So, a good process for making your ideas stickier is: (1) Identify the central message you need to communicate—find the core; (2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message—i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally? (3) Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.

If we’re trying to persuade a skeptical audience to believe a new message, the reality is that we’re fighting an uphill battle against a lifetime of personal learning and social relationships. It would seem that there’s nothing much we can do to affect what people believe. But if we’re skeptical about our ability to affect belief, we merely have to look at naturally sticky ideas, because some of them persuade us to believe some pretty incredible things.

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

1. Pay attention

1. Understand and remember it

1. Agree/Believe

1. Care

1. Be able to act on it

The same goes when trying to get audiences to speak up. When making presentations or teaching complicated ideas, people often say things like “You don’t have any questions, do you?” But swapping that out for “What questions do you have?” will encourage more people to follow up if they don’t understand.

The question can be made even more potent if it allows for feelings and for the censored to be said (and, conversely, for the thinker to know that saying something is an option, not a requirement):

What more do you think, or feel, or want to say?