pegasis person do in this situation?
By offering Bubba a compelling message about identity, the campaign made appeals to fear unnecessary.
The Music of Duo Piano
So far we’ve looked at three strategies for making people care: using associations, appealing to self-interest, and appealing to identity.
Why does your organization exist? Can other organizations do what you do – and if so, what is it you do that is unique?
One question asked participants to define the purpose of their organization in a way that would motivate other people to care about it.
The reality is that they did in fact know better than anyone on earth why the duo piano was worth preserving. But the Curse of Knowledge prevented them from expressing it well.
This tactic of the “Three Whys” can be useful in bypassing the Curse of Knowledge. (Toyota actually has a “Five Whys” process for getting to the bottom of problems on its production line. Feel free to use as many “Whys” as you like. Asking “Why?” helps to remind us of the core values, the core principles that underlie our ideas.
The first step in motivating the hospital staff to change was to get them to realize that there was a problem and get them to care about it.
“The first reaction was always something like ‘Oh, I never realized…. “Suri says she likes the work realized. Before the hospital workers saw the video, the problem wasn’t quite real. Afterward, she said, “There’s an immediate motivation to fix things. It’s no longer just some problem on a problem list.”
“If you look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will”.
How can we make people care about our ideas? We get them to take off their Analytical Hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities – not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be.
And, while we should always think about “What’s in it” for our audience, we should remember to stay clear of Maslow’s Basement. “What’s in it” for our audience might be aesthetic motivation or the desire for transcendence rather than a $250 bonus. Floyd Lee said, “As I see it, I am not just in charge of food services; I am in charge of morale”. Who wouldn’t want a leader like Floyd Lee?
Stories
Klein says that, in the environments he studies, stories are told and retold because they contain wisdom. Stories are effective teaching tools.
The story’s power, then, is twofold: It provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act). Note that both benefits, simulation and inspiration, are greeted to generating action. IN the last few chapters, we’ve seen that a credible idea makes people believe. An emotional idea makes people care.
When we hear a story, we simulate it.
Stimulating past events is much more helpful than stimulating future outcomes.
Maybe financial gurus shouldn’t be telling us to imagine that we’re filthy rich: instead, they should be telling us to replay the steps that led to our being poor.
Why does mental simulation work? It works because we can’t imagine events or sequences without evoking the same modules of the brain that are evoked in real physical activity. Brain scans show that we people imagine a flashing light, they activate the visual area of the brain; when they imaging someone tapping on their skin, they activate tactile areas of the brain. The activity of mental simulation is not limited to the insides of our heads. People who imagine works that start with h or p can’t resist subtle lip movements, and people who imagine looking at the Eifel Tower can’t resist moving their eyes upward. Mental simulation can even alter visceral physical responses: When people drink water but imagine that it’s lemon juice, the salivate more. Even more surprisingly, when people drink lemon juice but juice but imagine that its water, they salivate less.
Mental simulations help us mange emotions.
Mental simulations help us anticipate responses to future situations.
What we’re suggesting is that the right kind story is, effectively, a simulation. Stories are like flight simulators for the brain. Hearing the nurse’s heart-monitor story isn’t like being there, but it’s the nest best thing.
The more that training simulates the actions we must take in the world, the more effective it will be.
The second major payoff that stories provide: inspiration drives action, as does simulation.
The Challenge Plot
The story of David and Goliath is the classic Challenge plot.
There are variations of the Challenge plot that we all recognize: the underdog story, the rags-to-riches story, the triumph of the sheer willpower over adversity.
Challenge plots are inspiring in a defined way. They inspire us by appealing to our perseverance and courage. They make us want to work harder, take on new challenges, overcome obstacles.
Challenge plots inspire us to act.
The Connection Plot
This is what a Connection plot is all about. It’s a story about people who develop a relationship that bridges a gap – racial, class, ethnic, religious, demographic, or otherwise.
Where Challenge plots involve overcoming challenges, Connection plots are about our relationships with other people. If you’re telling a story at the company Christmas party, it’s probably best to use the Connection plot. If you’re telling a story at the kickoff party for a new project, go with the Challenge plot.
The Creativity Plot
The Creativity plot involves someone making a mental breakthrough, solving a long-standing puzzle, or attacking a problem in an innovative way. It’s the MacGyver plot.
Creativity plots make us want to do something different, to be creative, and to experiment with new approaches.
Stories at the World Bank
In 2001, he wrote a very insightful book called The Springboard. Denning defines a springboard story as a story that lets people see how an existing problem might change. Springboard stories tell people about possibilities.
One major advantage of springboard stories is that they combat skepticism and create buy-in.
