In Made to Stick, the Heath brothers describe six principles that make your idea sticky - that make it easy for people to remember and tell others about. Those six principles (and the effects they have) are:
Simple ideas help you remember.
Unexpected ideas make you pay attention.
Concrete ideas help you understand.
Credible ideas make you believe.
Emotional ideas make you care.
The right story makes you act.
Principle 6 (the right story makes you act) is something that I've seen in a book I reviewed last year (The Elements of Persuasion).
Stories demonstrate how you can act - what steps you can take, what obstacles you might face, how to overcome them, and what results you might expect. In The Elements of Persuasion, Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman talk about the role of the Hero - the character who embodies your message, and demonstrates "how to live your story".
A well-told story gives your audience enough information so they can mentally test how they would handle the situation. This mental rehearsal is the next best thing to actually doing something. As the Heath brothers say, stories are like flight simulators for the brain.
Here are a couple of anti-smoking ads for you to watch, and then I'll describe what Made to Stick has to say about the role of emotion in delivering an effective message.
These two ads started airing at almost the same time in the US. When teenagers were asked if they remembered any anti-smoking ads, 22 percent thought of the first 'Truth' campaign, while only 3 percent thought of the second 'Think' campaign.
Why is this important? Why is it important that more people remember the highly emotive ad that creates feeling of rebellion, resentment and belonging to a peer group than the lighter, gentler 'Think' ads?
Made to Stick suggests a couple of reasons emotion is important:
1) Feeling an emotion means you care. When people care, they're more likely to remember and they're more likely to act on what you're saying
2) The more we reason and think, the more our ability to feel is inhibited. Analysis prevents compassion. Made to Stick cites several examples of ads in the 'World Vision helping children in developing countries' genre. That feeds back into Point (1) - basically, the less you think, the more you act.
What makes someone believe an idea? In Made to Stick, the Heath brothers propose a variety of things that can make a message or an idea 'credible':
people we know and respect believe it
the idea matches our own experience
we're told it's true by an authority
we're told it's true by an anti-authority (see below)
we take it on faith
the message stands on its own merits and is inherently believable (it has 'internal credibility')
the message contains vivid details that make it easier to visualise the point you're making
statistics ... but ONLY IF they're phrased in human, everyday terms
you use an example that definitively proves the point you're making (aka 'The Sinatra Test')
the message challenges you to test the truth of it for yourself
It's worth going into more detail about a few of these sources of credibility.
Get the endorsement of an Anti-Authority
You can get someone to deliver your message who has personal experience with what you're saying. Someone who has lived through the experience your message is conveying, someone who's 'living proof' that what you're saying is true or works.
We're all aware of ads that try to seem credible because they use a celebrity endorsement from someone we want to be like, or a fronted someone with a reputation for honesty and trustworthiness (or an actor dressed to symbolise honesty and trustworthiness). Sometimes a message is delivered by an expert (like an academic or a professional). These are all forms of credibility because they use an 'authority' to present the message. But Pam Laffin started smoking when she was 10. She's an anti-authority; she has credibility because she's real. Or rather: had credibility. Pam died on 3 November 2000 at the age of 31.
Use vivid details Weirdly enough, simply using a vivid detail or two can make your message more believable. But these details need to be truthful, meaningful, and they need to add to your argument.
The Heath brothers cite a dance company who demonstrated how much they value diversity by letting people know that they had a 73 year old former mailman who danced with them.
Statistics (tend to make your eyes glaze over)
Statistics may sound impressive and seem like a good source of credibility, but they aren't particularly great at showing people what you mean.
I'm sure you can think of examples where people have quotes stats at you, and you've thought "These are just numbers," or "I don't understand what these numbers mean." I get baffled by stats all the time, primarily because it's hard to visualise these numbers mean in everyday, human terms.
But statistics are a good method of illustrating the relationships between things. If, rather than throwing numbers at your audience, you focus on describing that relationship in everyday, human terms you'll find people remember and understand your stats - which will make them more credible.
