Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Dan Heath

  JFK FBI NATO UPS NASA IRS

  Chances are you did much better the second time. Suddenly the letters meant something, which made them easier to remember. In Round 1, you were trying to remember raw data. In Round 2, you were remembering concepts: John F. Kennedy, the FBI, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, UPS, NASA, the IRS.

  But wait a second. Why is it easier to remember “John F. Kennedy” than the random letters F, J, K? Surely John F. Kennedy is a bigger bundle of information than the three random letters! Think of all the associations with JFK—politics, relationships, his assassination, and his famous family. If remembering was like weight lifting, it would be ridiculous to think we could “lift” JFK easier than three little letters!

  The secret, of course, is that we’re not “lifting” JFK. All the remembering work related to JFK has already been done. We’ve already built those muscles—the concept of JFK, and all its associations, is already embedded in our memories. What we’re remembering is simply a pointer to this information—we’re posting a little flag on the terrain of our memory. With the raw letters, we’re posting three separate flags. In the end, it’s one bit of information (or one flag) versus three, and it’s no surprise that one is easier to remember.

  So what? Is this just neat brain trivia? Here’s where we’re going: We’ve seen that compact ideas are stickier, but that compact ideas alone aren’t valuable—only ideas with profound compactness are valuable. So, to make a profound idea compact you’ve got to pack a lot of meaning into a little bit of messaging. And how do you do that? You use flags. You tap the existing memory terrain of your audience. You use what’s already there.

  The Pomelo Schema

  So far we have presented situations in which one simple idea, or a handful of simple ideas, were useful in guiding behavior. But, let’s face it, most people in the world do complicated things. It’s not our intention to argue that complicated things—law, medicine, construction, programming, teaching—can be pared down to two or three compact messages. We obviously can’t replace a school of architecture with a single compact idea (“Keep the building from falling down”).

  This leads us to an important issue that we haven’t discussed yet: How do you turn a freshman into an architect? How does complexity emerge from simplicity? We will argue that it is possible to create complexity through the artful use of simplicity. If simple ideas are staged and layered correctly, they can very quickly become complex.

  Let us teach you what a “pomelo” is. (If you already know what a pomelo is, be a good sport and feign ignorance.) Here is one way that we can explain to you what a pomelo is:

  EXPLANATION 1: A pomelo is the largest citrus fruit. The rind is very thick but soft and easy to peel away. The resulting fruit has a light yellow to coral pink flesh and can vary from juicy to slightly dry and from seductively spicy-sweet to tangy and tart.

  Quick question: Based on this explanation, if you mixed pomelo juice half and half with orange juice, would it taste good? You might make a guess, but the answer is probably a bit ambiguous. Let’s move on to an alternative explanation:

  EXPLANATION 2: A pomelo is basically a supersized grapefruit with a very thick and soft rind.

  Explanation 2 sticks a flag on a concept that you already know: a grapefruit. When we tell you that a pomelo is like a grapefruit, you call up a mental image of a grapefruit. Then we tell you what to change about it: It’s “supersized.” Your visualized grapefruit grows accordingly.

  We’ve made it easier for you to learn a new concept by tying it to a concept that you already know. In this case, the concept is “grapefruit.” “Grapefruit” is a schema that you already have. (“Schema” is a bit of technical jargon from psychology, but it’s so useful that we think it’s worth carrying through the book.)

  Psychologists define schema as a collection of generic properties of a concept or category. Schemas consist of lots of prerecorded information stored in our memories. If someone tells you that she saw a great new sports car, a picture immediately springs to mind, filled with generic properties. You know what “sports cars” are like. You picture something small and two-door, with a convertible top perhaps. If the car in your picture moves, it moves fast. Its color is almost certainly red. Similarly, your schema of “grapefruit” also contains a cluster of generic properties: yellow-pink color, tart flavor, softball-sized, and so on.

  By calling up your grapefruit schema, we were able to teach you the concept of pomelo much faster than if we had mechanically listed all the attributes of a pomelo. Note, too, that it’s easier to answer the question about the blend of pomelo and orange juice. You know that grapefruit juice blends well with OJ, so the pomelo schema inherits this property from the grapefruit schema. (By the way, to be complete, Explanation 1 is itself full of schemas. “Citrus fruit” is a schema, “rind” is a schema, and “tangy” is a schema. Explanation 2 is easier to parse only because “grapefruit” is a higher-level schema—a schema composed of other schemas.)

  By using schemas, Explanation 2 improves both our comprehension and our memory. Let’s think about the two definitions of “pomelo” in terms of the inverted pyramid structure. What’s the lead? Well, with Explanation 1 the lead is: citrus fruit. After the lead, there is no clear hierarchy; depending on what catches people’s attention, they might remember the rind info (“very thick but soft and easy to peel away”) or the color info (“light yellow to coral pink”) or the juiciness info or the taste info.

