Made to Stick (12 page)

The news-teaser approach can be used with all sorts of ideas in all sorts of contexts. 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?”

The gap theory relies on our ability to point out things that people don’t know. One complication is that people tend to think they know a lot. Research has shown that we are typically overconfident about how much we know.

In one study, researchers asked people to consider the serious parking problem faced by their university. Participants were given time to generate as many solutions as they could. The participants generated, in total, about 300 solutions, which were classified into seven major categories. One category suggested ways to reduce demand for parking (e.g., by raising parking fees), and another suggested ways to use parking space more efficiently (e.g., by creating spaces for “Compact Cars Only”).

The average participant failed to identify more than 70 percent of the best solutions identified by an expert panel. This failure is understandable; we wouldn’t expect any one person to be able to generate a database worth of solutions. However, when the individuals were asked to assess their own performance, they predicted that they had identified 75 percent. They thought they got the majority, but in reality they’d missed them.

If people believe they know everything, it’s hard to make the gap theory work. Fortunately, there are strategies for combating overconfidence. For instance, Nora Ephron’s journalism teacher prevented overconfidence by causing the students’ schemas of journalism to fail. He made them commit to their preconceived ideas and then pulled the rug out from under them.

Making people commit to a prediction can help prevent overconfidence.
Eric Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard, came up with a pedagogical innovation known as “concept testing.” Every so often in his classes, Mazur will pose a conceptual question and then ask his students to vote publicly on the answer. The simple act of committing to an answer makes the students more engaged and more curious about the outcome.

Overconfident people are more likely to recognize a knowledge gap when they realize that others disagree with them. Nancy Lowry and David Johnson studied a teaching environment where fifth and sixth graders were assigned to interact on a topic. With one group, the discussion was led in a way that fostered a consensus. With the second group, the discussion was designed to produce disagreements about the right answer.

Students who achieved easy consensus were less interested in the topic, studied less, and were less likely to visit the library to get additional information. The most telling difference, though, was revealed when teachers showed a special film about the discussion topic—during recess! Only 18 percent of the consensus students missed recess to see the film, but 45 percent of the students from the disagreement group stayed for the film. The thirst to fill a knowledge gap—to find out who was right—can be more powerful than the thirst for slides and jungle gyms.

If curiosity arises from knowledge gaps, we might assume that when we know more, we’ll become less curious because there are fewer gaps in our knowledge. But Loewenstein argues that the opposite is true. He says that as we gain information we are more and more likely to focus on what we don’t know. Someone who knows the state capitals of 17 of 50 states may be proud of her knowledge. But someone who knows 47 may be more likely to think of herself as
not knowing
3 capitals.

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)?

Gossip is popular because we know a lot about some people but there’s some information that we lack. We don’t gossip about passing acquaintances. Celebrity gossip is particularly tantalizing. We have a sense of who Tiger Woods and Julia Roberts are, but we crave the missing pieces—their quirks, their romantic struggles, their secret vices.

Curiosity comes from gaps in our knowledge. But what if there’s not much knowledge there to begin with? In the 1960s, an upstart television network, American Broadcasting Corporation, signed a contract to televise NCAA football games. College sports is a classic insiders’ topic. With the exception of a fringe of die-hard sports junkies, most fans usually care only about their own schools’ teams. But ABC could show only a few games each week in each region. For ABC’s bet to pay off, it needed to make viewers care about games that didn’t involve their home teams.

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.

One Saturday afternoon, after procrastinating all morning, he sat down to type out a proposal to his bosses:

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.

Other people at ABC were excited by what Arledge had written. Two days later, he was asked—at age twenty-nine, with a skimpy résumé—to produce a college-football game using the guidelines in his memo.

Arledge intuitively made use of Loewenstein’s gap theory. How do you get people interested in a topic? You point out a gap in their knowledge. But what if they lack so much knowledge about, say, the Georgia Bulldogs, that they’ve got more of an abyss than a gap? In that case, you have to fill in enough knowledge to make the abyss into a gap. Arledge set the scene, showed the local fans, panned across the campus. He talked up the emotions, the rivalries, the histories. By the
time the game started, some viewers had begun to care who won. Others were riveted.

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.