The Heath brothers illustrate this by quoting a series of statistics from Stephen Covey's book The 8th Habit, where a survey of employees in various companies revealed the following information:
+ Only 37 percent said they had a clear idea of what their organisation was trying to achieve and why + Only one in five employees said they were enthusiastic about their team's and their organisation's goals + Only one in five said they had a clear 'line of sight' between their daily work and their organisation's goals + Only 15 percent said they felt their organisation enabled them to fully execute their key goals + Only 20 percent said they fully trusted the organisation they worked for.
To me, that's a whole bunch of information that's pretty difficult to assimilate. So, instead, Stephen Covey provides an analogy that puts less emphasis on these numbers, and more on illustrating the relationships and meaning of those statistics using an everyday, easy-to-visualise concept:
If, say, a soccer team had these same scores, only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 of the 11 would care. ... And all but 2 of the players would, in some way, be competing against their own team members rather than the opponent.
Statistics are a good source of internal credibility but they aren't inherently helpful. They're only helpful if we understand them in human, everyday terms (which helps us get an idea of their scale and context).
The Sinatra Test
"If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere."
-- New York, New York (as sung by Frank Sinatra)
Passing the Sinatra Test is shorthand for saying that providing just one example is enough to establish your credibility (as long as it's the right example). For instance:
"I'm in charge of security at Fort Knox," means you can get a security job anywhere.
"Our company promptly and securely delivered the final Harry Potter book to every bookstore in America," means you can get any couriering job in America.
Test it yourself
You can challenge the person who's receiving your message to test it for themselves.
Made to Stick cites the example of the Wendy's "Where's the Beef?" ad. I'd heard about this for years, but never seen it till now. So, let's go back to the year 1984 and take a look:
The point here is that you can go into a fast-food store and test for yourself whether you're eating a bigger or smaller beef patty than you'd get at a rival store.
Figuring out a way of making it easy for your audience to establish that your message is credible for themselves, is a powerful source of credibility.
Made to Stick is a book about what makes ideas memorable, and what makes people want to tell your ideas to other people. So far, Made to Stick has talked about making sure your ideas are:
+ simple + unexpected and surprising
The next quality it recommends is 'concreteness' - describing your idea as something you can see or something you can do. Make your idea vivid and easy to imagine.
For instance, compare these two goals.
Goal 1: We will build the best passenger jet in the world.
Goal 2: We will build a passenger jet that seats 131 passengers, can fly non-stop from Miami to New York City, and land on Runway 4-22 at La Guardia International Airport.
What's the difference between these two goals? What are the different things you still need to know after reading them? Imagining you're an aircraft engineer, what would your next action be after receiving those goals?
What are the benefits of concreteness?
Making something concrete means that everyone has the same clear idea of what to do. Concreteness improves your ability to co-ordinate people, and make sure they're all working in the same direction.
Also, when something is concrete, it gives us something to focus on – a symbol, a representation, a known environment we’re all familiar with. As an example of this, Made to Stick describes the creation of the Palm Pilot. When they were designing it, the creator of the company would carry around a block of wood that represented the finished Palm Pilot. He wanted to avoid the failing of previous attempts to build a handheld organiser, which he saw as the tendency to keep packing as many cool features as possible into the palm pilot. So when a tech would come up to him with a new idea and say “How about we add this?”, the company's creator would pull out his block of wood (which he carried with him everywhere) and ask where this new feature would fit.
How can you tell if something's concrete?
+ You can examine it with your senses + You can see someone doing it + You can talk about it with someone, using terms and concepts that are familiar to them + You can use an example to describe it.
The opposite of concrete
The opposite of concreteness is abstraction. We talk abstractly when we use buzzwords, professional jargon, and ideas and descriptions that don't have any relevance to the real world.
When something is abstract, it makes it harder to understand and remember an idea. Abstraction also encourages people to interpret your idea in different ways
Unfortunately, it's extremely easy for us to slip into describing things abstractly. I'm sure you can remember a time when you were explaining a subject you know a lot about to someone who knew very little, and you realised they weren't following you. When I do that, I often find that I've:
+ forgotten to explain an important piece of information, assuming they already know it + used a word that means a lot to me, but means nothing to a casual audience + summed up a complex idea in a pithy sentence, rather than explaining in step-by-step, real-world terms what I mean.
