Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Dan Heath

  The problem, of course, is that it’s impossible to transfer an edifice in a ninety-minute presentation. The best you can do is convey some building blocks. But you can’t pluck building blocks from the roof, which is exactly what you’re doing with a recommendation like “Keep the lines of communication open.”

  Suppose you’re a manager at Nordstrom, addressing a conference of your peers. The final slide in your presentation might read, “Lessons from Nordstrom: In retail, outstanding customer service is a key source of competitive advantage.” While discussing your fourth slide you might have mentioned, as a humorous aside, the Nordie who gift-wrapped a present bought at Macy’s. These jokers from Klein’s firm want to keep your gift-wrapping story but drop your punch line. And they’re absolutely right.

  In the “Simple” and “Unexpected” chapters, we said that good messages must move from common sense to uncommon sense. In contrast, there’s nothing but common sense in recommendations such as “Keep the lines of communication open” and “Don’t wait too long when problems are building up.” (Klein comments that these lessons are presumably designed for people who would rather close lines of communication and sit around when they’re facing a daunting problem.)

  Once again, the Curse of Knowledge has bewitched these presenters. When they share their lessons—“Keep the lines of communication open”—they’re hearing a song, filled with passion and emotion, inside their heads. They’re remembering the experiences that taught them those lessons—the struggles, the political battles, the missteps, the pain. They are tapping. But they forget that the audience can’t hear the same tune they hear.

  Stories can almost single-handedly defeat the Curse of Knowledge. In fact, they naturally embody most of the SUCCESs framework. Stories are almost always Concrete. Most of them have Emotional and Unexpected elements. The hardest part of using stories effectively is making sure that they’re Simple—that they reflect your core message. It’s not enough to tell a great story; the story has to reflect your agenda. You don’t want a general lining up his troops before battle to tell a Connection plot story.

  Stories have the amazing dual power to simulate and to inspire. And most of the time we don’t even have to use much creativity to harness these powers—we just need to be ready to spot the good ones that life generates every day.

  WHAT STICKS

  Sometimes ideas stick despite our best efforts to stop them. In 1946, Leo Durocher was the coach of the Dodgers. His club was leading the National League, while the team’s traditional archrival, the New York Giants, was languishing in the bottom of the standings.

  During a game between the Dodgers and the Giants, Durocher was mocking the Giants in front of a group of sportswriters. One of the sportswriters teased Durocher, “Why don’t you be a nice guy for a change?” Durocher pointed at the Giants’ dugout and said, “Nice guys! Look over there. Do you know a nicer guy than [Giants’ manager] Mel Ott? Or any of the other Giants? Why, they’re the nicest guys in the world! And where are they? In seventh place!”

  As recounted by Ralph Keyes in his book on misquotations, Nice Guys Finish Seventh, the metamorphosis of Durocher’s quote began a year later. The Baseball Digest quoted Durocher as saying, “Nice guys finish in last place in the second division.” Before long, as his quip was passed along from one person to another, it evolved, becoming simpler and more universal, until it emerged as a cynical comment on life: “Nice guys finish last.” No more reference to the Giants, no more reference to seventh place—in fact, no more reference to baseball at all. Nice guys finish last.

  This quote, polished by the marketplace of ideas, irked Durocher. For years, he denied saying the phrase (and, of course, he was right), but eventually he gave up. Nice Guys Finish Last was the title of his autobiography.

  One of the most famous misquotations of all time is attributed to the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” This seems hard to believe—the quote is perfectly suited to our schema of Holmes. In fact, if you asked someone to name one Sherlock Holmes quote, this would be it. His most famous quote is the one he never said.

  Why did this nonexistent quote stick? It’s not hard to imagine what must have happened. Holmes frequently said, “My dear Watson,” and he often said, “Elementary.” A natural mistake, for someone inclined to quote from a Holmes mystery, would be to combine the two. And, like an adaptive biological mutation, the newly combined quote was such an improvement that it couldn’t help but spread. This four-word quotation, after all, contains the essence of Holmes: the brilliant detective never too busy to condescend to his faithful sidekick.

  In the “Simple” chapter, we told the story of the 1992 Clinton campaign and Carville’s famous proverb, “It’s the economy, stupid.” We mentioned that this proverb was one of three phrases that Carville wrote on a whiteboard. Here’s a trivia question: What were the other two?

  The other two phrases were “Change vs. more of the same” and “Don’t forget health care.” Those phrases didn’t stick. So should Carville have been pleased with the success of “It’s the economy, stupid” as an idea? On the one hand, his phrase resonated so strongly that it became a powerful tool in framing the election. On the other hand, he got only one third of his message across!

  We bring up these examples because, in making ideas stick, the audience gets a vote. The audience may change the meaning of your idea, as happened with Durocher. The audience may actually improve your idea, as was the case with Sherlock Holmes. Or the audience may retain some of your ideas and jettison others, as with Carville.

  All of us tend to have a lot of “idea pride.” We want our message to endure in the form we designed. Durocher’s response, when the audience shaped his idea, was to deny, deny, deny … then eventually accept.

