We can engage people’s curiosity over a long period of time by systematically “opening gaps” in their knowledge—and then filling those gaps.

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?

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.

The lesson for the rest of us is that if we want to make people care, we’ve got to tap into the things they care about. When everybody taps into the same thing, an arms race emerges. To avoid it, we’ve either got to shift onto new turf, as Thompson did, or find associations that are distinctive for our ideas.

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.