Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Summary of “Made to Stick”: Some ideas influence their audience, making a mark on their memory for a long time and even making them act; whilst others are forgotten having hardly been heard. The authors of Made To Stick study the ideas that stick and explain their methods of adhesion.

By Chip Heath and Dan Heath, 2007, 285 pages.

Note: Made To Stick is such a comprehensive book that I’m publishing its summary in two parts. This is the first. I’m afraid this will be the case for many books in the Psychology & Communication category 😉.

Not All Communication Is Created Equal

Made to Stick: Book Summary, Part I

You will never guess what happened to one of my friends’ friends – Frank, not to name him. He was in Seattle for an important meeting with a client. Once the meeting was over, he still had time before catching his flight home, so he went to a bar for a drink.

He had just finished his first glass when an attractive young woman came by and offered him a drink. Surprised, but flattered, he accepted. She returned with two drinks. “Thank you,” he said and took his first sip. After this, it was a total blackout.

When he woke up, comatose, he was lying in a hotel bathtub, his body covered in ice. He looked around him, panicked, trying to remember what he was doing there. His attention was then drawn to a small piece of paper:

DO NOT MOVE. PHONE 911.

There was a cellphone on a small table beside the bathtub. He struggled to reach, his fingers numbed with the cold, and dialed the emergency number.

At the other end of the line, the switchboard operator did not sound surprised. “Sir, could you please reach your arm behind your back? Can you feel something? A catheter in your lower back?”

Worried, he did as she asked. There was indeed a catheter.

“Do not panic, sir, said the young lady. You have just had a kidney removed. You are the victim of an organ trafficking network wreaking havoc in the city. The ambulance is on its way.

Congratulations! You have just read one of the most popular urban legends of the past fifteen years, which has gone around the Internet in every language and many forms. A story easily remembered, a striking story, a story made to stick; albeit a completely fake story.

Let’s now look at an article published in the newsletter of a charity organization:

The community’s make-up in the broader sense lends itself by nature to an equation of return on investment, which can be reproduced by referring to existing practices. […] The fact that, to maintain transparency, donor organizations often have to classify the donated sums into categories is a factor limiting the flow of resources towards our organization.

Now, go do something for ten minutes, anything. Then call a friend and tell him the two stories. Which one do you think you will remember best? Which one will you be able to explain to your friend in clear and simple terms?

An urban legend, on the one hand, a few lines from an article out of context on the other: the comparison between the two is indeed biased. However, it perfectly demonstrates the two extremes of what the authors call “the scale of memorability”. It also perfectly illustrates that some stories are made to stick and others are not.

We could be led to believe that some ideas are inherently interesting – a gang of organ thieves – and others inherently boring – the financial strategy of a charity organization. This is certainly partly true. But in this nature/nurture debate as applied to ideas, Chip Heath and Dan Heath gamble on nurture

Ideas are MADE to be Interesting vs. Being Born Interesting

In 1992, Art Silverman, an employee of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) – a non-profit organization aimed at educating consumers in the field of nutrition – was contemplating a packet of popcorn. He had just received the test results of popcorn packets collected at a dozen cinemas in three major American cities. Everyone had been surprised at the results: each bag contained on average 37 grams of saturated fat. The recommended maximum was 20 grams per day. The coconut oil used at the time was to blame, as it was full of saturated fat.

Something had to be done. This bag, which could easily be eaten between meals, contained in itself almost two day’s worth of saturated fat. But how was the public going to be informed? For most, “37 grams of saturated fat” doesn’t mean much. Is it good or bad? And even if it were bad, would it be “bad bad”, like tobacco, or “normal bad”, like a biscuit or a treat? Either way, the phrase “37 grams of saturated fat” is too boring to make consumers take any action.

There were many possibilities for communicating the message to the public. But it had to be something extravagant to match the extravagance of this nutritional aberration. So the CSPI organized a press conference delivering this message: “An average portion of popcorn sold at a local cinema contains more dangerous fat for the arteries than a breakfast with bacon and eggs, lunch with a Big Mac and fries, and dinner with steak and all the trimmings – combined!”  This message was reinforced with visuals – a table crammed with all these fatty foods. An entire day of unbalanced diet on a table; beside it, a single bag of popcorn.