  The question we have to ask ourselves in any situation is this: Is the audience’s version of my message still core? In Chapter 1 (“Simple”), we discussed the importance of focusing on core messages—honing in on the most important truths that we need to communicate. If the world takes our ideas and changes them—or accepts some and discards others—all we need to decide is whether the mutated versions are still core. If they are—as with “It’s the economy, stupid”—then we should humbly embrace the audience’s judgment. Ultimately, the test of our success as idea creators isn’t whether people mimic our exact words, it’s whether we achieve our goals.

  The Power of Spotting

  Carville, Durocher, and Arthur Conan Doyle were all creators of ideas. They produced ideas from scratch. But let’s not forget that it’s just as effective to spot sticky ideas as it is to create them.

  Think about Nordstrom. You can’t very well create from scratch a bunch of stories about sales reps cheerfully gift-wrapping presents from Macy’s. But when you come across a real story like that, you’ve got to be alert to the idea’s potential. And this isn’t as easy as it sounds.

  The barrier to idea-spotting is that we tend to process anecdotes differently than abstractions. If a Nordstrom manager is hit with an abstraction, such as “Increase customer satisfaction scores by 10 percent this quarter,” that abstraction kicks in the managerial mentality: How do we get there from here? But a story about a tire-chain-exchanging, cold-car-warming sales rep provokes a different way of thinking. It will likely be filed away with other kinds of day-to-day personal news—interesting but ultimately trivial, like the fact that John Robison shaved his head or James Schlueter showed up late seven days in a row. In some sense, there’s a wall in our minds separating the little picture—stories, for instance—from the big picture. Spotting requires us to tear down that wall.

  How do we tear down the wall? As a rough analogy, think about the way we buy gifts for loved ones. If we know that Christmas or a birthday is approaching, there’s a little nagging process that opens up in our minds, reminding us that “Dad is a gadget guy, so keep an eye out for cool gadgets.” It’s barely conscious, but if we happen upon a R
etractable Roto-Laser-Light on December 8, chances are we’ll immediately spot it as a possible fit for Dad.

  The analogy to the idea world is maintaining a deeply ingrained sense of the core message that we want to communicate. Just as we can put on Dad Gift Glasses, allowing us to view merchandise from his perspective, we can also put on Core Idea Glasses, allowing us to filter incoming ideas from that perspective. If you’re a Nordstrom manager, obsessed with improving customer service, this filter helps you spot the warming-cars episode as a symbol of perfection, rather than as an interesting anecdote.

  In the Introduction, we debunked the common assumption that you need natural creative genius to cook up a great idea. You don’t. But, beyond that, it’s crucial to realize that creation, period, is unnecessary.

  Think of the ideas in this book that were spotted rather than created: Nordies. Jared. The mystery of Saturn’s rings. Pam Laffin, the smoking antiauthority. The nurse who ignored the heart monitor, listened with her stethoscope, and saved the baby’s life. If you’re a great spotter, you’ll always trump a great creator. Why? Because the world will always produce more great ideas than any single individual, even the most creative one.

  The Speakers and the Stickers

  Each year in the second session of Chip’s “Making Ideas Stick” class at Stanford, the students participate in an exercise, a kind of testable credential to show what kinds of messages stick and don’t stick. The students are given some data from a government source on crime patterns in the United States. Half of them are asked to make a one-minute persuasive speech to convince their peers that nonviolent crime is a serious problem in this country. The other half are asked to take the position that it’s not particularly serious.

  Stanford students, as you’d expect, are smart. They also tend to be quick thinkers and good communicators. No one in the room ever gives a poor speech.

  The students divide into small groups and each one gives a one-minute speech while the others listen. After each speech, the listeners rate the speaker: How impressive was the delivery? How persuasive?

  What happens, invariably, is that the most polished speakers get the highest ratings. Students who are poised, smooth, and charismatic are rated at the top of the class. No surprise, right? Good speakers score well in speaking contests.

  The surprise comes next. The exercise appears to be over; in fact, Chip often plays a brief Monty Python clip to kill a few minutes and distract the students. Then, abruptly, he asks them to pull out a sheet of paper and write down, for each speaker they heard, every single idea that they remember.

  The students are flabbergasted at how little they remember. Keep in mind that only ten minutes have elapsed since the speeches were given. Nor was there a huge volume of information to begin with—at most, they’ve heard eight one-minute speeches. And yet the students are lucky to recall one or two ideas from each speaker’s presentation. Many draw a complete blank on some speeches—unable to remember a single concept.

  In the average one-minute speech, the typical student uses 2.5 statistics. Only one student in ten tells a story. Those are the speaking statistics. The “remembering” statistics, on the other hand, are almost a mirror image: When students are asked to recall the speeches, 63 percent remember the stories. Only 5 percent remember any individual statistic.

