Made to Stick

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

Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions—they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images —ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors—because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.

Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves —a “try before you buy” philosophy for the world of ideas. When we’re trying to build a case for something, most of us instinctively grasp for hard numbers.

Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness. For instance, it’s difficult to get teenagers to quit smoking by instilling in them a fear of the consequences, but it’s easier to get them to quit by tapping into their resentment of the duplicity of Big Tobacco.

Most of these templates relate to the principle of unexpectedness. For example, the Extreme Consequences template points out unexpected consequences of a product attribute. One ad emphasizes the power of a car stereo system—when the stereo belts out a tune, a bridge starts oscillating to the music, and when the speakers are cranked up the bridge shimmies so hard that it nearly collapses. This same template also describes the famous World War II slogan devised by the Ad Council, a nonprofit organization that creates public-service campaigns for other nonprofits and government agencies: “Loose Lips Sink Ships.

The surprising lesson of this story: Highly creative ads are more predictable than uncreative ones. It’s like Tolstoy’s quote: “All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” All creative ads resemble one another, but each loser is uncreative in its own way.

So, in the 1980s the Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander’s Intent (CI).

CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plan’s goal, the desired end-state of an operation. At high levels of the Army, the CI may be relatively abstract: “Break the will of the enemy in the Southeast region.” At the tactical level, for colonels and captains, it is much more concrete: “My intent is to have Third Battalion on Hill 4305, to have the hill cleared of enemy, with only ineffective remnants remaining, so we can protect the flank of Third Brigade as they pass through the lines.”

The CI never specifies so much detail that it risks being rendered obsolete by unpredictable events. “You can lose the ability to execute the original plan, but you never lose the responsibility of executing the intent,” says Kolditz. In other words, if there’s one soldier left in the Third Battalion on Hill 4305, he’d better be doing something to protect the flank of the Third Brigade.

The Combat Maneuver Training Center, the unit in charge of military simulations, recommends that officers arrive at the Commander’s Intent by asking themselves two questions:

If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must _______________.

The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is _______________. “

The longtime newspaper writer Ed Cray, a professor of communications at the University of Southern California, has spent almost thirty years teaching journalism. He says, “The longer you work on a story, the more you can find yourself losing direction. No detail is too small. You just don’t know what your story is anymore.”

This problem of losing direction, of missing the central story, is so common that journalists have given it its own name: Burying the lead.

Two psychologists quibbled. Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir later published a paper proving that the “sure-thing principle” wasn’t always a sure thing. They uncovered situations where the mere existence of uncertainty seemed to alter how people made decisions—even when the uncertainty was irrelevant to the outcome, as with the businessman’s purchase.

If you don’t know whether you passed or failed, you … wait and see? This is not the way the “sure-thing principle” is supposed to behave. It’s as if our businessman had decided to wait until after the election to buy his property, despite being willing to make the purchase regardless of the outcome.

Tversky and Shafir’s study shows us that uncertainty—even irrelevant uncertainty—can paralyze us.

Simple messages are core and compact.

At one level, the idea of compactness is uncontroversial. Rarely will you get advice to make your communications lengthy and convoluted, unless you write interest-rate disclosures for a credit card company. We know that sentences are better than paragraphs. Two bullet points are better than five. Easy words are better than hard words. It’s a bandwidth issue: The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be.

But let’s be clear: Compactness alone isn’t enough. We could latch on to a compact message that isn’t core; in other words, a pithy slogan that doesn’t reflect our Commander’s Intent. Compact messages may be sticky, but that says nothing about their worth. We can imagine compact messages that are lies (“The earth is flat”), compact messages that are irrelevant (“Goats like sprouts”), and compact messages that are ill-advised (“Never let a day pass without a shoe purchase”).

For thousands of years, people have exchanged sound bites called proverbs. Proverbs are simple yet profound. Cervantes defined proverbs as “short sentences drawn from long experience.” Take the English-language proverb: “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” What’s the core? The core is a warning against giving up a sure thing for something speculative. The proverb is short and simple, yet it packs a big nugget of wisdom that is useful in many situations.

Compact ideas help people learn and remember a core message. But they may be even more important when it comes time to help people act properly, particularly in an environment where they have to make lots of choices.

There is a striking parallel between the development of the Palm Pilot and the Clinton campaign led by James Carville. In both cases, the teams were composed of people who were knowledgeable and passionate about their work. Both teams boasted plenty of people who had the capability and the desire to do a lot of different things—argue every issue and engineer every feature. Yet in both cases the team needed a simple reminder to fight the temptation to do too much. When you say three things, you say nothing. When your remote control has fifty buttons, you can’t change the channel anymore.

We’ve seen that compact ideas are stickier, but that compact ideas alone aren’t valuable—only ideas with profound compactness are valuable. So, to make a profound idea compact you’ve got to pack a lot of meaning into a little bit of messaging. And how do you do that? You use flags. You tap the existing memory terrain of your audience. You use what’s already there.