  With Explanation 2, the lead is: grapefruit-like. The second paragraph is: supersized. The third paragraph is: very thick and soft rind.

  Six months from now, people will remember—at best!—the lead of our story. That means that with one story they’d remember “fruit” or “citrus fruit.” With the other story they’d remember “grapefruit.” The second story is clearly better—it isn’t a judgment call.

  This concludes what will probably be the last psychological discussion of citrus fruit you’ll ever encounter. But though the concept of “pomelo” may not be worth the neurons you just burned on it, the underlying concept—that schemas enable profound simplicity—is critical.

  Good teachers intuitively use lots of schemas. Economics teachers, for instance, start with compact, stripped-down examples that can be understood by students who have no preexisting economics schemas. “Let’s say that you grow apples and I grow oranges. We’re the only two people around. Let’s also say that we’d prefer to eat some of both fruits rather than all of either. Should we trade? If so, how do we go about doing it?”

  Students are initially taught how trade works in this simplified context. This knowledge, in turn, becomes a basic trade schema for them. Once learned, this schema can be called up and stretched along some dimension. For example, what happens if you suddenly get better at growing apples? Do we still trade the same way we did before? To solve this problem, we’re calling up a schema and adapting it, just as we did in making a pomelo out of our grapefruit schema.

  Complexity from Simplicity

  Schemas help us create complex messages from simple materials. In school, lots of science courses are taught by clever uses of schemas. Introductory physics deals with simple, idealized situations: pulleys, inclines, objects moving at constant rates along frictionless paths. As students become familiar with the “pulley” schema, it can be stretched in some way or merged with other schemas to solve more complicated problems.

  Another nice use of a schema is the solar system model of the atom, which many of us were taught as kids. This model posits that electrons orbit the nucleus, much as planets orbit the sun. This analogy gives students a quick, compact insight into how the atom works.

  The planetary analogy also provides an insight into the reason that many people avoid compact schemas (“a supersized grapefruit”) in favor of exhaustive description (“a citrus fruit with a soft, thick rind, blah blah blah …”). The use of schemas can sometimes involve a somewhat slower route to the “real truth.” For i
nstance, physicists now know that electrons don’t orbit the nucleus the way that planets do. In reality, electrons move in “probability clouds.” So what do you tell a sixth grader? Do you talk about the motion of planets, which is easy to understand and nudges you closer to the truth? Or do you talk about “probability clouds,” which are impossible to understand but accurate?

  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.

  Herb Kelleher could tell a flight attendant that her goal is to “maximize shareholder value.” In some sense, this statement is more accurate and complete than that the goal is to be “THE low-fare airline.” After all, the proverb “THE low-fare airline” is clearly incomplete—Southwest could offer lower fares by eliminating aircraft maintenance, or by asking passengers to share napkins. Clearly, there are additional values (customer comfort, safety ratings) that refine Southwest’s core value of economy. The problem with “maximize shareholder value,” despite its accuracy, is that it doesn’t help the flight attendant decide whether to serve chicken salad. An accurate but useless idea is still useless.

  We discussed the Curse of Knowledge in the introduction—the difficulty of remembering what it was like not to know something. Accuracy to the point of uselessness is a symptom of the Curse of Knowledge. 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.

  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.

  Schemas in Hollywood:

  High-concept Pitches

  A great way to avoid useless accuracy, and to dodge the Curse of Knowledge, is to use analogies. Analogies derive their power from schemas: A pomelo is like a grapefruit. A good news story is structured like an inverted pyramid. Skin damage is like aging. Analogies make it possible to understand a compact message because they invoke concepts that you already know.

  A good analogy can wield a lot of power. In fact, in Hollywood $100 million movies can be green-lighted based largely on the strength of a one-sentence analogy.

  The average Hollywood studio considers hundreds of pitches or screenplays for every movie it makes. It may be hard to muster sympathy for the life of studio execs, but let’s try for a moment. Imagine the terrifying decisions they must make. When they invest in a movie, they are essentially betting millions of dollars—and their own reputations—on an intangible idea.

  Contrast a movie pitch with the blueprint for a home. If an architect creates a nifty blueprint for a home, and someone puts up the money for construction, you can feel pretty confident that, nine months later, you’ll have a home that realizes the architect’s original vision.

  A movie pitch, on the other hand, is destined to change. When a screenwriter is hired, the story will change. When a director is hired, the artistic feel of the movie will change. When stars are hired to play the parts, their personalities will change how we perceive the characters in the story. When producers are hired, the storytelling will become subject to financial and logistical constraints. And when the movie is completed, months or years later, the marketing team will need to find a way to explain the plot to the public in about thirty seconds—without giving away too much.

  Imagine investing millions in an idea that will change as it is filtered through the consciousness of a succession of individuals with giant egos: directors, stars, producers, marketers. That idea had better be good.

