Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Chip Heath

finding the core isn’t synonymous with communicating the core. Top management can know what the priorities are but be completely ineffective in sharing and achieving those priorities.

Adams can’t possibly be personally involved in the vast majority of these hundreds of small decisions. But his employees don’t suffer from decision paralysis, because Adams’s Commander’s Intent is clear: “Names, names, and names.” Adams can’t be everywhere. But by finding the core and communicating it clearly, he has made himself everywhere. That’s the power of a sticky idea.

sentences are better than paragraphs. Two bullet points are better than five. Easy words are better than hard words. It’s a bandwidth issue: The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be.

Cervantes defined proverbs as “short sentences drawn from long experience.”

to make a 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 2: A pomelo is basically a supersized grapefruit with a very thick and soft rind. Explanation 2 sticks a flag on a concept 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.” Your visualized grapefruit grows accordingly.

By calling up your grapefruit schema, we were able to teach you the concept of pomelo much faster than if we had mechanically listed all the attributes of a pomelo.

schemas enable profound simplicity—is

The use of schemas can sometimes involve a somewhat slower route to the “real truth.”

If a message can’t be used to make predictions or decisions, it is without value, no matter how accurate or comprehensive it is.

great way to avoid useless accuracy, and to dodge the Curse of Knowledge, is to use analogies. Analogies derive their power from schemas: A pomelo is like a grapefruit. A good news story is structured like an inverted pyramid. Skin damage is like aging. Analogies make it possible to understand a compact message because they invoke concepts that you already know.

The first problem of communication is getting people’s attention. Some communicators have the authority to demand attention. Parents are good at this: “Bobby, look at me!” Most of the time, though, we can’t demand attention; we must attract it. This is a tougher challenge.

The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern.

How do I get people’s attention? And, just as crucially, How do I keep it?

surprise and interest—that are commonly provoked by naturally sticky ideas. • Surprise gets our attention.

Surprise GETS our attention, Interest KEEPS it.

Interest keeps our attention.

When our brows go up, it widens our eyes and gives us a broader field of vision—the surprise brow is our body’s way of forcing us to see more.

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. Avoiding Gimmickry Going for a big surprise, though, can cause a big problem. It’s easy to step over the line into gimmickry.

To be surprising, an event can’t be predictable. Surprise is the opposite of predictability. But, to be satisfying, surprise must be “postdictable.” The twist makes sense after you think about it, but it’s not something you would have seen coming. PHRAUG is post-dictable, but HENSION isn’t.

a good process for making your ideas stickier is: (1) Identify the central message you need to communicate—find the core; (2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message—i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally? (3) Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines. Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages.

If I already intuitively “get” what you’re trying to tell me, why should I obsess about remembering it? The danger, of course, is that what sounds like common sense often isn’t,

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.”

First, the teacher knew that the students had a defective schema of journalism, and he knew how it was defective. Second, he made them publicly commit to their defective models with the “write the lead” assignment. Then he pulled the rug out from under them with a well-structured surprise. By revealing the right lead—“There will be no school next Thursday”—he took their mental models, gave them a swift kick, and made them work better.

“You’ve heard of the famous Aha! experience, right?” he says. “Well, the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the Huh? experience.”

Mysteries exist wherever there are questions without obvious answers.

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.

Unexpected moment = surprise unexpected journey = mystery

fleeting surprise to enduring interest.

McKee says, “Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.”

How will it turn out? question is powerful enough to keep us watching even when we know better. “Think of all the bad films you’ve sat through just to get the answer to that nagging question.”

Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge. Loewenstein 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.

the gap theory. The goal is not to summarize; it’s to make you care about knowing something, and then to tell you what you want to know.

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?”

Novices perceive concrete details as concrete details. Experts perceive concrete details as symbols of patterns and insights that they have learned through years of experience. And, because they are capable of seeing a higher level of insight, they naturally want to talk on a higher level.

The moral of this story is not to “dumb things down.” The manufacturing people faced complex problems and they needed smart answers. Rather, the moral of the story is to find a “universal language,” one that everyone speaks fluently. Inevitably, that universal language will be concrete.

Concreteness creates a shared “turf” on which people can collaborate. Everybody in the room feels comfortable that they’re tackling the same challenge.

What makes people believe ideas? How’s that for an ambitious question? Let’s start with the obvious answers. We believe because our parents or our friends believe. We believe because we’ve had experiences that led us to our beliefs. We believe because of our religious faith. We believe because we trust authorities. These are powerful forces—family, personal experience, faith.

A commercial claiming that a new shampoo makes your hair bouncier has less credibility than hearing your best friend rave about how a new shampoo made her own hair bouncier. Well, duh. The company wants to sell you shampoo. Your friend doesn’t, so she gets more trust points. 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 antiauthorities are even better than authorities.

But the problem was that the number 5,000 means very little to people. The trick was to make this large number meaningful.

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.

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—that’s asking for temptation and trouble. But if we use statistics to help us make up our minds, we’ll be in a great position to share the pivotal numbers with others,

If you catered a White House function, you can compete for any catering contract. It’s the Sinatra Test: If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

The validity of the see-for-yourself claim causes some people to leap, illogically, to the rumormongers’ conclusion. This is how testable credentials can backfire—the “see for yourself” step can be valid, while the resulting conclusion can be entirely invalid.

The availability bias is a natural tendency that causes us, when estimating the probability of a particular event, to judge the event’s probability by its availability in our memory. We intuitively think that events are more likely when they are easier to remember.

We may remember things better because they evoke more emotion, not because they are more frequent.

Here’s what I tell my students about why they need to learn algebra: • You need it to get your high school diploma. • Every future math and science class you take will require a knowledge of algebra. • To get admitted to a good college, you’ll need a good record in math. • And even if you don’t ever plan to attend college, the reasoning skills you learn in algebra will help you buy a home, create a budget, etc.

MATH IS MENTAL WEIGHT TRAINING. It is a means to an end (for most people), not an end in itself.

One question asked participants to define the purpose of their organization in a way that would motivate other people to care about it.

If you come to work every day for years, focused on duo piano issues, it’s easy to forget that a lot of the world has never heard of the duo piano. It’s easy to forget that you’re the tapper and the world is the listener. The duo piano group was rescued from the Curse of Knowledge by a roomful of people relentlessly asking them, “Why?” By asking “Why?” three times, the duo piano group moved from talking about what they were doing to why they were doing it. They moved from a set of associations that had no power (except to someone who already knew duo piano music) to a set of deeper, more concrete associations that connected emotionally with outsiders.

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.