It’s easy to forget that we’re experts or knowledgeable in something, and we have to actively try and remember that the more expert we are, the less natural it is for us to talk like someone who knows nothing about the subject.
The upshot: if you're passionate and knowledgeable about a subject and you want other people to know about it or care about it, then you're going to have to get concrete.
How do you make something concrete?
Made to Stick recommends that you spend some time visualising your customers or the people you're trying to influence. The book uses the example of the Saddleback Church in California which seeks to recruit and convert people they call 'Saddleback Sam'. They describe Saddleback Sam as:
+ not currently attending a church and skeptical about organised religion + in his late 30s or early 40s + has (at least) a university degree + married with two children + happy in his job, and content with his life
In fact, the Saddleback Church goes into even more detail than this, but the point is that once you have a clear idea of who your customer is, you start to figure out what their needs are. What do they want? What don’t they want?
That helps you figure out what messages will appeal to them. You can make your ideas concrete in ways that meet their specific needs, and you can figure out the best ways to deliver your message. For instance, Saddleback Sam works hard and wants to spend time with his family, so tele-marketing to him at night is probably a very bad idea.
So now you're explaining your idea in a way that people can easily visualise. How do you make them believe you?
To deliver your message successfully, you have to get the audience's attention and then hold the audience's attention. One way of doing this is through using surprise and the unexpected.
Unexpected ideas inspire us
In a speech to Congress in 1961, President Kennedy clearly summarised a new goal for America:
Kennedy's idea is huge, surprising, and (obviously) provoked reactions like "Is this worth it?", and "Why should we do it?" Kennedy clarified the reasons America needed to embark on this endeavour in a speech at Rich University in 1962.(*)
(*) Let's leave aside discussion of the real motivations for the Apollo project for now.
You can get your audience's attention by surprising them. This works because we tend to think we're good at predicting what's going to happen next; we think we have a good understanding of the world around us. Surprise heppans wehn taht understanding fails us; when things occur that we don't expect.
After experiencing something unexpected, we then start paying extra special attention - trying to understand why we failed to predict what was going to happen (which is something I've hopefully just demonstrated).
Surprise means we've failed to predict what's going to happen, which causes us to pay attention so that we can make better predictions in the future.
So, how do you create surprise when you're trying to design and deviler a message?
In the previous post, I talked about identifying the core of your message. I used the example of 'time management', and narrowed my message down to the core of: Only do stuff that adds to you being the person you want to be.
To surprise people you need to explore what's counter-intuitive about your message's core. What are its unexpected implications? The authors of Made to Stick, the Heath brothers, have a nice turn of phrase about this: "Uncommon sense". Things that are common sense are obvious, and therefore easy to ignore (because we'll have guessed what's coming and won't be surprised). It's the part of your message that makes uncommon sense that will "break your audience's guessing machine".
In an attempt to illustrate, I will try and figure out what's counter-intuitive about "Only do stuff that adds to you being the person you want to be." I expect this will be reasonably hard - consider what's about to follow to be a bit of a brainstorm, rather than a final draft:
+ Without time management you'll never be happy + The person you want to be needs to be deliberately created + Creating yourself involves sculpting in time - paring away the bits that aren't you + Doing whatever you want is like junk food for your soul
I like that last one. I could think a bit harder and come up with more options, but let's go with that for now. So my counter-intuitive example is this:
Not using time management is much like eating a king-sized block of chocolate every day. Regularly eating junk food is a bad idea if you want to be healthy. In the same way, doing whatever you want, whenever you want, without thinking about it, tends to stuff your life with things you don't really want or need. And the end result is you don't end up with enough time to do the things you really want or need to do.
Hold the audience's attention
Curiousity comes from recognising that we have gaps in our knowledge. Apparently we have a psychological need to fill those gaps (as the number of morning tea conversations I have that involve me consulting Wikipedia will attest).
