Authors: Chip Heath
You’ll stress the scads of statistics that were pivotal in arriving at the Answer—and, like the Stanford students, you’ll find that no one remembers them afterward. You’ll share the punch line—the overarching truth that emerged from months of study and analysis—and, like the CEO who stresses “maximizing shareholder value” to his frontline employees, no one will have a clue how your punch line relates to the day-to-day work.
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. College professors take dozens of courses in their areas of expertise but none on how to teach. A lot of engineers would scoff at a training program about Telling Others.
Business managers seem to believe that, once they’ve clicked through a PowerPoint presentation showcasing their conclusions, they’ve successfully communicated their ideas. What they’ve done is share data. If they’re good speakers, they may even have created an enhanced sense, among their employees and peers, that they are “decisive” or “managerial” or “motivational.” But, like the Stanford students, the surprise will come when they realize that nothing they’ve
said had impact. They’ve shared data, but they haven’t created ideas that are useful and lasting. Nothing stuck.
For an idea to stick, for it to be useful and lasting, it’s got to make the audience:
Pay attention
Understand and remember it
Agree/Believe
Care
Be able to act on it
This book could have been organized around these five steps, but there’s a reason they were reserved for the conclusion. The Curse of Knowledge can easily render this framework useless. When an expert asks, “Will people understand my idea?,” her answer will be
Yes
, because she herself understands. (“Of course, my people will understand ‘maximizing shareholder value!’ “) When an expert asks, “Will people care about this?,” her answer will be
Yes
, because she herself cares. Think of the Murray Dranoff Duo Piano people, who said, “We exist to protect, preserve, and promote the music of the duo piano.” They were shocked when that statement didn’t arouse the same passion in others that it did in them.
The SUCCESs checklist is a substitute for the framework above, and its advantage is that it’s more tangible and less subject to the Curse of Knowledge. In fact, if you think back across the chapters you’ve read, you’ll notice that the framework matches up nicely:
| 1. Pay attention: | UNEXPECTED |
| 2. Understand and remember it: | CONCRETE |
| 3. Agree/Believe: | CREDIBLE |
| 4. Care: | EMOTIONAL |
| 5. Be able to act on it: | STORY |
So, rather than guess about whether people will understand our ideas, we should ask, “Is it concrete?” Rather than speculate about whether people will care, we should ask, “Is it emotional? Does it get out of Maslow’s basement? Does it force people to put on an Analytical Hat or allow them to feel empathy?” (By the way, “Simple” is not on the list above because it’s mainly about the Answer stage—honing in on the core of your message and making it as compact as possible. But Simple messages help throughout the process, especially in helping people to understand and act.)
The SUCCESs checklist, then, is an ideal tool for dealing with communication problems. Let’s look at some common symptoms of communication problems and how we can respond to them.
SYMPTOMS AND SOLUTIONS
Problems getting people to
pay attention to a message
SYMPTOM:
“No one is listening to me” or “They seem bored—they hear this stuff all the time.”
SOLUTION:
Surprise them by breaking their guessing machines—tell them something that is uncommon sense. (The lead is, There will be no school next Thursday! Nordies gift-wrap packages from Macy’s!)
SYMPTOM:
“I lost them halfway through” or “Their attention was wavering toward the end.”
SOLUTION:
Create curiosity gaps—tell people just enough for them to realize the piece that’s missing from their knowledge. (Remember Roone Arledge’s introductions to college football games, setting the context for the rivalry.) Or create mysteries or puzzles that are slowly solved over the course of the communication. (Like the professor who started each class with a mystery, such as the one about Saturn’s rings.)
Problems getting people to
understand and remember
SYMPTOM:
“They always nod their heads when I explain it to them, but it never seems to translate into action.”
SOLUTION:
Make the message simpler and use concrete language. Use what people already know as a way to make your intentions clearer, as with a generative analogy (like Disney’s “cast member” metaphor). Or use concrete, real-world examples. Don’t talk about “knowledge management;” tell a story about a health worker in Zambia getting information on malaria from the Internet.
SYMPTOM:
“We have these meetings where it seems like everyone is talking past each other” or “Everyone has such different levels of knowledge that it’s hard to teach them.”
SOLUTION:
Create a highly concrete turf where people can apply their knowledge. (Think of the venture-capital pitch for a portable computer where the entrepreneur tossed his binder onto the table, sparking brainstorming.) Have people grapple with specific examples or cases rather than concepts.
Problems getting people to
believe you or agree
SYMPTOM:
“They’re not buying it.”
SOLUTION:
Find the telling details for your message—the equivalent of the dancing seventy-three-year-old man, or the textile factory so
environmentally friendly that it actually cleans the water pouring through it. Use fewer authorities and more antiauthorities.
SYMPTOM:
“They quibble with everything I say” or “I spend all my time arguing with them about this.”
SOLUTION:
Quiet the audience’s mental skeptics by using a springboard story, switching them into creative mode. Move away from statistics and facts toward meaningful examples. Use an anecdote that passes the Sinatra Test.
Problems getting people to care
SYMPTOM:
“They are so apathetic” or “No one seems fired up about this.”
SOLUTION:
Remember the Mother Teresa effect—people care more about individuals than they do about abstractions. Tell them an inspiring Challenge plot or Creativity plot story. Tap into their sense of their own identities, like the “Don’t Mess with Texas” ads, which suggested that not littering was the Texan thing to do.
SYMPTOM:
“The things that used to get people excited just aren’t doing it anymore.”
SOLUTION:
Get out of Maslow’s basement and try appealing to more profound types of self-interest.
Problems getting people to act
SYMPTOM:
“Everyone nods their heads and then nothing happens.”
SOLUTION:
Inspire them with a Challenge plot story (Jared, David and Goliath) or engage them by using a springboard story (the World Bank). Make sure your message is simple and concrete enough to be useful—turn it into a proverb (“Names, names, and names”).
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” Those were John F. Kennedy’s words in May 1961. An inspiring message for an inspiring mission. It was a single idea that motivated a nation to a decade of work—and an eventual, historic, unforgettable success. But here’s the thing: You’re not JFK.
And neither are we. We don’t have an ounce of his charisma or power. We are less concerned with traveling to the moon than with, say, remembering our wallets when we leave home in the morning. So, if being JFK was what it took to make an idea stick, this would be a depressing book indeed.
JFK isn’t the standard. In fact, he’s the aberration. Keep in mind that the same chapter where we first mentioned the “Man on the Moon” speech also contains a reference to the Kentucky Fried Rat. Our heads are not entirely in the clouds.
Sticky ideas have things in common, and in this book we’ve reverse-engineered them. We’ve studied preposterous ideas: the kidney thieves and their ice-filled bathtub. We’ve studied brilliant ideas: Ulcers are caused by bacteria. We’ve studied boring ideas made interesting: the flight-safety announcement. We’ve studied interesting ideas made boring: Oral rehydration salts that could save the lives of thousands of kids. We’ve seen ideas related to newspapers, accounting, nuclear war, evangelism, seat belts, dust, dancing, litter, football, AIDS, shipping, and hamburgers.
And what we’ve seen is that all these ideas—profound and mundane, serious and silly—share common traits. Our hope is that, now that you understand these traits, you’ll be able to apply them to your own ideas.
They laughed when you shared a story instead of a statistic. But when the idea stuck …
The SUCCESs checklist is intended to be a deeply practical tool. It’s no accident that it’s a checklist and not an equation. It’s not hard, and it’s not rocket science. But neither is it natural or instinctive. It requires diligence and it requires awareness.
This book is filled with normal people facing normal problems who did amazing things simply by applying these principles (even if they weren’t aware that they were doing it). These people are so normal that you probably won’t even recognize their names when you see them. Their names aren’t sticky, but their stories are.
There was Art Silverman. He was the guy who stopped a nation from eating obscenely unhealthy movie popcorn. He laid out a full day’s worth of fatty foods next to a tub of popcorn and said, “This is how much saturated fat is in this snack.” A normal person with a normal job who made a difference.
There was Nora Ephron’s journalism teacher. Poor guy, we didn’t even mention his name. He told his class, “The lead is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.’” And in that one sentence he rewrote his students’ image of journalism. He inspired Ephron—and doubtless many others—to become journalists. A normal person with a normal job who made a difference.
What about Bob Ocwieja? No chance you remember his name. He’s the Subway franchise owner who served sandwiches to a fat guy every day and spotted a great story in the making. Because of Ocwieja the hugely successful Jared campaign was discovered and launched. A normal person with a normal job who made a difference.
Then there was Floyd Lee, the leader of the Pegasus mess hall in Iraq. He defined his role as being about morale, not food service. He got the same supplies as everyone else, but soldiers flocked to his tent and his pastry chef started describing her desserts as “sensual.” A normal person with a normal job who made a difference.
And there was Jane Elliott. Her classroom simulation of racial prejudice is still etched in the minds of her students more than
twenty years later. It’s not a stretch to say that she came up with an idea that
prevented
prejudice, like a vaccine. A normal person with a normal job who made a difference.
All these people distinguished themselves by crafting ideas that made a difference. They didn’t have power or celebrity or PR firms or advertising dollars or spinmeisters. All they had were ideas.
And that’s the great thing about the world of ideas—any of us, with the right insight and the right message, can make an idea stick.
I. TALKING STRATEGY
S
ince 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.
To see why the ability to talk strategy can be so effective, consider Cranium, the company that manufactures the hit board game Cranium and many other products. Whit Alexander, the co-founder of Cranium, recalls a time when he called a Chinese manufacturing partner to describe a concept for a new plastic game piece. The piece would be purple and made of multiple parts that would need to be glued together. His partner balked. “It’s not CHIFF,” he said. Alexander was astonished. His supplier, halfway across the globe, had just corrected him using Cranium’s own strategic language. And the supplier was absolutely right.
CHIFF is an acronym that stands for “Clever, High-quality, Innovative, Friendly, Fun.” The CHIFF concept defines Cranium’s strategic differentiation in the extremely competitive board-game market. CHIFF informs decisions across the organization—from branding to package design and the content of individual questions. (Example: A suggested question for the game asked how many justices were on the Supreme Court. It was rejected for being insufficiently clever and fun to be CHIFF. So it was rewritten: “In which of these sports could the members of the U.S. Supreme Court field a regulation team, with no justices left on the ‘bench’?”)
The Chinese manufacturer had chastised Alexander for his kludgy idea for a game piece. Glued together? That’s not particularly innovative or high-quality; the feel of the piece would be all wrong The manufacturer came back with design so smooth and novel that during a game players would hold spare pieces in their hand, turning them over and over just for tactile pleasure. Not only had the manufacturer improved the quality, he had also made a game piece fun. Alexander was impressed.
This is a game-board manufacturing success story. More important, though, it is a
strategy
success story. The executives of Cranium developed a way to communicate a crucial element of the company’s strategy—the competitive advantage that makes it better than its competitors—in a useful, comprehensible way. “CHIFF” is simply a clear, actionable statement of strategic differentiation. Cranium employees, suppliers, and channel partners all use CHIFF to make hundreds of on-the-ground decisions that defend Cranium’s competitive differentiation.
Let’s face it, there is no clearer proof that a strategy has been communicated properly than when a manufacturing supplier, in another country, with a different native language, uses it to correct the founder of the company.
CHIFF works because it respects the principles that make ideas “sticky”—understandable, memorable, and effective in changing
thought or behavior. And these principles for creating sticky ideas can be used to transform the way strategy is communicated within a firm.
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.
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!
Often, leaders aren’t even aware that they’re speaking abstractly.
When a CEO urges her team to “unlock shareholder value,” that challenge
means something vivid to her
. As in the Tappers and Listeners game, there’s a song playing in her head that the employees can’t hear. What does “unlocking shareholder value” mean for how I treat this particular customer? What does being the “highest-quality producer” mean for my negotiation with this difficult vendor?
Now, leaders can’t unlearn what they know. But they can thwart the Curse of Knowledge by “translating” their strategies into concrete language. For instance, Trader Joe’s is a specialty food market that carries inexpensive but exotic food. At Trader Joe’s, you might purchase some Moroccan simmer sauce for $2.53 or a quart of red-pepper soup for $1.99. 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.
A crucial element of every strategy is deciding which markets and customers a company will serve. The “unemployed college professor” speaks directly to this issue. Trader Joe’s could have referred to its customers as “people who are of high socioeconomic status and are quality-conscious but also budget-conscious, and who value variety and new experiences.” But this adjective-filled statement doesn’t provide as clear an image as the unemployed college professor. Would the professor like the red-pepper soup? Yep. The Curse of Knowledge has been thwarted.
Stories work particularly well in dodging the Curse of Knowledge, 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.
A good strategy should guide behavior, and a story can work better in this role than the standard boilerplate missionspeak. At Costco, as described in the book
Around the Corporate Campfire
, by Evelyn Clark, people talk about “salmon stories.” Jim Sinegal, the co-founder of Costco, said, “In 1996 we were selling between $150,000 and $200,000 of salmon fillets company-wide every week at $5.99 a pound. Then our buyers were able to get an improved product with belly fat, back fins, and collarbones removed at a better price. As a result, we reduced our retail price to $5.29. So they improved the product and lowered the price.”
But the buyers weren’t finished. They subsequently negotiated for salmon at an even better price that had the pin bones and skin removed. They lowered the price on this higher-quality salmon to $4.99 a pound. Later, because the lower prices were driving large volumes of sales, Costco began to place big orders directly with Canadian and Chilean salmon farms, which drove the retail price down to $4.79. The point? Costco stands for the relentless pursuit of ever-increasing quality at ever-decreasing prices. “Salmon stories,” like the elements of CHIFF, provide a brilliant way to communicate the company’s competitive advantage.
Sinegal says, “We’ve used that story so much as a teaching tool that I’ve had other buyers in the company, such as a clothing buyer in Canada, come up to me and say, ‘I’ve got a salmon story to tell you.’”
Two paragraphs back, you came across the sentence “Costco stands for the relentless pursuit of ever-increasing quality at ever-decreasing prices.” Note that the sentence works as a summary of the salmon story—it’s punctuation on the end of the sentence. But here’s the counterintuitive part: It doesn’t stand alone very well without the story. Saying an abstract sentence like that one, without the related story, is the same as being the Tapper in the Tapper and Listener game. “Ever-increasing quality at ever-decreasing prices” is something that is powerful and profound to an executive
who has internalized years of salmon stories
, but it’s sort of dry and vague to someone who doesn’t have access to those same experiences. (How do we decrease prices? What if you can’t decrease the prices and maintain the same level of profitability?)
Stories that speak to an organization’s strategy have two parts. There’s the story itself, and there’s the moral of the story. It’s nice to have both. If you have to choose between the two, though, choose the story. Because the moral is implicit in the story, but
the story is not implicit in the moral
. And the story—with its concrete language, specific protagonists, and real-world setting—is more likely to guide behavior.
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.
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.
Psychologists have uncovered situations where the mere existence of choice, even choice among several good options, seems to paralyze us in making decisions. (We discuss one example in the “Simple” chapter). In
The Paradox of Choice
, Barry Schwartz discusses many other examples of decision paralysis. Imagine two tables in a grocery store where you can taste different kinds of jam. One table has twenty-four kinds of jam, and the other has six. Both tasting tables were popular with customers. But when the sales of jam were tallied, there was a shock: The table with only six jars generated ten times as many sales as the other table! (People simply couldn’t decide which jar, among twenty-four, to buy.) Employees of companies with 401(k) plans also experience decision paralysis. For every additional ten mutual funds offered as investment choices by the plan, the employees
reduce
their retirement saving by 1 percent. Decision paralysis even affects the domain of love. When singles attended a speed-dating session where they met six other people, they formed more relationships than they did when they met twelve.
If decision paralysis affects retailing and finance and dating, you can feel pretty confident that it’s affecting your employees, too. Think about the sources of decision paralysis in your company. Every organization must make choices among attractive options: Customer service versus cost minimization. Revenue growth versus maximizing profitability. Quality versus speed to market. People development versus the needs of the quarter. Mix together lots of these tensions—an atmosphere full of potential opportunities and risks and uncertainties and incomplete information—and you’ve got a recipe for paralysis.
Furthermore, many classic strategy statements, such as the quest
to be the “low-cost provider,” simply don’t speak to many of these trade-offs—for instance the trade-off between quality and speed to market. Now, leaders could solve decision paralysis by encoding
everything
into a rule:
Try all available medications before proceeding to surgery!
Many companies do, in fact, adopt this approach—witness the three-inch-thick binders given to new employees to explain “company policy.” But you can never generate enough rules to encompass all the decisions that must be made by your employees. The world is complex, and it evolves. Yet rules forbid anyone to adapt to the world except the leaders who write the rules.