  In Hollywood, people use core ideas called “high-concept pitches.” You’ve probably heard some of them. Speed was “Die Hard on a bus.” 13 Going on 30 was “Big for girls.” Alien was “Jaws on a spaceship.”

  The high-concept pitches don’t always reference other movies. E.T., for instance, was pitched as “Lost alien befriends lonely boy to get home.” But a lot of pitches do invoke past movies. Why is that? Is it because Hollywood is full of cynical execs who shamelessly recycle old ideas?

  Well, yes, but that’s only part of the reason. The concept of the movie Speed, before it was pitched, obviously did not exist in the minds of the execs. It was like the word “pomelo,” before you knew what it meant. The compact, five-word phrase “Die Hard on a bus” pours a breathtaking amount of meaning into the previously nonexistent concept of Speed. To see this, think of all the important decisions you could make, just on the strength of those five words. Do you hire an action director or an indie director? Action. Do you budget $10 million for the movie or $100 million? $100 million. Big star or ensemble cast? Big star. Target a summer release or a Christmas release? Summer.

  As another example, imagine that you were just hired to be the production designer on the new film Alien. It will be your job to design the spaceship where most of the movie takes place. What does it look like? If you knew nothing at all about the movie, you might sensibly start by looking at old spaceship designs. For instance, think of the cool, immaculate interior of the Enterprise on Star Trek.

  Then your boss tells you that the vision for the movie is “Jaws on a spaceship.” That changes everything. Jaws was not cool or immaculate. Richard Dreyfus navigated around on a rickety old boat. Decisions were rushed, slapdash, claustrophobic, anxiety-ridden. The environment was sweaty. As you think about what made Jaws tick, your ideas start to take shape: The ship will be underdeveloped, dingy, and oppressive. The crew members will not wear bright Lycra uniforms. The rooms will not be well lit and lintless.

  High-concept pitches are Hollywood’s version of core proverbs. Like most proverbs, they tap the power of analogy. By invoking schemas that already exist (e.g., what the movie Jaws is like), the proverbs radically accelerate the learning process for people working on a brand-new movie.

  Obviously, a good pitch is not synonymous with a good movie. “Jaws on a spaceship” could have turned into a terrible movie if it weren’t for the contributions of hundreds of talented people over a period of years. On the other hand, a bad pitch—a bad proverb—is plenty to ruin a movie. No director could save “Terms of Endearment on a spaceship.”

  If high-concept pitches can have this power in the movie world—an environment filled with forty times the normal density of egos—we should feel confident that we can harness the same power in our own environments.

  Generative Analogies

  Some analogies are so useful that they don’t merely shed light on a concept, they actually become platforms for novel thinking. For example, the metaphor of the brain as a computer has been central to the insights generated by cognitive psychologists during the past fifty years. It’s easier to define how a computer works than to define how the brain works. For this reason it can be fruitful for psychologists to use various, well-understood aspects of a computer—such as memory, buffers, or processors—as inspiration to locate similar functions in the brain.

  Good metaphors are “generative.” The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate “new perceptions, explanations, and inventions.” Many simple sticky ideas are actually generative metaphors in disguise. For example, Disney calls its employees “cast members.” This metaphor of employees as cast members in a theatrical production is communicated consistently throughout the organization:

  Cast members don’t interview for a job, they audition for a role.

  When they are walking around the park, they are onstage.

  People visiting Disney are guests, not customers.

  Jobs are performances; uniforms are costumes.

  The theater metaphor is immensely useful for Disney employees. It is so useful that just by reading
the last few paragraphs you can probably predict how cast members should behave in situations we haven’t discussed. For instance, you can probably guess that employees are not allowed to be on break while in costume and in a public area. (An actor would never have a chat and a cigarette in mid-scene.) You might guess that street sweepers are evaluated on criteria other than the cleanliness of their sidewalks. Indeed, street sweepers are some of the most highly trained cast members, since their very visible public presence—coupled with the fact that they are clearly Disney employees—makes them an obvious target for customers’ questions about rides, parades, and restroom locations. Having them think of their role as performance, rather than maintenance, is a key part of the park’s success. “Employees as cast members” is a generative metaphor that has worked for Disney for more than fifty years.

  Contrast Disney with Subway. Like Disney, Subway has created a metaphor for its frontline employees. They are “sandwich artists.” This metaphor is the evil twin of Disney’s “cast members.” It is utterly useless as a guide to how the employee should act. Disney expects its cast members to behave like actors, but Subway does not expect its counter help to behave like artists. The defining trait of an “artist” is individual expression. We wonder how long an employee would last at Subway if she exhibited a lot of individual expression—in dress, in interaction, in the presentation of sandwiches. No doubt Subway’s sandwich artists are trusted to place a handful of onions on a twelve-inch sub, and it’s true that this is a certain kind of liberty. But one suspects that the counter person’s “artistry” can’t extend to adding an extra slice of turkey.