Made to Stick
Made to Stick describes why an idea cuts through, gets remembered and most importantly, helps to shift attitude and behavior. The authors focus on the key strategies that help shape an idea into one that can stick. The authors use a clever mnemonic as an illustration: S.U.C.C.E.Ss which stands for Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories. The principles that make up S.U.C.C.E.Ss increase the odds that your idea and message will stick. Every idea to be communicated must be focused (Simple), create attention (Unexpected), be understood and remembered (Concrete), be agreed upon (Credible), make people care enough ( Emotion) and then do something about it (Story).
Made to Stick provides strategies and techniques to overcome what the Heath brothers refer to as the enemy to stickiness, the “curse of knowledge.” The presenter of the idea is completely familiar with it while the audience is not. This situation can lead to the presenter poorly explaining core information necessary to make the idea hit home.
SIMPLICITY: Simple ideas are remembered easily. With this in mind, you must find the core of the idea, strip to its simplest form so it becomes easy to digest. With that said, you must take caution to not minimize it and thereby lessen its importance. Next, you share your idea effectively using the S.U.C.C.E.Ss principles. Schemas can also help simplify concepts. As an example, it is difficult to remember the letters JFKFBI, but easy to retain the same set arranged as JFK FBI.
UNEXPECTED: The first requirement of effective communication is getting attention and, second, keeping it. To get a message across, you need to capture their attention. Sticky ideas disrupt people’s expectations. Furthermore, you need to maintain focus and use the element of surprise to create attention and interest. In order to do this, you use the unexpected. Humans tend to think in patterns. Therefore, the key is to break the pattern. As an example, think about a flight attendant doing something different and unique with the normally mundane flight safety announcement.
The process of using the unexpected is:
- Find the core
- Figure out what is counter intuitive about the message
- Communicate your message in a way that disrupts your audience’s ability to guess what’s coming next.
CONCRETE: We relate to things that are comfortable and because of that, we understand it, visualize it then link it to our personal life. The better this connection is, the better odds of it being sticky. The Heath brothers also say that our memory works using “hooks”. The more hooks your message has, the more likely it will stick.
CREDIBLE: We often believe ideas when we can base them on authority. This is because we believe the problem of credibility is then easily solved. Credible focuses on how to create credibility when you don’t have an authority figure. This can be done in several ways, such as using anti-authority, statistics, concrete details, the Sinatra Test and the use of testable credentials.
EMOTIONAL: When the human emotion is touched, the receiver becomes more open to the message. Emotional components of stickiness focuses on the goal which is to make people care. Feelings inspire people to act but for people to take action, they have to care.
STORY: The key to making an idea sticky is to tell it as a story. One of the beautiful things about stories is that they allow you to bring the listener along with you. Stories are very good at preventing the curse of knowledge, as they force one to simplify and use concrete language. In fact, stories naturally meet other criteria of making ideas sticky: they are almost always concrete, they are often emotional and have good unexpected elements.
Each chapter of Made to Stick guides you through an essential element to make an idea stick.
THE BIG THREE – KEY POINTS
Key point 1: S.U.C.C.E.Ss is a set of principles that helps shape an idea into the one that will stick.
Key point 2: The fundamental requirement to make ideas stick is through stories, so don’t lecture…tell a story!
Key point 3: Emotions are a powerful influencer of thought and behavior.
One last thing…
“To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from “What information do I need to convey?” to “What questions do I want my audience to ask?”
― Chip and Dan Heath, Made to Stick