Made to Stick

CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

Reviewed by Todd

Ideas are slippery. Yet each day, we are called upon to communicate our ideas to others—to our employees, our clients, our spouses, our children. Often the words and images used to communicate ideas fade, and with them the ideas’ intent, as our listeners’ brains filter the endless stream of fact and opinion, notion and conclusion. The challenge lies in how to get your idea not to slip, but to stick.

Your childhood home, Kennedy’s challenge to put humans on the moon, a moral lesson from one of Aesop’s Fables. Each of these ideas possesses identifiable qualities that make it stick in our memories. Chip Heath, a professor at Stanford, has been intrigued for over a decade by the phenomenon of how many bad ideas gain traction, many in the form of urban myths. Dan Heath cofounded a company that produces video-based textbooks, and he found while working with some of the most-loved professors in the country that they used almost identical teaching methodologies. The two brothers brought together their interests, theories, and experiences to write Made to Stick, a book that will help anyone with a message make it memorable and effective. Dan and Chip lay out six key principles of sticky ideas: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotion, and stories.

Human memory excels at remembering identifiable “things” like one-room apartments or midcentury ranch houses. Concreteness trumps the abstract. This explains why it is easy to remember your childhood home. We also care about events from our childhood, associating birthday parties and broken bones with the places where they happened. Those emotions trigger strong memories and make them even stickier. Concreteness and emotion are hallmarks of a sticky idea.

Chip and Dan use President John F. Kennedy’s State of the Union speech in 1961 to illustrate another principle of stickiness: unexpectedness. Kennedy covered most of what was expected for that era: the Cold War, NATO, and civil defense. The speech’s conclusion, though, changed the course of American history. He declared, “This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth. . . .” The declaration was unexpected, and the call for serious space exploration caught the attention of the American public. More important, the challenge created a “knowledge gap,” as a nation asked itself how it would do that. That curiosity—the gap between what we know and what we want to know—is what propelled the United States to put Neil Armstrong on the moon in 1969.

Proverbs are the quintessential sticky ideas. The proverb “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” is full of concreteness in its reference to clearly understandable objects. A complex philosophical idea with wide applicability is communicated simply, with no wasted words. A similar sentiment can be found in Spanish, Polish, and medieval Latin. This idea appears to have originated in Aesop’s “The Hawk and the Nightingale,” written in 570 BC. Now, that is a sticky idea.

“We wanted to take apart sticky ideas— both natural and created—and figure out what made them stick.”

Like all great books, business or otherwise, stories are the backbone of Made to Stick. They bring ideas—both the Heath brothers’ and ours—to life. Stories, the authors say, act as flight simulators for the mind. Xerox repairmen frequently share stories with their cohorts over lunch. What at first might look like the sharing of gripes among coworkers is actually a rich learning environment. As each repairman tells his tale of some unexpected machine malfunction, the other lunchmates visualize those same problems, preparing themselves for a future encounter. These Xerox technicians’ tales contain most of the Heaths’ principles of stickiness. In each, you’ll find concrete descriptions of copier components, unexpected problems, and emotional frustration. The trick is keeping the story simple enough that it retains its essence and its impact.

What do Fortune 500 CEOs and health-care workers in Africa have in common? Both have the formidable challenge of selling ideas to thousands of people. Whether communicating a strategic course correction or advocating healthy behaviors that can save lives, making their ideas sticky is what will make their efforts successful. It’s the same for teachers, tool-and-die makers, managers, marketers . . . and, well, you. Everybody is selling something (and I mean that in the most positive of terms). Made to Stick gives you the tools to find more traction for your ideas. TS

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Random House, Hardcover 2007, ISBN 9781400064281

WHERE TO NEXT? Here for the Heaths’ inspiration Here for becoming top of mind Here to get people talking | EVEN MORE: Words That Work by Frank Lutz; Story by Robert McKee; Start-up by Jerry Kaplan