This is part of a multi-article series on the book Made to Stick.
It was 1961, and the United States was in the middle of the cold war. For years, the US had prided itself on being the most technically advanced nation in the world. But at that moment, Russia was beating them in the race to space.
In May of that year, President John F. Kennedy gave an address to congress, outlining how he felt America could maintain its leadership during the cold war. He requested funds for various strategic goals – everything from international aid to civil defense.
But he ended his address with a very unexpected statement:
I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
JFK’s idea – send a man to the moon and back in less than a decade – unified a nation and helped drive ten years of incredible scientific achievement.
Made to Stick
Why do some ideas stick while others refuse to catch on. That’s the subject of brothers Dan and Chip Heath’s book, Made to Stick.
When you share and market an idea, you’re really trying to get people to do five things:
- Pay attention
- Understand
- Agree
- Care
- Take action
If you take away any one of those ingredients, your idea has no impact. In Made to Stick, Dan and Chip identify six principles that many of the stickiest ideas share in common:
Simplicity. What is the core of the message? If you say many things, people don’t remember any of them. Sticky ideas need to be stripped down to their very core, without stripping away the meaning. You’re aiming for a proverb – not a sound bite!
Unexpectedness. If you want people to pay attention, you need to break peoples expectations. It’s human nature to ignore the expected and focus on the unexpected – it’s how we evolved.
It’s not enough to just get their attention, though. You need to keep it by maintaining their curiosity.
Concreteness. How often in the business world do you hear a mission statement or vision so abstract that it doesn’t make any sense? “Maximize shareholder value by leveraging resources to create critical advantage.” What does that even mean!?
If you want ideas to stick, they need to be concrete. Think, “Send a man to the moon and back in less than a decade.”
Credibility. In order to believe ideas, they need credibility. It’s not enough to cite statistics and numbers. Credibility is about putting data in context for people. Sometimes its even about providing a way for people to test it for themselves.
Emotions. To get people to care about ideas, they need to feel something. Statistics don’t elicit emotion. But stories do.
Stories. Stories help create emotion, but they also help elicit action. Memory functions a bit like velcro – the more hooks you create, the more likely an idea is to “stick.” Stories, packed with concrete details, create a lot of hooks. They also create a map for people to follow as they take action.
The stickiest ideas are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional stories.
How do you use these ideas?
In Made to Stick, Dan and Chip devote an entire chapter to each of these principles. I’m not going to rewrite the entire book, but I do want to explore a few of the principles in a bit more detail.
In future articles, I’m going to write about simplicity and unexpectedness in a bit more detail.
In the meantime, start crafting your ideas into simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional stories.
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