Made to Stick (13 page)

In May 1961, John F. Kennedy gave a speech to a special session of Congress. It was a time when the Cold War dominated global politics. The Cold War allowed for few ways to measure success—to record gains and losses—but, in one highly visible field, the United States was clearly lagging behind. That field was space.

Four years earlier, the United States—which had prided itself as the most technologically advanced nation—was stunned when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite. The United States eventually responded with its own satellite launches, but the Soviet Union maintained its lead, racking up first after first. In April 1961,

Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard followed a month later.

In Kennedy’s address to Congress, he outlined a series of requests to help the United States maintain its leadership during the Cold War. He asked for funds to achieve a number of strategic goals: to establish the AID program for international development, to expand the NATO alliance, to build radio and television stations in Latin America and Southeast Asia, and to shore up civil defense.

But he ended the speech on a curious note. His final proposal had nothing to do with international aid or civil defense. It was this: “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 … if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will not be one man going to the moon, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.”

Two unexpected ideas. Both create surprise. Radios are pieces of furniture, not something to slip into a pocket. Men don’t walk on the moon. It’s a long way up. The air is thin.

Both create insight. Rather than leading us along a plodding route from one incremental step to the next, the ideas give us a sudden, dramatic glimpse of how the world might unfold. And not just how but why.

Both create knowledge gaps. Loewenstein, the author of the gap theory, says it’s important to remember that knowledge gaps are painful. “If people
like
curiosity, why do they work to resolve it?” he asks. “Why don’t they put mystery novels down before the last chapter, or turn off the television before the final inning of a close ball game?”

Both of these unexpected ideas set up big knowledge gaps—but not so big that they seemed insurmountable. Kennedy didn’t propose a “man on Mercury,” and Ibuka didn’t propose an “implantable radio.” Each goal was audacious and provocative, but not paralyzing. Any engineer who heard the “man on the moon” speech must have
begun brainstorming immediately: “Well, first we’d need to solve this problem, then we’d need to develop this technology, then …”

The vision of a pocketable radio sustained a company through a tricky period of growth and led it to become an internationally recognized player in technology. The vision of a man on the moon sustained tens of thousands of separate individuals, in dozens of organizations, for almost a decade. These are big, powerful, sticky ideas.

When we’re skeptical about our ability to get people’s attention, or our ability to keep people’s attention, we should draw inspiration from Kennedy and Ibuka. And, on a smaller scale, from Nora Ephron’s journalism teacher and Nordstrom’s managers. Unexpectedness, in the service of core principles, can have surprising longevity.

CONCRETE

T
he fable above, “The Fox and the Grapes,” was written by Aesop. According to Herodotus, he was a slave (though he was later freed). Aesop authored some of the stickiest stories in world history. We’ve all heard his greatest hits: “The Tortoise and the Hare,” “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” “The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs,” “The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing,” and many more. If any story told in this book is still circulating a few millennia from now, odds are it will be “The Fox and the Grapes.”

Even English speakers who’ve never heard “The Fox and the Grapes” will recognize the phrase “sour grapes,” which encapsulates
the moral of the story. Aesop’s lesson has traveled the world. In Hungary, people say
savanyu a szolo
—“sour grapes” in Hungarian. In China, they say, “Grapes are sour because you cannot reach them.” In Sweden, a little local color was added; the Swedish expression
Surt sa räven om rönnbären
means “Sour, the fox said, about the rowanberries.”

Clearly, Aesop was illustrating a universal human shortcoming. The fable would not have survived for more than 2,500 years if it didn’t reflect some profound truth about human nature. But there are many profound truths that have not seeped into the day-to-day language and thinking of dozens of cultures. This truth is especially sticky because of the way it was
encoded
. The concrete images evoked by the fable—the grapes, the fox, the dismissive comment about sour grapes—allowed its message to persist. One suspects that the life span of Aesop’s ideas would have been shorter if they’d been encoded as
Aesop’s Helpful Suggestions—
“Don’t be such a bitter jerk when you fail.”

What the world needs is a lot more fables. On the Web, a satirical site features a “Business Buzzword Generator.” Readers can produce their own business buzzwords by combining one word each from three columns, which yields phrases like “reciprocal cost-based reengineering,” “customer-oriented visionary paradigm,” and “strategic logistical values.” (All of these sound eerily plausible as buzzwords, by the way.) Teachers have their own buzzwords: metacognitive skills, intrinsic motivation, portfolio assessment, developmentally appropriate, thematic learning. And if you’ve ever talked to a doctor, we don’t even have to provide examples. Our favorite from medicine: “idiopathic cardiomyopathy.” “Cardiomyopathy” means something is wrong with your heart, and “idiopathic” means “we have no idea why yours isn’t working.”

