Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Dan Heath

  This conversation was about three weeks ago, and while John isn’t perfect every day, the ratio has reversed and he is consistently focused most every day.

  John couldn’t “see” his behavior, couldn’t understand why it needed to change, until he was confronted with a story that made him see things in a different way. Continual nagging didn’t change him—a story did. Stories have a unique power to engage and inspire. How can you harness that power to make your lessons stick?

  REMINDERS: “Story” concepts from the book that are useful for teachers: See the second paragraph of this section above. Also, stories as flight simulators (The Un-passive audience). The three kinds of inspiring stories (The Art of Spotting).

  The Curse of Knowledge

  Let’s not forget the villain of the book, the Curse of Knowledge, which says that once you know something, it’s hard to imagine not knowing it. And that, in turn, makes it harder for you to communicate clearly to a novice. It’s a tough problem to avoid—every year, you walk into class with another year’s worth of mental refinement under your belt. You’ve taught the same concepts every year, and every year your understanding gets sharper. If you’re a biology teacher, you simply can’t imagine anymore what it’s like to hear the word “mitosis” for the first time, or to lack the knowledge that the body is composed of cells. You can’t unlearn what you already know.

  That’s where these tools of stickiness can help. Stickiness is a second language of sorts. When you open your mouth to communicate, without thinking about what’s coming out of your mouth you’re speaking your native language: Expertese. But students don’t speak Expertese. They do speak Sticky, though. Everyone speaks Sticky. In a sense, it’s the universal language. The grammar of stickiness—simplicity, storytelling, learning through the senses—enables anyone to understand the ideas being communicated.

  What Sticks

  Making ideas stickier isn’t hard. It just takes a bit of time and focus. The six principles of stickiness that we’ve discussed can be used as a checklist—imagine the checklist written on a Post-it note, stuck to the side of your desk as you outline a lesson. “Okay, for tomorrow’s lesson I’ve got to compare sedimentary and igneous rock. How can I make this Simple? Do students have some knowledge I can anchor in? How can I make it Concrete? Can I get a sample of the kinds of rock to show them? How can I tell a Story? Can I find a story of an archaeologist who used knowledge of the rock layers to solve an interesting problem?” You get the idea.

  A group of teachers at the Loudon Academy of Science—Linda Gulden, Jennifer Lynn, and Dan Crowe—did exactly this in revising their oceanography unit. They weren’t happy with the way things had gone in the past, so they put a lot of energy into revamping it. Here’s the new lesson plan:

  In the first class, they start with a mystery: “Let’s say you put a message in a bottle, drive out to the coast, and throw it as far as you can into the ocean. Where will the bottle end up?” They let students make their guesses. (“The waves will bring it right back to shore.” “It’ll end up in Antarctica.” “It’ll sink.”) But they don’t provide an answer (since there isn’t a clear answer).

  Then they begin to explore this same mystery in a more dramatic form. Students read a fascinating article about a cargo ship that hit a severe storm in January 1992 and lost a container overboard, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The container broke apart and released its contents: 28,800 floating duckies, turtles, beavers, and frogs. Years later, we know where many of these animal floaties ended up. Many hundreds of them beached near Sitka, Alaska, about 2,200 miles away—some made it there within six months, some twelve years later. By tracing the paths that these rubber duckies swam, we learn a lot about the way ocean currents work.

  In other classes, the teachers help the kids do some hands-on experimentation. They set up tanks of water with different levels of salinity and different temperatures, and let them see how those variables change the water current. In essence, the students are able to create their own ocean currents.

  Finally, they pivot to the critical role that oceans play in global climate. They start with a question: What determines the weather of a city, like New York City? Inevitably, students say it depends on latitude—the closer to the equator the city is, the warmer it is, and the closer to the poles it is, the colder it is. There is much truth in that, but there are huge discrepancies: For instance, New York City and Madrid are at roughly the same latitude, but it snows every winter in New York City and it doesn’t snow in Madrid. What’s the difference? That opens the topic of how ocean currents influence climate.

  In closing, notice that these teachers have developed a teaching plan that uses all the elements of sticky ideas.

  Simple: Anchoring the students’ knowledge of weather (New York vs. Madrid).

  Unexpected: Where will the bottle end up? Where did the duckies end up? Why is Madrid’s weather different than New York’s?

  Concrete: The message in a bottle, the rubber duckies, the hands-on tanks of water, the mention of specific cities.

  Credible: See for yourself, using this tank, how temperature affects water current.

  Emotional: Think of the hope, mystery, and anxiety involved in tossing an important message into the sea and wondering where it will go.

  Story: The tale of thousands of rubber duckies that fell overboard—and the journey they took around the world.

  Our hats are off to these teachers. We hope we’ve reinforced what you’re doing that is already sticky, and that we’ve inspired you to try something new. May your ideas stick!

  III. UNSTICKING AN IDEA

  Since Made to Stick came out, many anxious people have asked us, “How do I unstick a sticky idea?” They want to unstick a rumor about their company or a false perception of a particular product. They want to unstick whispered mistruths about political candidates. Once, we were even asked, “How would you unstick Paris Hilton?”