People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.

Some analogies are so useful that they don’t merely shed light on a concept, they actually become platforms for novel thinking. For example, the metaphor of the brain as a computer has been central to the insights generated by cognitive psychologists during the past fifty years. It’s easier to define how a computer works than to define how the brain works. For this reason it can be fruitful for psychologists to use various, well-understood aspects of a computer—such as memory, buffers, or processors —as inspiration to locate similar functions in the brain.

Good metaphors are “generative.” The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate “new perceptions, explanations, and inventions.” Many simple sticky ideas are actually generative metaphors in disguise. For example, Disney calls its employees “cast members.” This metaphor of employees as cast members in a theatrical production is communicated consistently throughout the organization:

• Cast members don’t interview for a job, they audition for a role.

• When they are walking around the park, they are onstage.

• People visiting Disney are guests, not customers.

• Jobs are performances; uniforms are costumes.

Generative metaphors and proverbs both derive their power from a clever substitution: They substitute something easy to think about for something difficult.

The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern. Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns. Consistent sensory stimulation makes us tune out: Think of the hum of an air conditioner, or traffic noise, or the smell of a candle, or the sight of a bookshelf. We may become consciously aware of these things only when something changes: The air conditioner shuts off. Your spouse rearranges the books.

Our brain is designed to be keenly aware of changes. Smart product designers are well aware of this tendency. They make sure that, when products require users to pay attention, something changes. Warning lights blink on and off because we would tune out a light that was constantly on. Old emergency sirens wailed in a two-note pattern, but modern sirens wail in a more complex pattern that’s even more attention-grabbing. Car alarms make diabolical use of our change sensitivity.

Our schemas are like guessing machines. Schemas help us predict what will happen and, consequently, how we should make decisions. The Enclave asks, “Didn’t see that coming?” No, we didn’t. Our guessing machines failed, which caused us to be surprised.

Emotions are elegantly tuned to help us deal with critical situations. They prepare us for different ways of acting and thinking. We’ve all heard that anger prepares us to fight and fear prepares us to flee. The linkages between emotion and behavior can be more subtle, though. For instance, a secondary effect of being angry, which was recently discovered by researchers, is that we become more certain of our judgments. When we’re angry, we know we’re right, as anyone who has been in a relationship can attest.

When our brows go up, it widens our eyes and gives us a broader field of vision—the surprise brow is our body’s way of forcing us to see more. We may also do a double take to make sure that we saw what we thought we saw. By way of contrast, when we’re angry our eyes narrow so that we can focus on a known problem. In addition to making our eyebrows rise, surprise causes our jaws to drop and our mouths to gape. We’re struck momentarily speechless. Our bodies temporarily stop moving and our muscles go slack. It’s as though our bodies want to ensure that we’re not talking or moving when we ought to be taking in new information.

Surprise makes us want to find an answer—to resolve the question of why we were surprised—and big surprises call for big answers. If we want to motivate people to pay attention, we should seize the power of big surprises.

Here is the bottom line for our everyday purposes: If you want your ideas to be stickier, you’ve got to break someone’s guessing machine and then fix it. But in surprising people, in breaking their guessing machines, how do we avoid gimmicky surprise, like the wolves? The easiest way to avoid gimmicky surprise and ensure that your unexpected ideas produce insight is to make sure you target an aspect of your audience’s guessing machines that relates to your core message. We’ve already seen a few examples of this strategy.

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.

The value of the stories does not come from unexpectedness in and of itself. The value comes from the perfect alignment between Nordstrom’s goals and the content of the stories. These stories could just as easily be destructive in another context.

It’s uncommon sense in the service of a core message.

As students sat in front of their manual typewriters, Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment. They would write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher reeled off the facts: “Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.”

The budding journalists sat at their typewriters and pecked away at the first lead of their careers. According to Ephron, she and most of the other students produced leads that reordered the facts and condensed them into a single sentence: “Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento … blah, blah, blah.”

The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly. Then he laid them aside and paused for a moment.

Finally, he said, “The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.’”

“It was a breathtaking moment,” Ephron recalls. “In that instant I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn’t enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered.” For the rest of the year, she says, every assignment had a secret—a hidden point that the students had to figure out in order to produce a good story.

We began this chapter with two questions: How do we get people’s attention? And how do we keep it? So far, most of our unexpected ideas represent relatively simple, quick adjustments to a model. They may be profound—as with Nora Ephron’s journalism teacher—but they happen rapidly, so they only need to get people’s attention for a short time. Sometimes, though, our messages are more complex. How do we get people to stick with us through a more complex message? How do we keep people’s attention?

Mystery is created not from an unexpected moment but from an unexpected journey. We know where we’re headed—we want to solve the mystery—but we’re not sure how we’ll get there.

