making your ideas stick: part 1. in made to stick, chip & dan heath introduced us to their...

Making Your Ideas Stick: Part 1

In Made to Stick, Chip & Dan Heath introduced us to their checklist of sticky principles

Simplicity

Unexpectedness

Concreteness

Credibility

Emotions

Stories

2Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, 2007

Simplicity

Unexpectedness

Concreteness

Credibility

Emotions

Stories

1. Simplicity

“If you say three things, you say nothing”


His point is that the minds are limited

• In overcommunicated environments, people are selective about the information they accept

• If there’s too much quantity and too little clarity, they simply ignore what you have to say and default to their incumbent positions

4

So a critical component of simplicity is that ideas must be compact

5

= On a bus

= In space

They’ve identified the core of their concept and expressed it effectively

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, 2007

Lets imagine for a moment that you were hired to design the sets for the movie Alien


Which of the following age categories accounts for the greatest % of breast cancer cases

• <40 years

• 40-50 years

• 51-60 years

• >60 years

7The Science of Fear, by Daniel Gardner, 2008

Which of the following age categories accounts for the greatest % of breast cancer cases

• <40 years

• 40-50 years

• 51-60 years

• >60 years

8

• <40 years

• 40-50 years

• 51-60 years

• >60 years

• <40 years 3.6%

• 40-50 years 12.4%

• 51-60 years 17%

• >60 years 67%

The Science of Fear, by Daniel Gardner, 2008

Why were Americans so wrong?

• A 2001 analysis of breast cancer articles in US magazines* revealed:

– 84% of women profiled in these articles were <50 years old

– Only 2.3% of women profiled in these articles were >70 years old

• Explanation:

– Selective exposure led to an error in our base rate assumptions

– Tragedy of young mothers prematurely leaving their children behind makes more compelling story

The Science of Fear, by Daniel Gardner, 2008

2. Unexpectedness

• The “Gap Theory” of curiosity

– Curiosity happens when we uncover a gap in our knowledge

– One important implication of this theory is that we need to open gaps before we can close them


Four ways to open gaps in our knowledge

1. Pose a question or puzzle that exposes such a gap

2. Point out that someone else knows something they don’t

3. Present them with situations that have unknown resolutions

4. We can challenge them to predict the outcome of an event


Emotion plays an important role in triggering our response to the unexpected

• Emotions like anger, fear and surprise have biological purposes

• Biological purpose of surprise is to jolt us to attention when our existing assumptions are proven wrong

• In these instances, surprise grabs our attention so we can repair our assumptions for the future


Attack on Pearl Harbor remains one of the most unexpected events in US history

13Seeing What Others Don’t, by Gary Klein 2013

3. Concreteness

• Abstraction makes it harder..

– to understand ideas

– to remember ideas

– to coordinate activities with others


Aesop was a master of concreteness

• His famous fables illustrate universal human shortcomings in the form of stories

• These universal truths are conceptual in nature

• Aesop makes them sticky by encoding them with concrete images

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A sample of Aesop’s work

Universal human truth

• Slow and steady wins the race u

• Don’t let greed drive unprofitable actions

• Don’t give false alarm u

Concrete image

• The tortoise and the hare u

• The goose that laid the golden eggs g

• The boy who cried wolf u

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Art Silverman is another master of concreteness

• Art worked at The Center for Science in Public Interest

• His organization conducted a nutritional analysis of movie popcorn from around the country

• US Department of Agriculture recommends that normal daily diet contain <20g of saturated fat

• Art found that average medium popcorn contained 37g of fat

• Art’s job was to make people care about that


Art’s First Instinct Was to Use a Bar Chart

18

20

37

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

Recommended DailyAllowance

Average Movie Popcorn

Sa

tura

ted

Fa

t (g

)

+85%


Art and his team eventually landed on something more concrete

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>


The story was an immediate sensation

• Featured on CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN

• Front pages of USA Today, LA Times, Wash. Post

• Late Night Talk Show hosts, Jay Leno & David Letterman, used it in their opening monologues

• The biggest movie chains all announced they would stop using coconut oil to pop their pop corn


Concreteness facilitates coordination

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Summary

• There are six principles that dictate why some ideas stick while others don’t

• The first is simplicity, sticky ideas must be compact but they must also capture the core of a concept and express it clearly

• The second is unexpectedness, sticky ideas capture attention by opening gaps in our knowledge and then filling those gaps we can repair our faulty assumptions

• The third is concreteness, while concrete ideas are easier to understand and remember than abstract ones, they also make it easier to coordinate activities

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