  Our answer on that last one was a bit slow in coming. We finally admitted, “You can’t.” There’s no Goo Gone for ideas. Sticky ideas stick. There are millions of people who’ve come to follow, willingly or unwillingly, the antics of a party-girl heiress. There’s no magic sticky incantation that will make us divert our attention to alternative energy, or some other worthy topic. Our best advice, on the Paris Hilton matter, was: Just wait it out. As we age, the memories will fade, and perhaps those neurons will die off entirely. (With any luck, they’ll go before the “dress ourselves” neurons.)

  But the question—How do I unstick an idea?—nagged at us. So we dug into the relevant academic research. It was a long and frustrating search, because there’s not much research tackling this topic. But we did find one promising lead that was about sixty-five years old.

  During World War II, social scientists had a keen patriotic interest in rumor control. About two-thirds of the rumors during were “wedge-drivers,” accusations that provoked anger at various social groups (blacks, Jews, the Brits). These rumors were false and socially destructive, so the government wanted to fight back aggressively. One tactic that seemed to work against wedge-drivers was to redirect the anger and make people mad at the rumormongers. For instance, the rumor-control people would put up posters of Nazi spies spreading rumors to gullible dupes. This primed listeners to react angrily when someone spread a rumor: You’re undermining the American war effort by spreading Nazi untruths!

  At first, this work in wartime propaganda seemed pretty removed from the concerns of our readers, who want their ideas to stick in business or in school. But then it dawned on us: Trying to unstick an idea is a bad strategy. The World War II rumor-control people weren’t trying to unstick an idea. They were shifting the turf and propagating a different, competing idea. Instead of arguing that the rumors themselves were baseless, they argued: The Nazis are trying to trick you. Are you going to fall for that?

  This suggests that we shouldn’t try to unstick ideas. We should fight sticky with stickier, meet Scotch tape with duct
tape.

  For decades, McDonald’s fought rumors that it used earthworms as filler in its burgers. At first, the company tried to unstick the idea. In 1978, McDonald’s officials had denounced the rumors as “completely unfounded and unsubstantiated.” (Quotes taken from Newsweek via Snopes.com, the mecca of urban-legend debunking.) Guess which idea was stickier: “earthworms in your meat patties” or “unfounded and unsubstantiated”?

  By 1992, Ray Kroc, McDonald’s most famous CEO, had come up with a better approach. He said, “We couldn’t afford to grind worms into meat. Hamburger costs a dollar and a half a pound, and night crawlers cost six dollars!” That’s nice; Kroc is fighting sticky with sticky. Notice the elements of credibility (dollars per pound) and unexpectedness (We can’t afford to serve you earthworms). He might even have gone a step further and made a joke about it: “If someone ever tries to sell you a WormBurger, you should worry about them secretly filling it with beef.”

  Another case of fighting sticky with sticky came during the late 1990s, when e-mailed rumors about nasty computer viruses circulated constantly. According to these rumors, if you clicked the wrong link, or opened the wrong e-mail, you’d destroy your computer. One day, a young systems operator, fed up with the dozens of bogus warnings he received every day, wrote a parody of the rumors:

  Warning: if you receive an e-mail with “Goodtimes” in the subject line, DO NOT OPEN IT!!!!! Goodtimes will rewrite your hard drive. It will also scramble any disks that are even close to your computer. It will recalibrate your refrigerator’s coolness setting so all your ice cream goes melty. It will demagnetize the strips on your credit cards and use subspace field harmonics to scratch your CDs. It will give your ex your new phone number. It will mix Kool-Aid into your fish tank. It moves your car randomly around parking lots so you can’t find it.

  The parody became a viral hit, as popular as the rumors it mocked. Bill Ellis, a folklorist at Penn State Hazleton, has documented that, as this parody spread, the apocalyptic virus warnings faded away. The parody cleverly provided people with a schema of an overhyped warning. Afterward, if you received more e-mails that fit the schema—full of overheated language and dire warnings—you knew to laugh rather than get worried. The young systems operator fought a sticky idea with a stickier idea.

  But sometimes the best way to fight a sticky idea is not with a message at all, even a stickier one. Sometimes what you need is a sticky action. Consider the dawn of the automobile era. As described in Hayagreeva Rao’s book Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations, the gasoline-powered car was greeted, at first, with skepticism and outright fear. People called it a “devilish contraption.” It spawned rabid opposition. The Farmer’s Anti-Automobile Society of Pennsylvania, for example, demanded that cars traveling at night on country roads “must send up a rocket every mile, then wait ten minutes for the road to clear. If a driver sees a team of horses, he is to pull to one side of the road and cover his machine with a blanket or dust cover that has been painted to blend into the scenery.” One technologist of the time scoffed at the idea that gasoline engines would ever be widely adopted: “You can’t get people to sit on an explosion.”

  That’s a sticky idea: simple, concrete, emotional. If you were an entrepreneurial automaker, how would you combat it? Well, the dumb thing to do would be to try to “unstick it” with a message: Go ahead, try telling potential customers, “Don’t worry, you’re actually sitting on a contained explosion.” Oh, and all the top automotive authorities say your fears are “unfounded and unsubstantiated.”

