Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Chip Heath

The vision of a pocketable radio sustained a company through a tricky period of growth and led it to become an internationally recognized player in technology. The vision of a man on the moon sustained tens of thousands of separate individuals, in dozens of organizations, for almost a decade. These are big, powerful, sticky ideas.

Unexpectedness, in the service of core principles, can have surprising longevity.

This truth is especially sticky because of the way it was encoded. The concrete images evoked by the fable—the grapes, the fox, the dismissive comment about sour grapes—allowed its message to persist.

Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in very different ways. Concreteness helps us avoid these problems. This is perhaps the most important lesson that Aesop can teach us.

This is not a story about land; it’s a story about abstraction. TNC avoided the trap of abstraction—saving 2 million acres per year—by converting abstract blobs on a map into tangible landscapes. TNC realized, wisely, that the context had grown more ambiguous, and the solutions had grown more ambiguous, but that their messages could not be allowed to grow more ambiguous. Concreteness is an indispensable component of sticky ideas.

Concrete language helps people, especially novices, understand new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert. If you’ve got to teach an idea to a room full of people, and you aren’t certain what they know, concreteness is the only safe language.

Using concreteness as a foundation for abstraction is not just good for mathematical instruction; it is a basic principle of understanding. Novices crave concreteness.

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. Abstraction demands some concrete foundation.

Naturally sticky ideas are stuffed full of concrete words and images—think of the Kentucky Fried Rat or the Kidney Heist’s ice-filled bathtub.

The concreteness actually made the most capable students want to become accountants.

Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory.

Jane Elliott’s simulation of prejudice is compelling evidence of the power of concreteness. But if concreteness is so powerful, why do we slip so easily into abstraction? The reason is simple: because the difference between an expert and a novice is the ability to think abstractly.

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.

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 makes targets transparent. Even experts need transparency.

The portfolio presented a challenge to the boardroom participants—a way of focusing their thoughts and bringing their existing knowledge to bear. It changed their attitude from reactive and critical to active and creative. The presence of the portfolio made it easier for the venture capitalists to brainstorm, in the same way that focusing on “white things in our refrigerator” made it easier for us to brainstorm.

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

This Clinic is one of our favorite before-and-after examples in the book, because it shows how powerful a concrete idea can be. The moral is to find some way to invite people to the table, to help them bring their knowledge to bear. Here, a prop works better than a scientific description.

Of the six traits of stickiness that we review in this book, concreteness is perhaps the easiest to embrace. It may also be the most effective of the traits. To be simple—to find our core message—is quite difficult. (It’s certainly worth the effort, but let’s not kid ourselves that it’s easy.) Crafting our ideas in an unexpected way takes a fair amount of effort and applied creativity. 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 abstractspeak. We forget that other people don’t know what we know.

authorities are a reliable source of credibility for our ideas.

We trust the recommendations of people whom we want to be like.

Can we find external sources of credibility that don’t involve celebrities or experts?

We can tap the credibility of antiauthorities.

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.

A person’s knowledge of details is often a good proxy for her expertise. Think of how a history buff can quickly establish her credibility by telling an interesting Civil War anecdote. But concrete details don’t just lend credibility to the authorities who provide them; they lend credibility to the idea itself.

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.

The use of vivid details is one way to create internal credibility—to weave sources of credibility into the idea itself. Another way is to use statistics.

This is the most important thing 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.

Another way to bring statistics to life is to contextualize them in terms that are more human, more everyday.

Statistics aren’t inherently helpful; it’s the scale and context that make them so.

Similarly, the human-scale principle allows us to bring our intuition to bear in assessing whether the content of a message is credible.

Statistics are a good source of internal credibility when they are used to illustrate relationships.

Ethically challenged people with lots of analytical smarts can, with enough contortions, make almost any case from a given set of statistics.

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.

PUNCH LINE:When we use statistics, the less we rely on the actual numbers the better. The numbers inform us about the underlying relationship, but there are better ways to illustrate the underlying relationship than the numbers themselves.

We’ve seen that we can make our ideas more credible, on their own merits, by using compelling details or by using statistics. A third way to develop internal credibility is to use a particular type of example, an example that passes what we call the Sinatra Test.

An example passes the Sinatra Test when one example alone is enough to establish credibility in a given domain.

Their power comes from their concreteness rather than from numbers or authority. These stories make you think, “If Safexpress can make it there, they can make it anywhere.”

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.”

This is how testable credentials can backfire—the “see for yourself” step can be valid, while the resulting conclusion can be entirely invalid.

So why do people predict badly? Because of the availability bias. 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. But often the things we remember are not an accurate summary of the world.

People remember things better because they evoke more emotion, not because they are more frequent. People remember things better because the media spend more time covering them (perhaps because they provide more vivid images), not because they are more common. The availability bias may lead our intuition astray, prompting us to treat unusual things as common and unlikely things as probable.

PUNCH LINE: Using testable credentials allows people to try out an idea for themselves.

How do we get people to believe our ideas? We’ve got to find a source of credibility to draw on.

In this chapter we’ve seen that the most obvious sources of credibility—external validation and statistics—aren’t always the best. A few vivid details might be more persuasive than a barrage of statistics. An antiauthority might work better than an authority. A single story that passes the Sinatra Test might overcome a mountain of skepticism.

When it comes to our hearts, one individual trumps the masses. The researchers believed that the smaller donations for the statistical letter could be a result of what they called the “drop in the bucket effect.” If people felt overwhelmed by the scale of the problem, their small donations might have seemed meaningless.

The researchers 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.

These results are shocking. The mere act of calculation reduced people’s charity. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.

Belief counts for a lot, but belief isn’t enough. For people to take action, they have to care.