Made to Stick

Key Concepts

Six Principles of Sticky Ideas

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS

PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS

PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY

PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS

PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES

“For an idea to stick, for it to be useful and lasting, it’s got to make the audience:

1. “Pay attention

2. “Understand and remember it 

3. “Agree/Believe 

4. “Care

5. “Be able to act on it” (p. 246)

SIMPLE

“The Combat Maneuver Training Center, the unit in charge of military simulations, recommends that officers arrive at the Commander’s Intent by asking themselves two questions: If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must _________________. The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is ________________.” (p. 27)

“It’s hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. If we’re to succeed, the first step is this: Be simple. Not simple in terms of “dumbing down” or “sound bites.” You don’t have to speak in monosyllables to be simple. What we mean by “simple” is finding the core of the idea.” (p. 27)

“Simple = Core + Compact”

“In other cases, compactness itself can come to seem an unworthy goal. Lots of us have expertise in particular areas. Becoming an expert in something means that we become more and more fascinated by nuance and complexity. That’s when the Curse of Knowledge kicks in, and we start to forget what it’s like not to know what we know. At that point, making something simple can seem like “dumbing down.” As an expert, we don’t want to be accused of propagating sound bites or pandering to the lowest common denominator. Simplifying, we fear, can devolve into oversimplifying.” (p. 46)

“The choice may seem to be a difficult one: (1) accuracy first, at the expense of accessibility; or (2) accessibility first, at the expense of accuracy. But in many circumstances this is a false choice for one compelling reason: If a message can’t be used to make predictions or decisions, it is without value, no matter how accurate or comprehensive it is.” (p. 56)

“To a CEO, “maximizing shareholder value” may be an immensely useful rule of behavior. To a flight attendant, it’s not. To a physicist, probability clouds are fascinating phenomena. To a child, they are incomprehensible.” (p. 57)

“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.” (p. 57)

UNEXPECTED

“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. People say, “You can’t make people pay attention,” and there is a commonsense ring to that. But wait a minute: That’s exactly what Karen Wood did. She made people pay attention, and she didn’t even need to raise her voice. The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern. (p. 64)

“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.” (p. 72)

“Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. When messages sound like common sense, they float gently in one ear and out the other. And why shouldn’t they? 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, as with the Hoover Adams and Southwest examples. It’s your job, as a communicator, to expose the parts of your message that are uncommon sense.” (p. 72)

To keep people’s attention, give them a mystery to solve or question to answer

“A few years ago, Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, set out to improve the way he talked about science in his writing and in his classes. For inspiration, he went to the library. He pulled down every book he could find in which scientists were writing for an audience of nonscientists. He photocopied sections of prose that he liked. Later, flipping through his stack of copied passages, he hunted for consistencies. In passages that weren’t interesting, he found mostly what he expected. The purpose wasn’t clear, and the prose was too formal and riddled with jargon. He also found a lot of predictable virtues in the good passages: The structure was clear, the examples vivid, and the language fluid. ‘But,’ says Cialdini, ‘I also found something I had not expected—the most successful of these pieces all began with a mystery story. The authors described a state of affairs that seemed to make no sense and then invited the reader into the material as a way of solving the mystery.’” (p. 80)

“In McKee’s view, a great script is designed so that every scene is a Turning Point. ‘Each Turning Point hooks curiosity. The audience wonders, What will happen next? and How will it turn out? The answer to this will not arrive until the Climax of the last act, and so the audience, held by curiosity, stays put.’ McKee notes that the 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.’” (p. 83)

CONCRETE

“What makes something “concrete”? If you can examine something with your senses, it’s concrete.” (p. 104)

“Concrete language helps people, especially novices, understand new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert.” (p. 104)

“Using concreteness as a foundation for abstraction is not just good for mathematical instruction; it is a basic principle of understanding. Novices crave concreteness. Have you ever read an academic paper or a technical article or even a memo and found yourself so flummoxed by the fancy abstract language that you were crying out for an example?” (p. 106)

CREDIBLE

“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.” (p. 137)

“Testable credentials are useful in many domains. For example, take the question “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Ronald Reagan famously posed this question to the audience during his 1980 presidential debate with Jimmy Carter. Reagan could have focused on statistics—the high inflation rate, the loss of jobs, the rising interest rates. But instead of selling his case he deferred to his audience.” (p. 158)

EMOTIONAL

“But the main question of this chapter is even more basic: How do we make people care about our messages? The good news is that to make people care about our ideas we don’t have to produce emotion from an absence of emotion. In fact, many ideas use a sort of piggybacking strategy, associating themselves with emotions that already exist.” (p. 171)

“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. 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.” (p. 201)

STORIES

“The conventional view of communication is to ignore the little voice inside the head and hope it stays quiet and that the message will somehow get through,” Denning says. But he has a different recommendation: “Don’t ignore the little voice…. Instead, work in harmony with it. Engage it by giving it something to do. Tell a story in a way that elicits a second story from the little voice.” (p. 234)

Villains that get in the way of effective communication

“Why can’t these smart, talented speakers make their ideas stick? A few of the villains discussed in this book are implicated. The first villain is the natural tendency to bury the lead—to get lost in a sea of information. One of the worst things about knowing a lot, or having access to a lot of information, is that we’re tempted to share it all. High school teachers will tell you that when students write research papers they feel obligated to include every unearthed fact, as though the value were in the quantity of data amassed rather than in its purpose or clarity. Stripping out information, in order to focus on the core, is not instinctual.” (p. 243)

“The second villain is the tendency to focus on the presentation rather than on the message. Public speakers naturally want to appear composed, charismatic, and motivational. And, certainly, charisma will help a properly designed message stick better. But all the charisma in the world won’t save a dense, unfocused speech, as some Stanford students learn the hard way.” (p. 244)

Quotables

“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. They will suffer anxiety from the need to choose—even when the choice is between two good options, like the lecture and the foreign film. Core messages help people avoid bad choices by reminding them of what’s important. In Herb Kelleher’s parable, for instance, someone had to choose between chicken salad and no chicken salad—and the message “THE low-fare airline” led her to abandon the chicken salad.” (p. 37)

“There is a curious disconnect between the amount of time we invest in training people how to arrive at the Answer and the amount of time we invest in training them how to Tell Others. It’s easy to graduate from medical school or an MBA program without ever taking a class in communication. College professors take dozens of courses in their areas of expertise but none on how to teach. A lot of engineers would scoff at a training program about Telling Others.” (p. 245)