The story was a hit and captured the attention of television channels. Very soon, consumers stopped buying popcorn. Cinemas, hand on heart, vowed that they would no longer use coconut oil to make their popcorn. The idea was well-crafted and clearly made to stick.

Use These 6 Principles to Communicate Ideas Made To Stick

Looking at the stories that stick and the ones that don’t, the Heath brothers set out to search for the common characteristics which could explain why some stories stick and others don’t. In particular, they studied hundreds of urban legends and widely spread proverbs.

From their research, they determined the following six principles to be essential to any idea made to stick:

1. SIMPLICITY. A great barrister claimed: “If you put forward ten arguments, even if they are relevant, the jury will have forgotten them all when they return to the deliberation room.” To be simple, an idea must be stripped down to its core, relentlessly excluding superfluous elements.
2. THE UNEXPECTED. To draw attention, intuitions must be challenged.
3. SOMETHING PRACTICAL. The ideas that naturally stick are full of concrete images. This is where business communication often stumbles.
4. CREDIBILITY. If a Health Minister talks about a health problem, we are prepared to believe him. But we are not always given such a position of authority. Our ideas must therefore themselves bear their own letters of credit.
5. EMOTION. To inspire passion for our ideas, the audience or the readers have to feel something. We are made to feel things for individuals, not for abstractions.
6. A STORY. Listening to a story or an anecdote is like a flight simulator, preparing us to react more quickly and more efficiently when a similar situation occurs.

Having read this list, you may think that these principles make sense. We all more or less know that we ought to “be simple” and “tell a story”. Do you know many convoluted gibberish story enthusiasts? I didn’t think so! But if it were so simple, we’d be flooded with brilliantly communicated ideas made to stick easily in our brains. Unfortunately, the “curse of knowledge”, a natural psychological tendency, works against us to make application of these principles quite challenging.

To fully understand the impact of “the curse of knowledge”, let’s look at a scientific study carried out in 1990 at Stanford University. It featured two groups of participants: drummers and listeners. The drummers were given 25 famous songs – such as The Star-Spangled Banner or Happy Birthday. They had to choose one and beat the tempo with their finger on a table to a listener. The listener had to guess which song it was.

The results were edifying: over the 120 songs played, the listeners identified on average only 2.5% (3 songs). But what was most enlightening was that before the drummers would play, they were asked to predict the success rate of the listeners: they estimated 50%. How were the drummers therefore only able to convey their message once in every 40 times, yet still have the perception and belief that they were much more successful, conveying their message one out of two times?

The drummers had knowledge the listeners did not have: the tune playing in their heads. For the listeners, the beats may as well have been Morse code, but for the drummers, they accompanied the tempo of the music. And this knowledge made them almost impervious to the listeners’ incomprehension.

This is a perfect illustration of the curse of knowledge. You can try the experiment for yourself at home ;). We will see this curse appear again throughout the remainder of the book and its discussion of each of the individual six principles noted above that make an idea stick. To understand more about how to apply each of the six principles and whether your ideas are made to stick, continue with me in reading. I invite you to share your thoughts and questions in the comments at the end for more discussion and sharing of what works in practical communication.

Chapter 1: Made to Stick Principle 1 – Simplicity

Every single move of each soldier in the U.S.A. army meets a very careful preparation, which originated with an order from the President of the United States. It then cascades down all the grades of the hierarchy right down to the last foot soldier. The plans are detailed, pointing out the “pattern of maneuvers” and the specific actions each unit will take, its necessary equipment, its munitions, etc. The problem is, no plan can survive contact with the enemy. It’s as if you were implementing a detailed plan for a friend playing a game of chess. You cannot predict the opponent’s moves, and therefore the plan becomes obsolete in just a few moves.

