Summary of Made to Stick
… by Chip and Dan Heath:
Some messages stick, and others are forgotten. We need to figure out how to make our messages stick, since we have only one chance. Sticky messages have six features:
Simple
Unexpected
Concrete.
Credible
Emotional
Tell a story.
The curse of knowledge makes it hard for you as a communicator to understand how a listener will perceive your communication. It’s hard to un-learn what you know.
Simple
Strip the idea down to its core, eliminating nuance and multiple perspectives. This is hard because you want to do justice to a complex situation, but if you make five points, people will remember none. Teachers say that students writing a research paper feel compelled to share all the information they found, thinking more information is good.
Many of us are highly trained in complex fields like medicine or engineering, where a lot of detail is necessary in order to come up with the right answer. A software engineer who studied only for a month isn’t an effective software engineer. But when the time comes to communicate the answer, detail is your enemy, not your friend.
Unexpected
Surprise makes people pay attention. One way to generate surprise is breaking a pattern, like a car ad that ends in an accident and turns out to be a public safety message.
Another way is to create a mystery like, “What are Saturn’s rings made of? Some scientists think it’s dust, others think it’s ice, and a third group thinks it’s gas.” Then people will keep reading through the story till they get the answer. We love mysteries! They create a need for closure. Don’t just give out information. Create mystery, make the reader ask a question, and then answer it.
When we have a gap in our knowledge, we feel the need to fill it. But you need to open a gap in the reader’s mind first before filling it. Just giving them information won’t work.
Concrete
Proverbs that endure for millennia are concrete like “a bird in the hand”, not abstract like “A benefit you have is worth two you may have”.
Concreteness is a foundation for abstractness. Abstraction is only for experts. People remember concrete, easily visualised things like “bicycle”, not “justice”.
Credible
Authorities lend credibility.
Personal experience adds credibility. To warn basketball players about HIV, considering their sudden glamor and attractiveness to women, a group of female fans in revealing clothing were arranged to flirt with the players, and tell them the next morning that they (the women) are HIV-positive. The players could see for themselves how close they came.
Ideas can also have internal credibility independent of the source. One thing people look for is details. A story about a murder is more credible when it mentions a specific place where it happened.
Even if the detail is irrelevant: for example, in a custody case, to show that the mom doesn’t take care of the child, if you say that the mom sent her child to school with an untreated wound which the school nurse cleaned and in the process, spilled a chemical on her uniform, the spill is irrelevant to whether the mom is a good mom, but it increases credibility. Even irrelevant details can help.
Statistics add credibility, but make sure you look for statistics before you reach a conclusion, in order to reach the right conclusion, not to bolster a predetermined conclusion, which can be misleading.
Another source of credibility is “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” For example, if your company was asked to cater a dinner at the White House, it’s more than good enough to cater any other event.
Credibility is improved by testable claims — claims you ask the listener to test for themselves, like an ad that says a burger has more beef than its competitors.
Emotional
Asking people to donate saying 3 million Malawians are hungry is less effective than talking about Rokia, a 7-year girl from Malawi who goes hungry every day… The huge numbers made people feel their contribution can’t make a difference.
Priming people to think emotionally (“Which word comes to mind when you think of a baby?”) rather than analytically (“How far does an object moving 120 meters per second move in 15 seconds?”) before telling them about Rokia increases contributions. When you’re in an analytical frame of mind, you’re not in an emotional frame of mind.
Sell benefits, not features.
Sometimes appealing to identity works, such as by saying people like you don’t litter.
Stories
Stories are part entertainment, part information and part motivation to act.
Show, don’t tell.
Often it’s about spotting a story, not creating one.
Motivational stories come in a few forms:
Challenge: The protagonist faces a challenge formidable even to him, and overcomes it.
Connection: Helping people outside one’s group, bridging a social gap. The Good Samaritan story comes from the bible, where Samaritans and Jews were enemies, but a Samaritan still helped a Jew who may otherwise die beside a road.
Creativity: A breakthrough, or solving a longstanding problem.
Use each story when it’s appropriate, like a challenge story to inspire a team to accept a challenge and work harder.
Why tell a story to convey a message, when you could convey the message directly in the form of a logical argument? Because if you make a logical argument, you’re inviting the little voice in people’s head to judge, debate and criticise it. By telling a story, you’re giving the voice something to do, so that it doesn’t turn against you.
If you distil the essence of a story and present it, like “Don’t wait too long when problems are building up”, it sounds like common sense and will be ignored. A story conveying the same message will be remembered.
Corporate Communications
Companies focus a lot on communicating to customers, but little on communicating to employees.
Many corporate strategies are neither good nor bad, but inert — they don’t cause any action.
Executives communicate using abstractions like increasing shareholder value, because they understand what that means, having had experiences that increased or decreased shareholder value, but listeners don’t know what that means, and the curse of knowledge prevents executives from understanding this chasm.
Complex decisions paralyse people, even if some of the information is irrelevant to the decision. For example, given two good options A and B, some people choose A and others choose B, and hardly anyone choose neither. This makes sense — both A and B are better than nothing. But adding a third and bad option C paralyses many people, who choose neither A nor B. This is illogical — both A and B are better than nothing, but people face decision paralysis and can’t choose either.
Innovation requires experimentation and waste. If you’re too focused on efficiency, you kill innovation. You need a culture of innovation where some amount of goofing around and trying out random things for no reason is encouraged.
In addition to innovators, you need improvers: people who spot an idea, perhaps outside the company, that didn’t work out and improve it so that it does.
Culture tells employees what to prioritise (for example, customer happiness) over what (costs) so that people can act independently but in sync with the culture. The alternative — coming up with policies that cover every situation — doesn’t work, because you can’t, and even if you could, nobody will read a 1000-page book of rules.
What if a bad idea has become stuck and you want to unstick it? You can’t — you can only replace it with a better idea. During WW2, negative rumors spread about various groups like blacks, driving wedges between soldiers. The army wanted to stop this, but they could not say not to believe such rumors, because stick ideas can’t be un-stuck. So, the army put up posters showing Nazis spreading such rumors to dis-unite soldiers, replacing a bad idea with a good one. Then people reacted angrily to rumors questioning the loyalty of the person spreading the rumor.
Education
A professor simplified a complex digital signal processing course by asking what are the three things a student needs to know to succeed, and removing the rest.
Present new concepts by anchoring them to concepts people already know, like saying that the electrons orbit the nucleus like planets orbit the sun. Or how cars were initially presented as horseless carriages.
Conclusion
For an idea to stick, it must make the audience:
Pay attention
Understand and remember it
Agree and Believe
Care
Be able to act on it.
These match the features we discussed earlier:
Pay attention — unexpected
Understand and remember it — concrete
Agree and Believe — credible
Care — emotional
Be able to act on it — story