The process of raising audience's awareness that they have gaps in their knowledge leads to them wanting to stick around until you fill those gaps with answers, facts or stories.
Made to Stick outlines a bunch of ways you can create these gaps in your audience:
+ make them publically predict something which they get wrong + make them realise that they disagree about the topic with other audience members + provoke their interest with something unfamiliar + highlight their current knowledge and then point out some specific knowledge they're missing + make them realise they need your facts.
Made to Stick highlights a principle here that's also true in screenwriting: shift your mindset away from "What information do I want to convey?" to "What questions do I want them to ask?" People will stick around to find out the answers to questions that interest them, and (according to Made to Stick) they'll even stick around to find out the answers to questions that don't.
Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath is about creating ideas that stick in people's minds, ideas that make people want to spread them. The first element of 'stickiness' is simplicity.
Simplicity is a proverb
When you're creating an idea, you want it to be short, easy to remember. Ideally you want your idea to be short and WORTHWHILE for people to remember. For instance, think about these phrases:
"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."
"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."
Proverbs are worthwhile ideas that are simple, profound, and (most importantly) useful. They provide a guide about how to behave in a complex situation or a principle to live by. Proverbs provide wisdom. And people share them - the bird-in-the-hand proverb can be found in Spain, Russia, Iceland, and even in medieval Latin documents. Its origin may be from one of Aesop's Fables, dating from around 570 B.C.
Simplicity is the most important thing
Think about a subject you know a lot about. Now, if you want to, try this mental exercise - it should take about 10 seconds. Imagine a friend asks you to explain a bit about that subject to them. They'll give you a couple of minutes to give them a bit of an overview of it.
Have a think about a few of the things you'd want to explain to them.
While you're doing that, I'll try it with the idea of time management. Skip past the bullet-points and I'll keep on with the post:
write everything down
review stuff regularly
keep a list of tasks you want to do
have a list of goals (yearly and monthly)
do stuff that's important but not urgent
do things in small chunks
do stuff that excites you
do stuff that adds to the person you want to be
eliminate unimportant stuff
keep a notebook with you to write stuff down
time management is a habit - start small
there are lots of good books to read.
So, here's why simplicity is good. People who are experts want to communicate a lot to their audience - and the tendancy is to communicate too much. I have 12 things in my list above - the chances are that 10 minutes after I explain this stuff, my friend is going to remember nothing. Maybe one or two things at most.
When an idea is simple, it means you've found its core - the most important thing about the idea that you want to communicate.
You can't have 5 'most important' things that you want to communicate. You've got to prioritise by weeding out the important ideas that aren't the most important idea. You've got to eliminate the superfluous.
What's left is like a proverb or a haiku: the most important thing about your idea.
If I were to do this with my list above, getting rid of stuff that'd merely be nice to talk about, I'm left with this:
have a list of goals (yearly and monthly)
do stuff that's important but not urgent
do things in small chunks
do stuff that adds to the person you want to be
eliminate unimportant stuff
time management is a habit - start small
If I then eliminate the stuff that I think would be really beneficial to know, I get this:
do stuff that's important but not urgent
do stuff that adds to the person you want to be
eliminate unimportant stuff
time management is a habit - start small
Those are four principles of time management that I think are really important to know. But four is still too many - if I were forced to choose only the most important thing, then what would it be?
Only do stuff that adds to the person you want to be.
So, I didn't know that before I did this exercise. For me, the purpose behind time management is to help you live the life you want to live, and to help you be the person you want to be. Now, discussing that idea any further would be irrelevant to this post but it's a good illustration of this principle.
***
The chapter on Simplicity goes into more detail about how to achieve short, profound, essential statements of your idea. It talks about relating your idea to concepts your audience is already familiar with, and with using analogies (especially analogies that allow the audience to extrapolate a lot of information from them).
The whole chapter is a worthwhile read, but essentially it emphasises again and again the reason why we should aim for simplicity: when people remember the core of your idea, they know what's important. They know what to focus on in any given situation. Knowing the core allows them to make good choices under pressure.
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