  Auto enthusiasts chose to act. They created a series of “reliability races” in which automobile inventors would bring their autos together and have them compete on endurance, fuel economy, and hill-climbing ability. Reliability contests were one part product testing and one part festival. The first contest took place in 1895, and by 1912 they had been discontinued, because cars were an accepted social reality. What happened in between was that the automakers gave thousands of people the chance to see firsthand the promise of automobiles—to see that there was nothing to fear. (In fact, the acclaim Henry Ford received from his performance in the reliability contests enabled him to launch the Ford Motor Company in 1903.)

  Note that the auto enthusiasts didn’t try to argue their way out of the fears; they acted their way out. They chose a demonstration that was Unexpected (Until today I thought cars were dangerous and unreliable); Concrete (Did you see it take that hill?); Emotional (I can see myself becoming one of those liberated drivers); and Credible (I saw it all with my own eyes!).

  So how do you unstick an idea? First of all, be realistic. It took seventeen years for reliability races to establish public trust in the automobile. The rumor about earthworms in McDonald’s hamburgers still circulates in some places, despite Ray Kroc’s brilliant response. Sticky ideas endure, and, as we’ve seen in the book, that can be a great thing. It can also be a real nuisance if you’re working against a sticky idea that’s false.

  Our advice is simple: Fight sticky ideas with stickier ideas. We hope we’ve given you some useful tools for making your ideas sticky. And if you want to unstick Paris Hilton, maybe you should be looking for another fame-hungry heiress to take her place? (We’re not sure heiress races will do the trick.)

  MAKING IDEAS STICK: THE EASY REFERENCE GUIDE

  What Sticks?

  Kidney heist. Halloween candy. Movie popcorn.

  Sticky = understandable, memorable, and effective in changing thought or behavior.

  SIX PRINCIPLES: SUCCESS.

  SIMPLE UNEXPECTED CONCRETE CREDIBLE EMOTIONAL STORIES.

  THE VILLAIN: CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE. It’s hard to be a tapper. Creativity starts with templates: Beat the Curse with the SUCCESs checklist.

  1. Simple

  FIND THE CORE.

  Commander’s Intent. Determine the single most important thing: “THE low-fare airline.” Inverted pyramid: Don’t bury the lead. The pain of decision paralysis. Beat decision paralysis through relentless prioritization: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Clinic: Sun exposure. Names, names, names.

  SHARE THE CORE.

  Simple = core + compact. Proverbs: sound bites that are profound. Visual proverbs: The Palm Pilot wood block. How to pack a lot of punch into a compact communication: (1) Using what’s there: Tap into existing schemas. The pomelo. (2) Create a high concept pitch: “Die Hard on a bus.” (3) Use a generative analogy: Disney’s “cast members.”

  2. Unexpected

  GET ATTENTION: SURPRISE.

  The successful flight safety announcement. Break a pattern! Break people’s guessing machines (on a core issue). The surprise brow: a pause to collect information. Avoid gimmicky surprise—make it “postdictable.” “The Nordie who …” “There will be no school next Thursday.” Clinic: Too much on foreign aid?

  HOLD ATTENTION: INTEREST.

  Create a mystery: What are Saturn’s rings made of? Screenplays as models of generating curiosity. The Gap Theory of Curiosity: Highlight a knowledge gap. Use the news-teaser approach: “Which local restaurant has slime in the ice machine?” Clinic: Fund-raising. Priming the gap: How Roone Arledge made NCAA football interesting to nonfans. Hold long-term interest: the “pocketable radio” and the “man on the moon.”

  3. Concrete

  HELP PEOPLE UNDERSTAND AND REMEMBER.

  Write with the concreteness of a fable. (Sour grapes.) Make abstraction concrete: The Nature Conservancy’s landscapes as eco-celebrities. Provide a concrete context: Asian teachers’ approach to teaching math. Put people into the story: accounting class taught with a soap opera. Use the Velcro theory of memory: The more hooks in your idea, the better. Brown eyes, blue eyes: a simulation that “cured” racial prejudice.

  HELP PEOPLE COORDINATE.

  Engineers vs. manufacturers: Find common ground at a shared level of understanding. Set common goals in tangible terms: Our plane will land on Runway 4-22. Make it real: The Ferraris go to Disney World. Why concretene
ss helps: white things versus white things in your refrigerator. Create a turf where people can bring their knowledge to bear: The VC pitch and the maroon portfolio. Clinic: Oral Rehydration Therapy. Talk about people, not data: Hamburger Helper’s in-home visits and “Saddleback Sam.”

  4. Credible

  HELP PEOPLE BELIEVE.

  The Nobel-winning ulcer insight no one believed. Flesh-eating bananas.

  EXTERNAL CREDIBILITY. Authority and antiauthority. Pam Laffin, smoker.

  INTERNAL CREDIBILITY.

  Use convincing details. Jurors and the Darth Vader Toothbrush. The dancing seventy-three year old.