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…

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…

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.

Since the release of Made to Stick, we’ve had the chance to work with a lot of organizations, and we’ve been surprised to find that their external communications are usually far more sophisticated than their internal communications. Compare a typical customer with a typical employee. Companies spend millions trying to understand the Typical Customer. He is studied and analyzed. His whims are plotted and charted. Messages are laboriously tailored to his concerns and delivered to him via convenient media.

Meanwhile, the Typical Employee receives a bland (but cheerful) monthly e-mail newsletter, which an unlucky HR employee hacked together in ninety minutes.

We are being facetious, of course, but the trend is unmistakable: Customer communication is taken very seriously, and employee communication isn’t. And that’s a tremendous opportunity for organizational leaders. Employees need to understand what your organization stands for, where it’s headed, and what will make it successful. In other words, they need to be able to “talk strategy.” And if they can talk strategy back to you, you’ll benefit from insights that would otherwise be untapped and invisible.

Talking Strategy

A strategy is, at its core, a guide to behavior. It comes to life through its ability to influence thousands of decisions, both big and small, made by employees throughout an organization. A good strategy drives actions that differentiate the company and produce financial success. A bad strategy drives actions that lead to a less competitive, less differentiated position. A lot of strategies, though, are simply inert. Whether they are good or bad is impossible to determine, because they do not drive action. They may exist in pristine form in a PowerPoint document, or in a “strategic planning” binder, or in speeches made by top executives. But if they don’t manifest themselves in action they are inert, irrelevant. They’re academic.

It’s not a lack of effort or good intentions that renders a strategy inert. Every executive wants his team to understand. But there are three nasty barriers that make strategic communication more difficult. We’ll discuss them and offer suggestions for overcoming them.

Barrier 1: The Curse of Knowledge

If there’s one concept we wish we had emphasized more in Made to Stick, it’s the Curse of Knowledge. We see its effects everywhere. And, as in all the domains we discussed in the book, the Curse of Knowledge afflicts leaders when they try to communicate a strategy to the rest of an organization. It leads executives to talk about strategy as though they themselves were the audience. It tempts them to use language that is sweeping, high-level, and abstract: The most efficient manufacturer of semiconductors! The lowest-cost provider of stereo equipment! World-class customer service!...

Trader Joe’s describes its target customer as an “unemployed college professor who drives a very, very used Volvo.” The image is a simplification, obviously—at any given moment, there are probably zero of these “target customers” in Trader Joe’s. What the “unemployed college professor” image does for Trader Joe’s is this: It ensures that everyone in the organization has a common picture of the customer…

because they force us to use concrete language. For instance, FedEx has an award called the Purple Promise, which honors employees who keep FedEx’s delivery promise that packages will “absolutely, positively” arrive overnight. The Purple Promise award honors stories like these: In St. Vincent, a tractor-trailer accident blocked the main road going into the airport. Together, a driver and a ramp agent tried every possible alternate route to the airport, but they were stymied by traffic jams. Eventually, having run out of options, they struck out on foot, carrying every package the last mile to the airport, which ensured an on-time departure. In New York, after a delivery truck broke down and the replacement van was running late, the FedEx driver initially delivered a few packages on foot, but then, despairing of finishing her route on time, she managed to persuade a driver from a competitor to take her on her last few deliveries.

These are not just interesting stories. They are tangible demonstrations—in vivid, concrete, on-the-ground terms—of the company’s competitive advantage, which is to be the most reliable shipping company in the world. Like CHIFF, these stories can work to inform decisions across the organization. A top sales executive can use the New York story to convey, “This is how seriously we take reliability.” A new delivery driver can use the story as a guide to behavior: “My job is not to drive a route and go home at 5 P.M.; my job is to get packages delivered any way I can.” An operations person can use the story to make better decisions about maintenance contracts —for example, it’s worth negotiating for the fastest possible maintenance cycles on delivery trucks…

Both stories and concrete language help leaders dodge the Curse of Knowledge, and everyone in the organization benefits from a shared understanding of the strategy.

Barrier 2: Decision paralysis

Most people in an organization aren’t in charge of formulating strategy; they just have to understand the strategy and use it to make decisions. But many strategies aren’t concrete enough to resolve a well-established psychological bias called decision paralysis…

Barrier 3: Lack of a common language

In the classic 1950s models of communication, a “sender” communicates with a “receiver.” The metaphor suggests that the message passed is a kind of package—wrapped up on one side and unwrapped on the other. There is certainly a lot of communication that operates in this way—professors lecturing to their students, ministers preaching to their congregations, etc. Should strategic communication work this way? Absolutely not…

The scrappy Savings & Loans Credit Union, based in Adelaide, Australia, has developed a common strategic language. Internally, the company defines its strategy this way: “We don’t want to be first, but we sure as hell don’t want to be third.” The meaning: They want the company to be a fast-follower. They’ll stand back and let the first mover take the risk and grab the glory of innovation, then they’ll come in right behind and copy it, while making the copy crisper than the original. For instance, a competitor offered a credit card that paid part of its commission to an environmental group. The card was a flop, but meanwhile Savings & Loans had ginned up its own card affiliated with the local children’s hospital, which was an instant hit—proceeds from the card funded a $2.5 million renovation of the Emergency Department.

As Chip and Nancy put it, for people afflicted with component focus, “wholes are not the ‘sum of their parts,’ they are a function of one part.” The deeper a person’s expertise, the worse this narrow focus gets. Chip and Nancy show how “the curse of knowledge” accentuates the coordination troubles caused by component focus: Experts wrongly assume that—because a subject comes so easily to them after learning about it for years—what they know is obvious and can quickly be grasped by others. Experts unwittingly create coordination snafus by failing to pass along essential information to people in other positions and fields because they assume it is self-evident. Or, when they try to pass information along, experts provide explanations they believe are easy to understand but are incomprehensible to people who aren’t indoctrinated into their circle.

Behavioral scientists have conducted hundreds of studies about the differences between powerful and powerless words and phrases. We are especially smitten with research led by Jonah Berger at the University of Pennsylvania and by our Stanford colleague Jennifer Aaker. We draw mostly on their work to generate five tips about the kind of talk that provokes people to act, persist, and develop imaginative solutions.