One important implication of the gap theory is that we need to open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts. The trick to convincing people that they need our message, according to Loewenstein, is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they’re missing. We can pose a question or puzzle that confronts people with a gap in their knowledge. We can point out that someone else knows something they don’t. We can present them with situations that have unknown resolutions, such as elections, sports events, or mysteries. We can challenge them to predict an outcome (which creates two knowledge gaps—What will happen? and Was I right?).

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?

Some topics naturally highlight gaps in our knowledge. Human-interest stories are fascinating because we know what it’s like to be human—but we don’t know what it’s like to have certain dramatic experiences. How does it feel to win an Olympic medal? How does it feel to win the Lotto? How did it feel to be conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker (each of whom not only married but had ten children … which sparks several additional lines of questioning)?

How do you go about making viewers in College Station, Texas, care about the Michigan vs. Ohio State matchup? A twenty-nine-year-old named Roone Arledge, whose previous responsibilities primarily involved assigning crews to cover baseball, boxing, and football games, wrote a memo suggesting ways to improve the coverage of college football games.

Arledge saw ample room for improvement. Sportscasters typically set up their cameras, focused on the field, and waited for something to happen in front of them. They ignored everything else—the fans, the color, the pageantry. “It was like looking out on the Grand Canyon through a peephole in a door,” Arledge said.

The memo was three pages long. It discussed camera angles, impact shots, opening graphics. The heart of the memo, though, was a new way of engaging viewers who might not ordinarily care about a college game in Corvallis, Oregon. The trick, Arledge said, was to give people enough context about the game so that they’d start to care.

Arledge’s next assignment was to take over a series that was eventually renamed Wide World of Sports. The show introduced Americans to a variety of sports events they may never have seen before: the Tour de France, the Le Mans auto races, rodeo championships, ski races, and soccer matches. In covering these events, Arledge used the same philosophy he’d pioneered for the NCAA: Set the context and give people enough backstory that they start to care about the gaps in their knowledge. Who’s going to falter during the grueling twenty-four-hour Le Mans? Will the teacher turned barrel racer win the championship? What the heck is a yellow card?

Arledge died in 2002. During his career, he became the head of ABC Sports and later ABC News. He founded the Wide World of Sports, Monday Night Football, 20/20, and Nightline. He won thirty-six Emmys. The tool kit he developed for NCAA football stood the test of time. The way to get people to care is to provide context. Today that seems obvious, because these techniques have become ubiquitous. But this avalanche of context started because a twenty-nine-year-old wrote a memo about how to make college football more interesting.

But to prove that the knowledge gaps exist, it may be necessary to highlight some knowledge first. “Here’s what you know. Now here’s what you’re missing.” Alternatively, you can set context so people care what comes next. It’s no accident that mystery novelists and crossword-puzzle writers give us clues. When we feel that we’re close to the solution of a puzzle, curiosity takes over and propels us to the finish.

There is value in sequencing information—not dumping a stack of information on someone at once but dropping a clue, then another clue, then another. This method of communication resembles flirting more than lecturing.

Both create insight. Rather than leading us along a plodding route from one incremental step to the next, the ideas give us a sudden, dramatic glimpse of how the world might unfold. And not just how but why.

Both create knowledge gaps. Loewenstein, the author of the gap theory, says it’s important to remember that knowledge gaps are painful. “If people like curiosity, why do they work to resolve it?” he asks. “Why don’t they put mystery novels down before the last chapter, or turn off the television before the final inning of a close ball game?”

Both of these unexpected ideas set up big knowledge gaps—but not so big that they seemed insurmountable. Kennedy didn’t propose a “man on Mercury,” and Ibuka didn’t propose an “implantable radio.” Each goal was audacious and provocative, but not paralyzing. Any engineer who heard the “man on the moon” speech must have begun brainstorming immediately: “Well, first we’d need to solve this problem, then we’d need to develop this technology, then …

Unexpectedness, in the service of core principles, can have surprising longevity.

Clearly, Aesop was illustrating a universal human shortcoming. The fable would not have survived for more than 2,500 years if it didn’t reflect some profound truth about human nature. But there are many profound truths that have not seeped into the day-to-day language and thinking of dozens of cultures. This truth is especially sticky because of the way it was encoded. The concrete images evoked by the fable—the grapes, the fox, the dismissive comment about sour grapes—allowed its message to persist. One suspects that the life span of Aesop’s ideas would have been shorter if they’d been encoded as Aesop’s Helpful Suggestions—“Don’t be such a bitter jerk when you fail.

Even the most abstract business strategy must eventually show up in the tangible actions of human beings. It’s easier to understand those tangible actions than to understand an abstract strategy statement— just as it’s easier to understand a fox dissing some grapes than an abstract commentary about the human psyche.

Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in very different ways. Concreteness helps us avoid these problems. This is perhaps the most important lesson that Aesop can teach us.