Plans are useful in the army. They show that the operational process is in place and enables asking the right questions. But since they often don’t work as well in practice on the battlefield, the American army introduced a new concept in the 1980s: the Intention of Commandment (IC). It is a simple and concise sentence describing the operation’s objective. It can be general and abstract at a higher level, but the lower down the grades, the more it becomes precise and practical.

For instance, the Intention of Commandment maybe something like: “I intend to position the 3^rd battalion on hill 4305 to liberate it and protect the flank of the 3^rd brigade when it pushes through the line.” Thanks to the IC, the soldiers know their mission’s ultimate objective. They are free to improvise according to the circumstances to reach it.

No plan can survive when faced with the enemy. This precept should speak even to those who have no military experience. Very often, no business plan can survive in contact with the customer. No lesson plan can survive in contact with the pupils, etc. To make one’s ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, and chaotic context is not easy. The way to success is simplicity. Not simple as in “simplistic” or “reductive”, but simplicity as in, the idea’s substantive spinal cord.

The idea you are trying to convey has to be undressed, totally stripped down to its very essence, its core, and devoid of all superficiality. The trickiest thing is to set aside any idea that appears to be important but is not ultimately the most important. The Intention of Commandment makes the American army’s officers extract the most important objective in an operation. There can only be one priority, and only one IC.

Finding the essence of an idea is to set aside a large number of ideas to enable the most important one to shine. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

This is the essence of Made to Stick. To make your ideas stick, there are two steps:

1. Find their essence.
2. Bring them alive with the help of the six principles.

No more, no less.

Chapter 2: Made to Stick Principle 2 – The Unexpected

The first issue of communication is to get the attention of those you’re addressing. Sometimes we have the appropriate authority to demand attention – like parents with their children – but most of the time, we don’t have this luxury.

One of the most basic elements to capture attention is to break a pattern or a well-anchored model in our audience’s mind. We human beings get used to recurring patterns incredibly quickly. We soon no longer pay attention to the noisy computer, the purring fan, the picture on the wall… To become conscious of things, there has to be a change: the computer or the fan stops, the picture falls off the wall or we find its space empty, etc. Our brain is therefore extremely sensitive to change. Once we have drawn the others’ attention with surprise, we must keep it by making their interest grow.

Surprise is linked to a facial expression common to all cultures. We all recognize it. The eyebrows are rounded and high… The skin underneath the eyebrows is stretched by the upward movement and more visible than usual, while the eyes are wide open. Psychologists Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen in their book Unmasking the Face named it “the eyebrow of surprise”.

When we raise our eyebrows, our eyes widen and our field of vision expands, making us see more. On the contrary, when we are angry, the eyes shrink so that we may concentrate on the issue. Often the surprise is such that we are left with our mouth open, our body paralyzed for a few seconds, our muscles at rest, as if the brain was processing how to integrate this new piece of information. Surprise therefore acts as an emergency neutralizer when our guessing machines are cut short. All our ongoing activities are interrupted and our attention unwillingly focuses on the surprising event.

The unexpected ideas are therefore more likely to stick because surprise makes us attentive and makes us think. This extra attention imprints the unexpected events into our memory. Sometimes this attention is short-lived, but in other cases, surprise can lead to lasting attention. Some researchers looking into conspiracy theories have noticed that these are often born of unexpected events individuals do not comprehend, such as the death of beautiful young people. There are conspiracy theories for John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Kurt Cobain. The deaths of 90-year-old people do not provoke so much questioning.

Surprise is therefore a powerful instrument to use, but be careful not to overuse it. To understand this, read the following words:

• COMBINEMENT
• BRAVITUDE
• DOWG
• HAUSPITALE

Then ask someone else to read them and carefully watch their facial expressions. Normally, COMBINEMENT and BRAVITUDE make people frown more, whereas DAWG and HAUSPITALE make people raise their eyebrows.

DOWG and HAUSPITALE inspire surprise because their spelling is not familiar whereas the pronunciation is. We go “oh!” when we realize that DOWG is a bizarre way of spelling DOG and HAUSPITALE is an incorrect spelling for HOSPITAL.

On the contrary, COMBINEMENT and BRAVITUDE appear to be bizarrely familiar, as they use a combination of existing words. But they do not actually exist and when we realize this, it annoys us because we have been struggling to find a solution that does not exist. These two words are examples of gratuitous and hollow surprise, which does not stick and is frustrating.

To be surprising, an event cannot be predictable. For its surprise factor to be sufficient, it must be visible afterward when we reflect on it. The trick makes sense when we think about it, but we didn’t perceive it at first.

Therefore, to make ideas stick better:

1. Identify the central message, the essence to be communicated – the substantive spinal cord
2. Discover what about the message is contrary to intuition – what is the element of surprise we can use
3. Communicate our message in a way that breaks our audience’s guessing machines and surprises them.

Once we have drawn the attention, we still need to maintain it. To this end, we may use techniques such as the “open loop”. Start with an enigma, stimulate intellectual curiosity that makes us want to know the answer, and open a loop to keep their attention hooked, only closing it once the message communication is complete.

Enigmas are indeed powerful because they create the need for an ending. As the psychology professor Robert Cialdini says: “Have you heard about the Aha! Experiment? Well, the Aha! The experiment is a lot more satisfying when it is preceded by the Eh? Experiment.”

Chapter 3: Made to Stick Principle 3 – Something Practical

Aesop’s fables and their morals have traveled worldwide, generating many proverbs, such as those linked to his fable The Fox and the Grapes:

“A fox, having glimpsed a few ripening grapes at the top of a tree wanted to eat them. He tried hard to reach them, but realizing that all his efforts were in vain, he hid his sorrow and said, turning away, that he did not want to eat these grapes as they were too raw and sour.”

If Aesop’s fables have traveled worldwide and survived for 2,500 years, it is of course because they communicate profound truths. It is also because they are presented in a way that makes the ideas stick. The fables conjure up concrete images, like the grapes, the fox, the scornful claim about the green grapes.

The world needs more fables. In all walks of life, we are overwhelmed with hollow slogans and confusing doublespeak, which does not mean and/or signify anything we can easily relate to. For example:

• In Business…
  • Client-orientated visionary paradigm
  • Reciprocal reengineering based on costs
• In Teaching…
  • Metacognitive competences
  • Pertinent portfolio evaluation in terms of development
• In Medicine…
  • Idiopathic cardiomyopathy (Cardiomyopathy means “there’s something wrong with your heart’ and idiopathic, “we have no idea what it is”)

I won’t even talk about the academics with their theses full of edifying jargon, information technologists, mechanics, psychologists, scientists, politicians, basically just about everyone.

Languages are often abstract, but life is not. Even the most abstract business strategy must translate into tangible human actions. And it is easier to adhere and understand tangible actions than the presentation of an abstract strategy. Concrete means directly perceptible by the senses. A “V8 engine” is concrete. “Great performance” is not. Abstraction has its place in messaging, but it’s an expert communicator’s luxury and privilege to use.

To teach an idea to beginners or neophytes, or even a group of people whose level of knowledge you ignore, the only risk-free language is that of concreteness and practicality.

Chapter 4: Made to Stick Principle 4 – Credibility

One out of ten people will have an ulcer in their lifetime. For many years, doctors believed ulcers were caused by an excess of gastric acid eating away at the stomach’s wall. They thought this excess was caused by stress, spicy food, or too much alcohol. In 1982, Barry Marshal and Robin Warren, two researchers from Perth, Australia, discovered that ulcers were caused by bacteria, which would some years later be named Helicobacter Pylori.

This discovery was considerable. If ulcers were caused by bacteria, then they could easily be cured. All we needed was antibiotics. Would the medical community cry out for joy, would they organize huge parties in honor of the researchers, were they thanked for this new hope they were giving for the health of hundreds of millions of human beings?

Absolutely not. No one believed them. And there were three reasons for this:

1. The medical community firmly believed that nothing could withstand gastric acid, an extremely powerful substance, which can eat away at a piece of meat or even dissolve a nail.
2. At the time of the discovery, Robin Warren was a mere pathologist in a Perth hospital and Barry Marshal was completing his residency. They hadn’t developed the authority to make the case: residents do not cure illnesses affecting 10% of the world population.
3. The place. A researcher from Perth is like a doctor from Oregon. Science is science, but scientists are humans and they have the same tendency to snobbery as the rest of us.

Marshall and Warren did not even manage to have their research paper published. After two years of procrastination, Marshall, who could no longer wait, skipped breakfast, called his colleagues, and swallowed in front of them a glass containing almost one billion H. Pylori bacteria. In a few days, he developed the symptoms of an ulcer and cured himself using antibiotics.

However, the game was not yet won, as some researchers reproached him his method. Still, his demonstration had given a new breath of life to his theory, which then started to be widely studied. In 1994, the role of H. Pylori in ulcers was officially recognized and in 2005, Marshall and Warren jointly received the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their discovery.

Trying to convince a skeptical audience is very difficult because it’s an enormous challenge to surmount an entire lifetime of teachings and social interactions. Such as here in the story of two men who make a medical discovery worthy of the Nobel Prize, and one of them has to poison himself to be believed! Yet some absolutely unfathomable urban tales spread like wildfire.

How Credibility Creates Ideas Made to Stick

• Authority

Any message issued by an established authority within the message’s subject area is considered with more respect than a message coming from an average individual.

By authority, we mean two categories of people:

1. Specialists – who have authority in their given field, such as Stephen Hawking for Physics, Alan Greenspan for Economics, Tony Robbins for personal development, etc.
2. Stars or celebrities – Michael Jordan likes McDonald’s. Very well. He is neither a dietician nor a gourmet, but he is likely to make many people go to McDonald’s because many people would like to emulate him.

We rarely have the opportunity to engage international specialists or celebrities in promoting our products or ideas (if you do, you may skip this section 😉 ). Thankfully, it is also possible to call upon perfect strangers.

• Illustrious Unknown Individuals Who Tell Indisputable Truths

Pam Laffin was the heroin of an anti-smoking campaign broadcasted on American television in the 1990s. She was neither a health specialist nor a celebrity. Pam was a smoker. She was 29 years old at the time and a mother of two and had started smoking at the age of 14, “to look older”, as she said in the commercial. It showed her struggle against cancer, her operations, her scars, her terrible suffering. She died at age 31. The commercial had a considerable impact.

It was not evident at first that Pam Laffin, a perfect stranger, would influence the opinion. Yet she became a credible and respected source because amidst the countless other sources talking about smoking, she exuded honesty and impartiality. The ordeal shown on television was hers, it was real. She really suffered. She really died. It was raw truth.

• The Power of Details

Scientific studies show that living and concrete details increase an idea or a story’s credibility, provided that not just anything is used and that these details symbolize and support the core of the message. We have to build credibility into our ideas by supporting the simple essence of our message with details that support the validity of that core message.

• Illustrated Statistics

Another way of making a message more credible is by using statistics. Statistics can often be boring and do not make an idea stick. It is better to illustrate them with images or clear comparisons, rather than using raw figures.

• The Principle of Human Scale

Another way of giving life to numbers is by presenting them in a more human context. Let’s compare the two scientific developments below:

1. Scientists recently calculated an important physical constraint with extraordinary accuracy. To picture this accuracy, imagine throwing a rock from the Sun to the Earth and hitting your target within a 500-meter radius of its center.

2. Scientists recently calculated an important physical constraint with extraordinary accuracy. To picture this accuracy, imagine throwing a rock from New York to Los Angeles and hitting your target within a 1.5-centimeter radius of its center.

Which one of the two claims appears to be the most precise?

In both cases, the degree of accuracy is rigorously identical. However, a study revealed that 58% of participants believed the first claim was “very impressive” while a whopping 83% believed the second claim was. It is easier for us to imagine the distance from New York to Los Angeles than from the Sun to Earth. This comparison therefore sticks a lot better and helps us perceive more clearly the scientists’ prowess. It is therefore important to change any figure or result that is too large to a human scale so that it may be concretely understood.

To be continued…

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