Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Chip Heath

Warning: Sun Exposure Is Dangerous THE SITUATION: Health educators at Ohio State University want to inform the academic community about the risks of sun exposure.

People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.

So, 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.

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?”

What we should learn from urban legends and the Mrs. Johnson trial is that vivid details boost credibility. But what should also be added is that we need to make use of truthful, core details. 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.

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.

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.

IDEO created a video, shot from the perspective of a patient who goes to the emergency room for a leg fracture. In the video, we see what the patient sees. We are the patient. We come in through the door to the ER—we hunt around for check-in instructions and interact with the admissions people, who are speaking in a foreign medical tongue. Eventually, we are laid on a gurney and wheeled through the hospital. We see long stretches of the hospital ceiling. We hear disembodied voices, because we can’t see the person addressing us. Every now and then, someone pokes his or her head into our field of view. Frequently, there are long pauses where we just sit idle, staring at the ceiling, unsure what’s coming next.

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

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.

Jared reminds us that we don’t always have to create sticky ideas. Spotting them is often easier and more useful.

Guy faces huge obstacles and overcomes them—it’s a Challenge plot. Challenge plots inspire people to take on challenges and work harder. If that feeling is consistent with the goal you want to achieve, run with the story; don’t tack it on the bulletin board.

If you’re running the Grinder Team, and you’re trying to reinvent the company culture, then you need to be on the lookout for Creativity plots. When you hear that some of your men dragged metal around a parking lot, you’ve found something.