For fifty years, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has helped protect environmentally precious areas in the world using the simplest possible method: It buys them. It buys land at market prices, making it off-limits to environmentally damaging uses, such as development or logging. This strategy has come to be known within TNC as “bucks and acres.” It had appeal to donors and benefactors, because the results of their gifts were so clear. A big gift bought a big piece of land. A small gift bought a small piece of land. As one donor commented, TNC produced “results you could walk around on.”

In 2002, Mike Sweeney, the COO of TNC California, was facing a big challenge. California is particularly important to TNC, because it contains so many environmentally critical areas. California is one of only five Mediterranean climate regions in the world. (The others are the fynbos of South Africa, the matorral of Chile, the kwongan of Australia, and, of course, the Mediterranean.) These Mediterranean climate zones occupy only 2 percent of the world’s landmass but host more than 20 percent of its plant species. If you want to buy environmentally precious land, Mediterranean climates give you a lot of bang for your buck.

In 2002, Sweeney and his staff had taken a map of California and colored in the most environmentally sensitive areas, the areas worth preserving. Astonishingly, 40 percent of the map was colored. This was a non-starter: There weren’t enough bucks out there to buy that many acres.

The students are wisely trying to find a way to break up a big, abstract goal into smaller, more concrete subgoals. This is the right idea. But in this case the numbers are just too big. And “acreage” is not necessarily the best way to think. There are 1,500-acre plots of land that are more environmentally precious than other 90,000-acre plots. Thinking about “acreage per year” is akin to a museum curator thinking about “canvases per year,” without regard to period, style, or painter.

TNC named the oak savanna the Mount Hamilton Wilderness (based on its highest peak, the site of a local observatory). Identifying the area as a coherent landscape and naming it put it on the map for local groups and policymakers. Before, Sweeney says, Silicon Valley groups wanted to protect important areas close to their homes, but they didn’t know where to start. “If you say, ‘There’s a really important area to the east of Silicon Valley,’ it’s just not exciting, because it’s not tangible. But when you say, ‘The Mount Hamilton Wilderness,’ their interest perks up.

This is not a story about land; it’s a story about abstraction. TNC avoided the trap of abstraction—saving 2 million acres per year—by converting abstract blobs on a map into tangible landscapes. TNC realized, wisely, that the context had grown more ambiguous, and the solutions had grown more ambiguous, but that their messages could not be allowed to grow more ambiguous. Concreteness is an indispensable component of sticky ideas.

Concrete language helps people, especially novices, understand new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert. If you’ve got to teach an idea to a room full of people, and you aren’t certain what they know, concreteness is the only safe language.

Using concreteness as a foundation for abstraction is not just good for mathematical instruction; it is a basic principle of understanding. Novices crave concreteness. Have you ever read an academic paper or a technical article or even a memo and found yourself so flummoxed by the fancy abstract language that you were crying out for an example?

Or maybe you’ve experienced the frustration of cooking from a recipe that was too abstract: “Cook until the mixture reaches a hearty consistency.” Huh? Just tell me how many minutes to stir! Show me a picture of what it looks like! After we’ve cooked the dish a few times, then the phrase “hearty consistency” might start to make sense. We build a sensory image of what that phrase represents. But the first time it’s as meaningless as 3 + 2 + 1 would be to a three-year-old.

This is how concreteness helps us understand—it helps us construct higher, more abstract insights on the building blocks of our existing knowledge and perceptions. Abstraction demands some concrete foundation. Trying to teach an abstract principle without concrete foundations is like trying to start a house by building a roof in the air.

Memory, then, is not like a single filing cabinet. It is more like Velcro. If you look at the two sides of Velcro material, you’ll see that one is covered with thousands of tiny hooks and the other is covered with thousands of tiny loops. When you press the two sides together, a huge number of hooks get snagged inside the loops, and that’s what causes Velcro to seal. Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory. Your childhood home has a gazillion hooks in your brain. A new credit card number has one, if it’s lucky.

Novices perceive concrete details as concrete details. Experts perceive concrete details as symbols of patterns and insights that they have learned through years of experience. And, because they are capable of seeing a higher level of insight, they naturally want to talk on a higher level. They want to talk about chess strategies, not about bishops moving diagonally.

The moral of this story is not to “dumb things down.” The manufacturing people faced complex problems and they needed smart answers. Rather, the moral of the story is to find a “universal language,” one that everyone speaks fluently. Inevitably, that universal language will be concrete.

HP, like many technology firms, generates great research in its laboratories, but that research isn’t always translated into tangible physical products. Researchers get excited about pushing the boundaries of a technology, making products that are complex and sophisticated, while customers generally seek out products that are easy and reliable. The desires of researchers and customers don’t always dovetail.

