Dan Heath, a consultant at Duke CE, co-authored “MADE TO STICK: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” with his brother Chip. The book is a practical guide to effective communication.
What’s a sticky idea, and who needs to make their ideas stick?
A sticky idea is one that people understand when they hear it, that they remember later on, and that changes the way they think or act. We all need to make our ideas stick sometimes. Managers need to share the new strategy with employees. Teachers need to get ideas across to their students. Parents need to give advice to their teenagers.
Yet stickiness is a rare commodity—how much can you remember from what you read in the newspaper this morning? Or the last PowerPoint presentation you saw? And you probably couldn’t fill an index card with what you recall from high school chemistry.
What is your favorite example of a sticky success story?
My favorite is JFK’s speech from 1961—he challenged the nation to put a man on the moon and return him safely within the decade. It’s a sticky idea that motivated a nation of millions for the better part of a decade. The “man on the moon” idea captures perfectly the 6 principles of sticky ideas: it’s simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and it’s a story (in miniature). Think about the concreteness in particular: Was there a single person on the planet who didn’t understand exactly what success would look like? Was anyone confused by the meaning of “man,” “moon,” or “decade”? That’s remarkable! A lot of organizations—and individuals--could learn from that clarity.
If JFK had been a modern-day politician or CEO, he’d probably have said, “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry, using our capacity for technological innovation to build a bridge towards humanity’s future.” Goodbye, moon walk.
Isn’t it too simplistic to suggest that there is a formula for sticky ideas?
Yes, it is. A “formula” for sticky ideas is impossible. But think of it like desserts. There are millions of different desserts in the world, and it would be ridiculous to think that there’s a single recipe that accounts for all of them. If you look at the ingredients of all these desserts, though, you start to notice they have a lot in common: flour, sugar, butter, chocolate, cream, etc. That’s our point about ideas—that sticky ideas of all kinds share common traits. And, more importantly, that you can use these traits to make your ideas stickier.
What common problems arise when ideas just aren’t structured with enough stickiness?
People forget. They misunderstand. They get confused. They pick the wrong priorities. They don’t believe you. They believe you but they don’t act. They believe you but they don’t much care. If you’re the kind of person who needs to make ideas stick—a trainer, a journalist, a teacher, a parent, a manager, a nonprofit leader, a politician—these are not theoretical problems. These are huge, everyday realities.
You spend a lot of time in the book discussing the Curse of Knowledge. What does it have to do with sticky ideas?
The Curse of Knowledge is the arch-villain in our book. The Curse of Knowledge happens because when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result we become lousy communicators. Think of the stereotypical IT guy in the office who can’t give you a clear answer to some computer question. All the vast experience he has with computers renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in jargon and abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the IT guy in our own domain of expertise. If we know enough to come up with an important insight, we also know too much to communicate easily with others. That’s why knowledge is a Curse. But the principles in our book can reverse the Curse.
So how do you dodge the Curse of Knowledge?
You go back to the six principles of stickiness. One of the best stories in the book is about a group of nutritionists who found that a typical medium movie-sized popcorn had 37 grams of saturated fat. They’re experts and they knew that was a ludicrous amount. But they had to come up with a concrete way to convey the ludicrousness to the rest of us. Here’s what they said: “A medium sized popcorn contains more fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings—combined!” That message is a perfect example of at least three of the principles in the book—it’s very concrete, but it’s also emotional and unexpected. And it worked: Moviegoers stopped eating popcorn until movie theaters stopped popping in coconut oil (the source of most of the saturated fat).
You talk a lot about urban legends as the ultimate sticky ideas. What’s your favorite urban legend?
That’s like choosing a favorite child. There are too many good ones. “You only use 10% of your brain” is a great one that a surprising number of people take seriously. “Wow, think how smart I would be if I could use ALL my brain instead of 10%!” Um, actually, you’re already using all your brain, and it’s apparently not enough to convince you how dumb this idea is. Would anyone fear brain damage if 90% of the stuff up there was nougat?
So a sticky idea is not necessarily a good idea or a true one?
Nope.
Did you try to write the book in a way that would be sticky with readers? How did you try to pull this off?
Yes, we were all too aware that our book needed to be filled with sticky examples. When your basketball coach can’t make a free throw, it hurts his credibility. A lot of times, we literally pulled out the checklist of the 6 principles and used it to assess what we’d written. And more often than not we didn’t score very well. So we’d go back and tinker with the text and try to include more stories, try to be more concrete, try to make clear what wasn’t “common sense” about our message. We’ve experienced firsthand one of the key lessons of our book: Making ideas stickier isn’t hard, but it is certainly not instinctual behavior. It takes effort and intention.
How is your book different from Gladwell’s Tipping Point?
Gladwell is one of our heroes, and we acknowledge in the book that we ripped off the “sticky” terminology from him! He coined the perfect word to describe the concept that we were studying in the marketplace of ideas. But Gladwell’s interest was in how innovations are more likely to “tip” when they are sticky. Chip and I wanted to know how sticky ideas got that way in the first place – how they are constructed, and what makes some ideas stick and others disappear.
How was it working with your brother?
Well, in school, Chip was the guy who turned in his papers a week early so he could relax and listen to Supertramp records. And I was the guy who popped 4 No-Doz and started his paper at 3am the night before it was due. So you can imagine some of the tensions we had to work through.
Would a stickier world be a better world?
It would be like putting on your first pair of eyeglasses. Everything would suddenly be a lot clearer. And we’d all remember a lot more high school chemistry.
Click here to purchase Dan's book “MADE TO STICK: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.”
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