In addition to creating buy-in, springboard stories mobilize people to act. Stories focus people on potential solutions. Telling stories with visual goals and barriers shifts the audience into a problem-solving mode.
Stories are almost always concrete. Most of them have Emotional and Unexpected elements. The hardest part of using stories effectively is making sure that they’re Simple – that they reflect your core message. It’s not enough to tell a great story; the story has to reflect your agenda.
What Sticks
The Power of Spotting
If you’re a great spotter, you’ll always trump a great creator. Why? Because the world will always produce more great ideas than any single individual, even the most creative one.
The Speakers and the Stickers
Almost no correlation emerges between “speaking talent” and the ability to make ideas stick.
More Villains
Managers must share proverbs – “Names, names, and names” or “THE low-fare airline” – that helps employees wiring decisions out of ambiguous situations.
You know things that others don’t know, and you can’t remember what it was like not to know those things. So when you get around to sharing the Answer, you’ll tend to communicate s if your audience were you.
You’ll share the punch line – the overarching trust the emerged from most the of study and analysis – and like the CEO who stresses “maximimising shareholder value” to his frontline employees, no one will have a clue how your punch line relates to the day-to-day work.
There is a curious disconnect between the amount of time we invest in training people how to arrive at the Answer and the amount of time we invest in training them how to Tell Others. It’s easy to graduate from medical school or an MBA program without even taking class in communication.
The Curse of Knowledge can easily render this framework useless. When an expert asks, “Will people understand my idea?” her answer will be yes, because she herself understands. (Of course, my people will understand ‘maximizing shareholder value!) When an expert askes, “Will people care about this?” her answer will be yes, because she herself cares.
Sticky Advice
Talking Strategy
Customer communication is taken very seriously, and employee communication isn’t. And that’s a tremendous opportunity for organizational leaders. Employees need to understand what your organization stands for, where it’s headed, and what will make your organization successful.
A strategy is, at its core, a guide to behavior. It comes to life through its ability to influence thousands of decisions, both big and small, made by employees throughout an organization.
A lot of strategies, though, are simply inert. Whether they are good or bad is impossible to determine, because they do not drive action.
Barrier 1: The Curse of Knowledge
A crucial element of every strategy is declining which markets and customers a company will service.
A good strategy should guide behavior.
Barrier 2: Decision Paralysis
Barrier 3: Lack of a common language
Employees rely on leaders to define the organizations game plan. Leaders rely on employees to tell them how the game is going. For this dialogue to work, both sides must be able to understand each other. This is easier said than done.
Making Strategies Stick: Three Principles
The three barriers to talking strategy – the Curse of Knowledge, decision Paralysis and Lack of Common Strategic Vocabulary.
If your company doesn’t have stories that convey your strategy, that should be a warning flag about your strategy – it may not be sufficiently clear to influence how people act.
Leaders treat strategy as a two-step process: Step 1 – is determining the right strategy. Step 2 – is communicating it in a way that allows it to become part of the organizational vocabulary. Both are necessary.
A strategy that is built into the way an organization talks cannot be inert. If your frontline employees can talk about your strategy, can tell stories about it, can talk back to their managers and feel credible doing so, then the strategy is doing precisely what it was intended to do: guide behavior.
Curiosity comes from a gap between what we know and what we want to know. Teachers can make powerful use of this technique.
That’s what emotion does for an idea – it makes people care. It makes people feel something.
John couldn’t “see” his behavior, couldn’t understand why it needed to change, until he was confronted with a story that made him see things in a different way. Continually nagging didn’t change him – a story did. Stories have a unique power to engage and inspire.
The Curse of Knowledge
Let’s not forget the villain of the book, the Curse of Knowledge, which says that once you know something, it’s hard to imagine not knowing it. And that, in turn, makes it harder for you to communicate clearly to a novice.
When you open your mouth to communicate, without thinking about what’s coming out of your mouth you’re speaking your active language: Expertise. But students don’t speak Expertise. They do speak Sticky, though. Everyone speaks Sticky. In a sense, it’s the universal language. The grammar of stickiness – simplicity, storytelling, learning through the sense – enables anyone to understand the ideas being communicated.
What Sticks
Making ideas stickier isn’t hard. It just takes a bit of time and focus. The 6 principles of stickiness that we’re discussed can be used as a checklist – imaging the checklist written on a Pot-it note, to the side of your desk as you outline a lesson. “Okay, for tomorrow’s lesson I’ve got to compare sedimentary and igneous rock. How can I make this simple? Do students have some knowledge I can anchor in? How can I make it Concrete? Can I get a sample of the kinds of rock to show them? How can I tell a Story? Can I find a story of an archaeologist who used knowledge of the rock layers to solve an interesting problem? You get the idea.
