Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Chip Heath

Have you ever noticed that our friends’ friends have much more interesting lives than our friends themselves?

Are ideas born interesting or made interesting? Well, this is a nurture book.

Why do some ideas succeed while others fail?

many naturally sticky ideas are true. In fact, perhaps the oldest class of naturally sticky ideas is the proverb—a nugget of wisdom that often endures over centuries and across cultures. As an example, versions of the proverb “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” have appeared in more than fifty-five different languages.

“How to Make Ideas Stick.” The premise of the course was that if we understood what made ideas naturally sticky we might be better at making our own messages stick.

The Tipping Point has three sections. The first addresses the need to get the right people, and the third addresses the need for the right context. The middle section of the book, “The Stickiness Factor,” argues that innovations are more likely to tip when they’re sticky.

One skill we can learn is the ability to spot ideas that have “natural talent,”

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY

A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.”

We must create ideas that are both simple and profound.

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS

For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. How do you keep students engaged during the forty-eighth history class of the year? 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

This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions—they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless.

PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY

PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS

Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness.

PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES

To summarize, here’s our checklist for creating a successful idea: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. A clever observer will note that this sentence can be compacted into the acronym SUCCESs.

The villain is a natural psychological tendency that consistently confounds our ability to create ideas using these principles. It’s called the Curse of Knowledge.

The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.

Reversing the process is as impossible as un-ringing a bell. You can’t unlearn what you already know. There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge reliably. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them.

spontaneously in naturally sticky ideas—for example,

researchers tried to classify these “less successful” ads, they could classify only 2 percent of them. The surprising lesson of this story: Highly creative ads are more predictable than uncreative ones. It’s like Tolstoy’s quote: “All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” All creative ads resemble one another, but each loser is uncreative in its own way.

If you want to spread your ideas to other people, you should work within the confines of the rules that have allowed other ideas to succeed over time. You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.

Many armies fail because they put all their emphasis into creating a plan that becomes useless ten minutes into the battle.”

The Army’s challenge is akin to writing instructions for a friend to play chess on your behalf. You know a lot about the rules of the game, and you may know a lot about your friend and the opponent. But if you try to write move-by-move instructions you’ll fail. You can’t possibly foresee more than a few moves. The first time the opponent makes a surprise move, your friend will have to throw out your carefully designed plans and rely on her instincts.

He believes that plans are useful, in the sense that they are proof that planning has taken place. The planning process forces people to think through the right issues. But as for the plans themselves, Kolditz says, “They just don’t work on the battlefield.” So, in the 1980s 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.

The CI never specifies so much detail that it risks being rendered obsolete by unpredictable events. “You can lose the ability to execute the original plan, but you never lose the responsibility of executing the intent,” says Kolditz.

as soon as people know what the intent is they begin generating their own solutions.”

No plan survives contact with the enemy.

No lesson plan survives contact with teenagers.

What we mean by “simple” is finding the core of the idea.

The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important but just aren’t the most important idea.

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” A designer of simple ideas should aspire to the same goal: knowing how much can be wrung out of an idea before it begins to lose its essence.

There are two steps in making your ideas sticky—Step 1 is to find the core, and Step 2 is to translate the core using the SUCCESs checklist.

A new employee can easily put these ideas together to realize how to act in unscripted situations. For instance, is it all right to joke about a flight attendant’s birthday over the P.A.? Sure. Is it equally okay to throw confetti in her honor? Probably not—the confetti would create extra work for cleanup crews, and extra clean-up time means higher fares.

A well-thought-out simple idea can be amazingly powerful in shaping behavior.

stories in this chapter aren’t simple because they’re full of easy words. They’re simple because they reflect the Commander’s Intent. It’s about elegance and prioritization, not dumbing down.

News reporters are taught to start their stories with the most important information. The first sentence, called the lead, contains the most essential elements of the story. A good lead can convey a lot of information,

After the lead, information is presented in decreasing order of importance. Journalists call this the “inverted pyramid” structure—the

If news stories were written like mysteries, with a dramatic payoff at the end, then readers who broke off in mid-story would miss the point.

The inverted pyramid also allows newspapers to get out the door on time. Suppose a late-breaking story forces editors to steal space from other stories. Without the inverted pyramid, they’d be forced to do a slow, careful editing job on all the other articles, trimming a word here or a phrase there. With the inverted pyramid structure, they simply lop off paragraphs from the bottom of the other articles, knowing that those paragraphs are (by construction) the least important.

A common mistake reporters make is that they get so steeped in the details that they fail to see the message’s core—what readers will find important or interesting.

Decision Paralysis Why is prioritizing so difficult? In the abstract, it doesn’t sound so tough. You prioritize important goals over less important goals. You prioritize goals that are “critical” ahead of goals that are “beneficial.” But what if we can’t tell what’s “critical” and what’s “beneficial”? Sometimes it’s not obvious.

psychologists have found that people can be driven to irrational decisions by too much complexity and uncertainty.

Tversky and Shafir’s study shows us that uncertainty—even irrelevant uncertainty—can paralyze us.

Prioritization rescues people from the quicksand of decision angst, and that’s why finding the core is so valuable. The people who listen to us will be constantly making decisions in an environment of uncertainty.

To us, Paragraph 5 flashes in neon lights as the core: Skin damage. . .is cumulative over the years and cannot be reversed. Wow. Isn’t that the single most important thing we’d want to tell sun-worshippers?

Don’t start with something interesting but irrelevant in hopes of entertaining the audience. Instead, work to make the core message itself more interesting.