Many teachers use some version of the Arledge tool kit to prime their students’ interest. Some label the strategy “advanced organizers.” The idea is that to engage students in a new topic you should start by highlighting some things they already know. An earth-science teacher might ask her students to bring in pictures of an earthquake’s devastation, as a way of leading up to a discussion of plate tectonics. Alternatively, the teacher can set the context, à la Arledge, so that students start to become interested. A chemistry teacher might lead into the periodic table of elements by discussing Mendeleyev and his long, passionate quest to organize the elements. In this way, the periodic table emerges from within the context of a sort of detective story.

Knowledge gaps create interest. 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.

Treasure maps, as shown in the movies, are vague. They show a few key landmarks and a big
X
where the treasure is. Usually the adventurer knows just enough to find the first landmark, which becomes the first step in a long journey toward the treasure. If treasure maps were produced on MapQuest.com, with door-to-door directions, it would kill the adventure-movie genre. 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.

Unexpected ideas, by opening a knowledge gap, tease and flirt. They mark a big red
X
on something that needs to be discovered but don’t necessarily tell you how to get there. And, as we’ll see, a red
X
of spectacular size can end up driving the actions of thousands of people for many years.

In the rubble of Tokyo after World War II, a young company, later named Sony, struggled to stay in business. It attracted a handful of smart scientists and engineers, but its first innovation, an electric rice cooker, was a failure. Initially, Sony survived by repairing shortwave radios.

Around this time, Masaru Ibuka, Sony’s lead technologist, became intrigued by transistors, which had recently been invented by a team at Bell Laboratories. Ibuka craved a “substantial” project to motivate his team of fifty scientists and engineers, and he saw tremendous promise in transistors. But when he bid to license the technology from
Bell Labs, the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry denied the license. It was skeptical of the young company’s ability to manage such a cutting-edge technology.

In 1953, Ibuka secured permission to license transistors. He had a vision for a radio that would be based on transistors. The advantage of a transistor radio was obvious to engineers; it would free radios from the big vacuum tubes that made them so bulky and unreliable. Bell Labs told Ibuka that it didn’t think a “transistor radio” was possible. His engineers began to pursue the vision anyway.

Let’s pause here for a moment to put ourselves in Ibuka’s shoes. Your company has been struggling, and you’ve got a team of brilliant people whom you need to inspire. You have the potential to lead them in one hundred different directions—rice cookers or radios or telephones or whatever else R & D could dream up. But you’re convinced that the idea of a transistor-based radio is the most promising path.

Your core message, then, is the dream of a transistor radio. How do you make this message unexpected? How do you engage the curiosity and interest of your team? The concept of a “transistor radio” is probably not enough, in and of itself, to motivate your team. It’s focused more on technology than on value. A transistor radio—so what?

What about tapping into some of the classic managerial themes? Competition: “Sony will beat Bell Labs in making a transistor radio work.” Quality: “Sony will be the world’s most respected manufacturer of radios.” Innovation: “Sony will create the most advanced radios in the world.”

Here’s the idea Ibuka proposed to his team: a “pocketable radio.”

It’s hard, in retrospect, to comprehend the hubris of that idea—how utterly unexpected, how preposterous, it must have seemed the first time a Sony engineer heard it. Radios were not things you put into your pocket; they were pieces of furniture. At the time, radio factories employed full-time cabinetmakers.

Furthermore, the idea that an upstart Japanese company would deliver such an innovation, when the brilliant minds at Bell Labs thought it impossible, was not credible. After all, the 1950s were a decade when “Made in Japan” was synonymous with shoddy workmanship.

But Sony engineers were talented and hungry. Ibuka’s idea of a pocketable radio caught on internally and drove Sony through an incredible period of growth. By 1957, Sony had grown to 1,200 employees. In March 1957, just four years after Sony was grudgingly granted permission to tinker with transistors, the company released the TR-55, the world’s first pocketable transistor radio. The TR-55 sold 1.5 million units and put Sony on the world map.

A “pocketable radio”—isn’t this simply a brilliant product idea, rather than a brilliant “sticky idea”? No, it is both, and both elements are indispensable. There’s no question that someone in the world would have invented a transistor radio, even if Ibuka had decided to build the world’s fanciest rice cooker. Transistor radios were an inevitable technological progression. But the first transistor radios were nowhere near pocket-sized, and without Ibuka’s unexpected idea his engineers might have stopped pursuing the technology long before it became small enough to be useful. Ibuka inspired years of effort because he came up with an unexpected idea that challenged hundreds of engineers to do their best work.