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A few years ago the two brothers Chip and Dan—realized that both had been studying how ideas stick for about ten years. Their expertise came from very different fields, but they had zeroed in on the same question: Why do some ideas succeed while others fail? How to create sticky ideas that last long?
Dan had developed a passion for education. He co-founded a start-up publishing company called Thinkwell that asked a somewhat unconventional question: If you were going to build a textbook from scratch, using video and technology instead of text, how would you do it? As the editor-in-chief of Thinkwell, Dan had to work with his team to determine the best ways to teach subjects like economics, biology, calculus, and physics. He had an opportunity to work with some of the most effective and best-loved professors in the country: the calculus teacher who was also a stand-up comic; the biology teacher who was named National Teacher of the Year; the economics teacher who was a playwright. Essentially, Dan enjoyed a crash course in what makes great teachers great. And he found that, while each teacher had a unique style, collectively their instructional methodologies were almost identical.
“Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is in their implementation. Until then, they are in limbo.” ~ Theodore Levitt
False Idea Displace True One
Chip, as a professor at Stanford University, had spent about ten years asking why bad ideas sometimes won out in the social marketplace of ideas. How could a false idea displace a true one? And what made some ideas more viral than others? Over the years, he’s become uncomfortably familiar with some of the most disgusting and absurd tales in the chronicles of ideas. He’s heard them all. Here’s a very small sampler:
- Coca-Cola rots your bones. This fear is big in Japan, but so far the country hasn’t experienced an epidemic of jellylike
- The Great Wall of China is the only man-made object that is visible from space. (The Wall is really long but not very wide. Think about it: If the Wall were visible, then any interstate highway would also be visible, and maybe a few Wal-Mart superstores as well.)
- You use only 10 percent of your brain. (If this were true, it would certainly make brain damage a lot less worrisome.)
Naturally Sticky Ideas
Chip, along with his students, has spent hundreds of hours collecting, coding, and analyzing naturally sticky ideas: urban legends, wartime rumors, proverbs, conspiracy theories, and jokes. Urban legends are false, but many naturally sticky ideas are true. In fact, perhaps the oldest class of naturally sticky ideas is the proverb—a piece of wisdom that often endures over centuries and across cultures. As an example, versions of the proverb “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” have appeared in more than fifty-five different languages.
In studying naturally sticky ideas, both trivial and profound, Chip has conducted more than forty experiments with more than 1,700 participants on topics such as:
- Why Nostradamus’s prophecies are still read after 400 years
- Why Chicken Soup for the Soul stories are inspirational
- Why ineffective folk remedies persist
A few years ago, he started teaching a course at Stanford called “How to Make Ideas Stick.” The premise of the course was that if we understood what made ideas naturally sticky we might be better at making our own messages stick. During the past few years, he has taught this topic to a few hundred students bound for careers as managers, public-policy analysts, journalists, designers, and film directors.
Six Principles of Sticky Ideas
As Chip and Dan pored over hundreds of sticky ideas during their study, they found the following six principles behind them.
Principle 1: Simplicity
How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.” To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission—sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.
Principle 2: Unexpectedness
How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. A bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whole day’s worth of fatty foods! We can use surprise—an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus—to grab people’s attention. But surprise doesn’t last.
For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. How do you keep students engaged during the forty-eighth history class of the year? We can engage people’s curiosity over a long period of time by systematically “opening gaps” in their knowledge—and then filling those gaps.
Principle 3: Concreteness
How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes off-center. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, and 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.” Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.
Principle 4: Credibility
How do we make people believe our ideas? When the former surgeon general C. Everett Koop talks about a public-health issue, most people accept his ideas without skepticism. But in most day-to-day situations we don’t enjoy this authority. 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 automatically grasp hard numbers. But in many cases, this is exactly the wrong approach.
In the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics demonstrating the slowness of the economy. Instead, he asked a simple question that allowed voters to test for themselves: “Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago.”
Principle 5: Emotions
How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. In the case of movie popcorn, we make them feel disgusted by its unhealthiness. Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire locality. 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 disloyalty of Big Tobacco.
Principle 6: Stories
How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.
Those are the six principles of successful ideas. To summarize, here’s our checklist for creating a successful idea: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. A clever observer will note that this sentence can be compacted into the acronym SUCCESs. No special expertise is needed to apply these principles. (Excerpt is from ‘Made to Stick’ by Chip Heath & Den Heath).