Marshall and Warren’s research contributed to an important theme in modern medicine: that bacteria and viruses cause more diseases than we would think. It is now known that cervical cancer is caused by the contagious human papillomavirus, or HPV. Certain types of heart disease have been linked to cytomegalovirus, a common virus that infects about two thirds of the population.

In the fall of 2005, Marshall and Warren received the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work. These two men had a brilliant, Nobel-worthy, world-changing insight. So why did Marshall have to poison himself to get people to believe him?

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.

An expert on folk legends, Jan Brunvand, says that legends “acquire a good deal of their credibility and effect from their localized details.”

A person’s knowledge of details is often a good proxy for her expertise. Think of how a history buff can quickly establish her credibility by telling an interesting Civil War anecdote. But concrete details don’t just lend credibility to the authorities who provide them; they lend credibility to the idea itself. The Civil War anecdote, with lots of interesting details, is credible in anyone’s telling. By making a claim tangible and concrete, details make it seem more real, more believable.

But even though the details shouldn’t have mattered, they did. Jurors who heard the favorable arguments with vivid details judged Mrs. Johnson to be a more suitable parent (5.8 out of 10) than did jurors who heard the unfavorable arguments with vivid details (4.3 out of 10). The details had a big impact.

We can take comfort, perhaps, in the fact that the swing wasn’t more dramatic. (If the mother’s fitness had dropped from eight to two, we might have had to worry a bit about our justice system.) But the jurors did make different judgments based on irrelevant vivid details. So why did the details make a difference? They boosted the credibility of the argument. If I can mentally see the Darth Vader toothbrush, it’s easier for me to picture the boy diligently brushing his teeth in the bathroom, which in turn reinforces the notion that Mrs. Johnson is a good mother.

This is the most important thing to remember about using statistics effectively. Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.

Humanizing the statistics gives the argument greater wallop.

When it comes to statistics, our best advice is to use them as input, not output. Use them to make up your mind on an issue. Don’t make up your mind and then go looking for the numbers to support yourself—that’s asking for temptation and trouble.

For an example that unites all three of the “internal credibility” sources— details, statistics, and the Sinatra Test—we can turn to Bill McDonough, an environmentalist known for helping companies improve both the environment and the bottom line.

Another example of testable credentials comes from Jim Thompson, the founder of the Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA). The mission of the PCA is to emphasize that youth sports should not be about winning at all costs; it should be about learning life lessons.

Observing their own behavior, the coaches learn the lesson—how they found it easier to criticize than to support, to think of ten clever insults rather than a single consolation. Thompson found a way to transform his point into a testable credential, something the coaches could experience for themselves.

In this chapter we’ve seen that the most obvious sources of credibility—external validation and statistics— aren’t always the best. A few vivid details might be more persuasive than a barrage of statistics. An anti-authority might work better than an authority. A single story that passes the Sinatra Test might overcome a mountain of skepticism. It’s inspirational to know that a medical genius like Marshall had to climb over the same hurdles with his idea as we’ll have to climb with ours—and to see that he eventually prevailed, to the benefit of us all.

The researchers theorized that thinking about statistics shifts people into a more analytical frame of mind. When people think analytically, they’re less likely to think emotionally. And the researchers believed it was people’s emotional response to Rokia’s plight that led them to act.

These results are shocking. The mere act of calculation reduced people’s charity. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.

Rather, the goal of making messages “emotional” is to make people care. Feelings inspire people to act.

The Truth campaign isn’t about rational decision-making; it’s about rebellion. And it made a lot of teens care enough to do something. In this case, that something was nothing.

The most basic way to make people care is to form an association between something they don’t yet care about and something they do care about.

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.

Because mail-order advertising is so transparent, it’s essentially a laboratory for assessing motivational appeals. What makes people care? Ask a direct-mail copywriter. And John Caples is often cited as the greatest copywriter of all time. He says, “First and foremost, try to get self-interest into every headline you write. Make your headline suggest to readers that here is something they want. This rule is so fundamental that it would seem obvious. Yet the rule is violated every day by scores of writers.

Caples says companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits. “The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments (the world’s best seed!) that they forget to tell us why we should buy (the world’s best lawn!).” An old advertising maxim says you’ve got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures.

So what’s the nonadvertising, nonschlocky takeaway from the Caples techniques? The first lesson is not to overlook self-interest. Jerry Weissman, a former TV producer and screenwriter who now coaches CEOs in how to deliver speeches, says that you shouldn’t dance around the appeal to self-interest. He says that the WIIFY—“what’s in it for you,” pronounced whiff-y—should be a central aspect of every speech.

This finding suggests that it may be the tangibility, rather than the magnitude, of the benefits that makes people care. You don’t have to promise riches and sex appeal and magnetic personalities. It may be enough to promise reasonable benefits that people can easily imagine themselves enjoying.

Lee realizes that serving food is a job, but improving morale is a mission. Improving morale involves creativity and experimentation and mastery. Serving food involves a ladle.

One of the soldiers who commute to Pegasus for Sunday dinner said, “The time you are in here, you forget you’re in Iraq.” Lee is tapping into Maslow’s forgotten categories—the Aesthetic, Learning, and Transcendence needs. In redefining the mission of his mess hall, he has inspired his co-workers to create an oasis in the desert.

The message of the campaign was Texans don’t litter. Notice that the celebrities are valuable only insofar as they can quickly establish the schema of “Texas”—or, more specifically, of “ideal, masculine Texans.” Even people who dislike Willie Nelson’s music can appreciate his quality of Texan-ness.

The campaign was an instant success. Within a few months of the launch, an astonishing 73 percent of Texans polled could recall the message and identify it as an antilitter message. Within one year, litter had declined 29 percent.

Don’t Mess with Texas,” as a phrase, is a great slogan. But we shouldn’t confuse the slogan with the idea. The idea was that Syrek could make Bubba care about litter by showing him that real Texans didn’t litter. The idea was that Bubba would respond to an identity appeal better than he would to a rational self-interest appeal. Even if a second-rate copywriter had been hired, and the slogan had been “Don’t Disrespect Texas,” the campaign would still have decreased cans on Texas highways.

So far we’ve looked at three strategies for making people care: using associations (or avoiding associations, as the case may be), appealing to self-interest, and appealing to identity. All three strategies can be effective, but we’ve got to watch out for our old nemesis, the Curse of Knowledge, which can interfere with our ability to implement them.

The reality is that they did in fact know better than anyone on earth why the duo piano was worth preserving. But the Curse of Knowledge prevented them from expressing it well. The mission to “preserve duo piano music” was effective and meaningful inside Murray Dranoff, but outside the organization it was opaque. Several attendees later commented that they had sympathized with the question “Why would the world be a less rich place if duo piano music disappeared completely?” What’s so special about the duo piano? Who cares?

If you come to work every day for years, focused on duo piano issues, it’s easy to forget that a lot of the world has never heard of the duo piano. It’s easy to forget that you’re the tapper and the world is the listener. The duo piano group was rescued from the Curse of Knowledge by a roomful of people relentlessly asking them, “Why?” By asking “Why?” three times, the duo piano group moved from talking about what they were doing to why they were doing it. They moved from a set of associations that had no power (except to someone who already knew duo piano music) to a set of deeper, more concrete associations that connected emotionally with outsiders.

This tactic of the “Three Whys” can be useful in bypassing the Curse of Knowledge. (Toyota actually has a “Five Whys” process for getting to the bottom of problems on its production line. Feel free to use as many “Whys” as you like.) Asking “Why?” helps to remind us of the core values, the core principles, that underlie our ideas.

IDEO also created role-playing exercises, putting the staffers in the patients’ shoes. The exercises included such tasks as, “Imagine that you are French and you are trying to locate your father in the hospital, but you don’t speak any English.” IDEO has become known for this type of simulation— simulations that drive employees to empathize with their customers. Time seems to erode empathy in some contexts, and IDEO’s simulations manage to restore the natural empathy that we have for others. “The world of business tends to emphasize the pattern over the particular,” Suri said. “The intellectual aspects of the pattern prevent people from caring.

This realization—that empathy emerges from the particular rather than the pattern—brings us back full circle to the Mother Teresa quote at the beginning of the chapter: “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

How can we make people care about our ideas? We get them to take off their Analytical Hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities—not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be.

This story was collected by Gary Klein, a psychologist who studies how people make decisions in high-pressure, high-stakes environments. He spends time with firefighters, air-traffic controllers, powerplant operators, and intensive-care workers. The story about the baby appears in a chapter called “The Power of Stories,” in Klein’s book Sources of Power.

The story’s power, then, is twofold: It provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act). Note that both benefits, simulation and inspiration, are geared to generating action. In the last few chapters, we’ve seen that a credible idea makes people believe. An emotional idea makes people care. And in this chapter we’ll see that the right stories make people act.

A second group of students, the “event-simulation” group, were kept in the lab. They were asked to mentally simulate how the problem had unfolded:

We would like you to visualize how this problem arose. Visualize the beginning of the problem, going over in detail the first incident…. Go over the incidents as they occurred step by step. Visualize the actions you took. Remember what you said, what you did. Visualize the environment, who was around, where you were.

Here’s the answer: The event-simulation group—the people who simulated how the events unfolded—did better on almost every dimension. Simulating past events is much more helpful than simulating future outcomes. In fact, the gap between the groups opened up immediately after the first session in the lab. By the first night, the event-simulation people were already experiencing a positive mood boost compared with the other two groups.

When the groups returned a week later, the event simulators’ advantage had grown wider. They were more likely to have taken specific action to solve their problems. They were more likely to have sought advice and support from others. They were more likely to report that they had learned something and grown.

You may find these results a bit counterintuitive, because the pop-psychology literature is full of gurus urging you to visualize success. It turns out that a positive mental attitude isn’t quite enough to get the job done. Maybe financial gurus shouldn’t be telling us to imagine that we’re filthy rich; instead, they should be telling us to replay the steps that led to our being poor.

Perhaps most surprisingly, mental simulation can also build skills. A review of thirty-five studies featuring 3,214 participants showed that mental practice alone—sitting quietly, without moving, and picturing yourself performing a task successfully from start to finish—improves performance significantly. The results were borne out over a large number of tasks: Mental simulation helped people weld better and throw darts better. Trombonists improved their playing, and competitive figure skaters improved their skating. Not surprisingly, mental practice is more effective when a task involves more mental activity (e.g., trombone playing) as opposed to physical activity (e.g., balancing), but the magnitude of gains from mental practice is large on average: Overall, mental practice alone produced about two thirds of the benefits of actual physical practice.

The takeaway is simple: Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something, but it’s the next best thing. And, to circle back to the world of sticky ideas, what we’re suggesting is that the right kind of story is, effectively, a simulation. Stories are like flight simulators for the brain. Hearing the nurse’s heart-monitor story isn’t like being there, but it’s the next best thing.

Inspiration drives action, as does simulation.

Aristotle believed there were four primary dramatic plots: Simple Tragic, Simple Fortunate, Complex Tragic, and Complex Fortunate. Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru, lists twenty-five types of stories in his book: the modern epic, the disillusionment plot, and so on. When we finished sorting through a big pile of inspirational stories—a much narrower domain—we came to the conclusion that there are three basic plots: the Challenge plot, the Connection plot, and the Creativity plot.

These three basic plots can be used to classify more than 80 percent of the stories that appear in the original Chicken Soup collection. Perhaps more surprisingly, they can also be used to classify more than 60 percent of the stories published by People magazine about people who aren’t celebrities. If an average person makes it into People, it’s usually because he or she has an inspiring story for the rest of us. If our goal is to energize and inspire others, these three plots are the right place to start. (By the way, if you’re a more jaded type of person who finds the Chicken Soup series treacly rather than inspirational, you’ll still find value in the three plot templates. You can always turn down the volume on the plots a bit.)

The story of David and Goliath is the classic Challenge plot. A protagonist overcomes a formidable challenge and succeeds. David fells a giant with his homemade slingshot. There are variations of the Challenge plot that we all recognize: the underdog story, the rags-to-riches story, the triumph of sheer willpower over adversity…

Challenge plots are inspiring even when they’re much less dramatic and historical than these examples. The Rose Blumkin story doesn’t involve a famous character. Challenge plots are inspiring in a defined way. They inspire us by appealing to our perseverance and courage. They make us want to work harder, take on new challenges, overcome obstacles. Somehow, after you’ve heard about Rose Blumkin postponing her one-hundredth birthday party until an evening when her store was closed, it’s easier to clean out your garage. Challenge plots inspire us to act.

THE CONNECTION PLOT…

The lesson of the story is clear: Good neighbors show mercy and compassion, and not just to people in their own group.

This is what a Connection plot is all about. It’s a story about people who develop a relationship that bridges a gap—racial, class, ethnic, religious, demographic, or otherwise. The Connection plot doesn’t have to deal with life-and-death stakes, as does the Good Samaritan. The connection can be as trivial as a bottle of a Coke, as in the famous Mean Joe Greene commercial. A scrawny young white fan encounters a towering famous black athlete. A bottle of Coke links them. It ain’t the Good Samaritan, but it’s clearly a Connection plot.

Connection plots are also fabulous for romance stories—think of Romeo and Juliet (or the top-grossing movie of all time, Titanic). All Connection plots inspire us in social ways. They make us want to help others, be more tolerant of others, work with others, love others. The Connection plot is the most common kind of plot found in the Chicken Soup series.

Where Challenge plots involve overcoming challenges, Connection plots are about our relationships with other people. If you’re telling a story at the company Christmas party, it’s probably best to use the Connection plot. If you’re telling a story at the kickoff party for a new project, go with the Challenge plot.

The third major type of inspirational story is the Creativity plot. The prototype might be the story of the apple that falls on Newton’s head, inspiring his theory of gravity. The Creativity plot involves someone making a mental breakthrough, solving a long-standing puzzle, or attacking a problem in an innovative way. It’s the MacGyver plot.

Ingersoll-Rand is a giant company that makes nonsexy products such as industrial grinders, used in auto shops to sand down auto bodies. Historically, Ingersoll-Rand had been slow at bringing new products to market. One employee, frustrated by the average four-year product life cycle, said, “It was taking us longer to introduce a new product than it took our nation to fight World War II.”