  Furthermore, almost no correlation emerges between “speaking talent” and the ability to make ideas stick. The people who were captivating speakers typically do no better than others in making their ideas stick. Foreign students—whose less-polished English often leaves them at the bottom of the speaking-skills rankings—are suddenly on a par with native speakers. The stars of stickiness are the students who made their case by telling stories, or by tapping into emotion, or by stressing a single point rather than ten. There is no question that a ringer—a student who came into the exercise having read this book—would squash the other students. A community college student for whom English is a second language could easily outperform unwitting Stanford graduate students.

  Why can’t these smart, talented speakers make their ideas stick? A few of the villains discussed in this book are implicated. The first villain is the natural tendency to bury the lead—to get lost in a sea of information. One of the worst things about knowing a lot, or having access to a lot of information, is that we’re tempted to share it all. High school teachers will tell you that when students write research papers they feel obligated to include every unearthed fact, as though the value were in the quantity of data amassed rather than in its pur pose or clarity. Stripping out information, in order to focus on the core, is not instinctual.

  The second villain is the tendency to focus on the presentation rather than on the message. Public speakers naturally want to appear composed, charismatic, and motivational. And, certainly, charisma will help a properly designed message stick better. But all the charisma in the world won’t save a dense, unfocused speech, as some Stanford students learn the hard way.

  More Villains

  There are two other key villains in the book that the Stanford students don’t have to wrestle with. The first is decision paralysis—the anxiety and irrationality that can emerge from excessive choice or ambiguous situations. Think about the students who missed both a fantastic lecture and a great film because they couldn’t decide which one was better, or how hard it was for Jeff Hawkins, the leader of the Palm Pilot development group, to get his team to focus on a few issues rather than on many.

  To beat decision paralysis, communicators have to do the hard work of finding the core. Lawyers must stress one or two points in their closing arguments, not ten. A teacher’s lesson plans may contain fifty concepts to share with her students, but in order to be effective that teacher must devote most of her efforts to making the most critical two or three stick. Managers must share proverbs—”Names, names, and names” or “THE low-fare airline”—that help employees wring decisions out of ambiguous situations.

  The archvillain of sticky ideas, as you know by now, is the Curse of Knowledge. The Stanford students didn’t face the Curse of Knowledge because the data on crime was brand-new to them—they were more akin to reporters trying to avoid burying the lead on a news story than to experts who have forgotten what it’s like not to know something.

  The Curse of Knowledge is a worthy adversary, because in some sense it’s inevitable. Getting a message across has two stages: the Answer stage and the Telling Others stage. In the Answer stage, you use your expertise to arrive at the idea that you want to share. Doctors study for a decade to be capable of giving the Answer. Business managers may deliberate for months to arrive at the Answer.

  Here’s the rub: The same factors that worked to your advantage in the Answer stage will backfire on you during the Telling Others stage. To get the Answer, you need expertise, but you can’t dissociate expertise from the Curse of Knowledge. You know things that others don’t know, and you can’t remember what it was like not to know those things. So when you get around to sharing the Answer, you’ll tend to communicate as if your audience were you.

  You’ll stress the scads of statistics that were pivotal in arriving at the Answer—and, like the Stanford students, you’ll find that no one remembers them afterward. You’ll share the punch line—the overarching truth that emerged from months of study and analysis—and, like the CEO who stresses “maximizing shareholder value” to his frontline employees, no one will have a clue how your punch line relates to the day-to-day work.

  There is a curious disconnect between the amount of time we invest in training people how to arrive at the Answer and the amount of time we invest in training them how to Tell Others. It’s easy to graduate from medical school or an MBA program without ever taking a class in communication. College professors take dozens of courses in their areas of expertise but none on how to teach. A lot of engineers would scoff at a training program about Telling Others.

  Business managers seem to believe that, once they’ve clicked th
rough a PowerPoint presentation showcasing their conclusions, they’ve successfully communicated their ideas. What they’ve done is share data. If they’re good speakers, they may even have created an enhanced sense, among their employees and peers, that they are “decisive” or “managerial” or “motivational.” But, like the Stanford students, the surprise will come when they realize that nothing they’ve said had impact. They’ve shared data, but they haven’t created ideas that are useful and lasting. Nothing stuck.

  Making an Idea Stick:

  The Communication Framework

  For an idea to stick, for it to be useful and lasting, it’s got to make the audience:

  Pay attention

  Understand and remember it

  Agree/Believe

  Care

  Be able to act on it

  This book could have been organized around these five steps, but there’s a reason they were reserved for the conclusion. The Curse of Knowledge can easily render this framework useless. When an expert asks, “Will people understand my idea?,” her answer will be Yes, because she herself understands. (“Of course, my people will understand ‘maximizing shareholder value!’ “) When an expert asks, “Will people care about this?,” her answer will be Yes, because she herself cares. Think of the Murray Dranoff Duo Piano people, who said, “We exist to protect, preserve, and promote the music of the duo piano.” They were shocked when that statement didn’t arouse the same passion in others that it did in them.

  The SUCCESs checklist is a substitute for the framework above, and its advantage is that it’s more tangible and less subject to the Curse of Knowledge. In fact, if you think back across the chapters you’ve read, you’ll notice that the framework matches up nicely: