Imagine: You’re at the airport and don’t have anything to read on the flight. You see two books at a kiosk. Six Principles of Effective Communication, a non-descript textbook, and Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, a bright orange hardcover with what looks like duct tape on the cover. Which book would you buy?
The point of this imaginary scenario (I made the first book up) isn’t that you need a catchy title and cover to sell books, althought that may be true, but that how ideas are communicated is often as important as the ideas themselves.
Chip and Dan Heath have spent the last ten years studying this phenomenon – why some ideas “stick.†Chip as a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford and Dan as an educational entrepreneur and consultant. In Made to Stick, they share what they have learned.
“Stickiness†is used to describe ideas that stay with us, that become part of our mental furniture. In other words: effective communication. The brothers adopted the idea from Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 book The Tipping Point. But while Gladwell was studying the nature of social epidemics they wanted to understand the structure of effective communication – what makes ideas that stick tick.
Their answer? If you want to create an idea that sticks develop a Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story. This acronym (SUCCES) may be memorable, and a little corny, but what does it mean exactly? At the risk of oversimplifying, it means using what we know about how people think, act, react, and interact with ideas to craft effective communication.
From the introduction to the epilogue, and through chapters dealing with each of the six qualities, the authors model a basic structure for effective communication.
Step one is strip your idea to its core. When we try to communicate too much nothing sticks. But simple is not dumbing down, simple yes, but profound. Think proverbs not sound bites.
The remaining qualities take the next steps. If you want your idea to stick you need to make your audience: pay attention; understand and remember; agree/believe; care; and be able to act.
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