Ingersoll-Rand decided to do something about the slow development cycle. The company created a project team whose goal was to produce a new grinder in a year—one quarter the usual time. Standard theories of organizational culture would have predicted a slim chance of success. The grinder team, however, did a lot of things right, including the use of stories to emphasize the group’s new attitude and culture. One story, for instance, involved a critical decision about whether to build the new grinder’s casing out of plastic or metal. Plastic would be more comfortable for the customer, but would it hold up as well as metal?

The traditional Ingersoll-Rand method of solving this problem would have been to conduct protracted, careful studies of the tensile and compression properties of both materials. But this was the Grinder Team. They were supposed to act quickly. A few members of the team cooked up a less formal testing procedure. While on an off-site customer visit, the team members tied a sample of each material to the back bumper of their rental car, then drove around the parking lot with the materials dragging behind. They kept this up until the police came and told them to knock it off. The verdict was that the new plastic composite held up just as well as the traditional metal. Decision made.

In the history of the Grinder Team, this story has become known as the Drag Test. The Drag Test is a Creativity plot that reinforced the team’s new culture. The Drag Test implied, “We still need to get the right data to make decisions. We just need to do it a lot quicker.”

The famous explorer Ernest Shackleton faced such enormous odds in his explorations (obviously a classic Challenge plot) that unity among his men was mission-critical. A mutiny could leave everyone dead. Shackleton came up with a creative solution for dealing with the whiny, complaining types. He assigned them to sleep in his own tent. When people separated into groups to work on chores, he grouped the complainers with him. Through his constant presence, he minimized their negative influence. Creativity plots make us want to do something different, to be creative, to experiment with new approaches.

When the Jared article hits our desk, we want to spot the crucial elements immediately. Guy faces huge obstacles and overcomes them—it’s a Challenge plot. Challenge plots inspire people to take on challenges and work harder. If that feeling is consistent with the goal you want to achieve, run with the story; don’t tack it on the bulletin board.

If you’re running the Grinder Team, and you’re trying to reinvent the company culture, then you need to be on the lookout for Creativity plots. When you hear that some of your men dragged metal around a parking lot, you’ve found something.

Know what you’re looking for. You don’t need to make stuff up, you don’t need to exaggerate or be as melodramatic as the Chicken Soup tales. (The Drag Test isn’t melodramatic.) You just need to recognize when life is giving you a gift.

Stories can almost single-handedly defeat the Curse of Knowledge. In fact, they naturally embody most of the SUCCESs framework. Stories are almost always Concrete. Most of them have Emotional and Unexpected elements. The hardest part of using stories effectively is making sure that they’re Simple—that they reflect your core message. It’s not enough to tell a great story; the story has to reflect your agenda. You don’t want a general lining up his troops before battle to tell a Connection plot story.

Stories have the amazing dual power to simulate and to inspire. And most of the time we don’t even have to use much creativity to harness these powers—we just need to be ready to spot the good ones that life generates every day.

The barrier to idea-spotting is that we tend to process anecdotes differently than abstractions. If a Nordstrom manager is hit with an abstraction, such as “Increase customer satisfaction scores by 10 percent this quarter,” that abstraction kicks in the managerial mentality: How do we get there from here? But a story about a tire-chain-exchanging, cold-car-warming sales rep provokes a different way of thinking. It will likely be filed away with other kinds of day-today personal news—interesting but ultimately trivial, like the fact that John Robison shaved his head or James Schlueter showed up late seven days in a row. In some sense, there’s a wall in our minds separating the little picture—stories, for instance—from the big picture. Spotting requires us to tear down that wall.

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.

Why can’t these smart, talented speakers make their ideas stick? A few of the villains discussed in this book are implicated. The first villain is the natural tendency to bury the lead—to get lost in a sea of information. One of the worst things about knowing a lot, or having access to a lot of information, is that we’re tempted to share it all…

The second villain is the tendency to focus on the presentation rather than on the message. Public speakers naturally want to appear composed, charismatic, and motivational. And, certainly, charisma will help a properly designed message stick better. But all the charisma in the world won’t save a dense, unfocused speech, as some Stanford students learn the hard way.

The Curse of Knowledge is a worthy adversary, because in some sense it’s inevitable. Getting a message across has two stages: the Answer stage and the Telling Others stage. In the Answer stage, you use your expertise to arrive at the idea that you want to share. Doctors study for a decade to be capable of giving the Answer. Business managers may deliberate for months to arrive at the Answer.

Here’s the rub: The same factors that worked to your advantage in the Answer stage will backfire on you during the Telling Others stage. To get the Answer, you need expertise, but you can’t dissociate expertise from the Curse of Knowledge. You know things that others don’t know, and you can’t remember what it was like not to know those things. So when you get around to sharing the Answer, you’ll tend to communicate as if your audience were you.

There is a curious disconnect between the amount of time we invest in training people how to arrive at the Answer and the amount of time we invest in training them how to Tell Others. It’s easy to graduate from medical school or an MBA program without ever taking a class in communication.

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

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.