Language is often abstract, but
life
is not abstract. Teachers teach students about battles and animals and books. Doctors repair problems
with our stomachs, backs, and hearts. Companies create software, build planes, distribute newspapers; they build cars that are cheaper, faster, or fancier than last year’s. Even the most abstract business strategy must eventually show up in the tangible actions of human beings. It’s easier to understand those tangible actions than to understand an abstract strategy statement—just as it’s easier to understand a fox dissing some grapes than an abstract commentary about the human psyche.

Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in very different ways. Concreteness helps us avoid these problems. This is perhaps the most important lesson that Aesop can teach us.

For fifty years, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has helped protect environmentally precious areas in the world using the simplest possible method: It buys them. It buys land at market prices, making it offlimits to environmentally damaging uses, such as development or logging. This strategy has come to be known within TNC as “bucks and acres.” It had appeal to donors and benefactors, because the results of their gifts were so clear. A big gift bought a big piece of land. A small gift bought a small piece of land. As one donor commented, TNC produced “results you could walk around on.”

In 2002, Mike Sweeney, the COO of TNC California, was facing a big challenge. California is particularly important to TNC, because it contains so many environmentally critical areas. California is one of only five Mediterranean climate regions in the world. (The others are the
fynbos
of South Africa, the
matorral
of Chile, the
kwongan
of Australia, and, of course, the Mediterranean.) These Mediterranean climate zones occupy only 2 percent of the world’s landmass but host
more than 20 percent of its plant species. If you want to buy environmentally precious land, Mediterranean climates give you a lot of bang for your buck.

In 2002, Sweeney and his staff had taken a map of California and colored in the most environmentally sensitive areas, the areas worth preserving. Astonishingly, 40 percent of the map was colored. This was a non-starter: There weren’t enough bucks out there to buy that many acres.

Yet 9 percent of the state was classified as being in “critical danger.” Nine percent of California was still far too much to contemplate purchasing, but these regions were environmentally essential; TNC couldn’t simply give up on them.

TNC decided to implement some new approaches. “Bucks and acres” couldn’t succeed with this vast quantity of land. So instead of owning the land outright, TNC would ensure that the critical areas were
protected against damage
. The organization would pay landowners not to develop their land, buying what’s known as a “conservation easement.” It would work with local and state governments to change policies and encourage conservation of private and public land. It would focus on important marine areas, where there was no land to buy.

These new strategies made sense—TNC could protect more areas than it could reach through “bucks and acres.” But they also had drawbacks. First, they were much less concrete to donors. Donors can’t “walk around on” a favorable government regulation. Second, they were also potentially demoralizing for employees—they made progress less tangible. When TNC was focused on land deals, Sweeney said, “it was easy to celebrate a deal closing, to tell everyone, ‘John and Mary got this land,’ and to pat them on the back.” These “milestone moments,” so great for morale, were harder to find in the new model. How could TNC make the new strategy more concrete?

What would you do in this situation? Is there a way to recapture
the invaluable tangibility of the “bucks and acres” strategy in a context that was necessarily more ambiguous? You’ve got 40 percent (or at least 9 percent) of the state to protect, and you can’t buy it. How do you explain yourself to donors and partners?

Chip has discussed this case with his students at Stanford, and in grappling with the need for concreteness some students respond by breaking up the impossibly large scale of the challenge—40 percent of California! 9 percent in critical need!—by subdividing it into more tangible “subgoals.” For example: “We will protect a 2 percent chunk of California every year for twenty years.” Others try to invoke a unit of measurement that we can understand, such as the acre. Most people can visualize an acre. But the scale is too big: 2 percent of California is about two million acres. No one can picture two million acres.

The students are wisely trying to find a way to break up a big, abstract goal into smaller, more concrete subgoals. This is the right idea. But in this case the numbers are just too big. And “acreage” is not necessarily the best way to think. There are 1,500-acre plots of land that are more environmentally precious than other 90,000-acre plots. Thinking about “acreage per year” is akin to a museum curator thinking about “canvases per year,” without regard to period, style, or painter.

Here’s what TNC did: Instead of talking in terms of land area, it talked about a “landscape.” A landscape is a contiguous plot of land with unique, environmentally precious features. The TNC set a goal of preserving fifty
landscapes
—of which twenty-five were an immediate priority—over a ten-year period. Five landscapes per year sounds more realistic than 2 million acres per year, and it’s much more concrete.

To the east of Silicon Valley there is a set of brown hills that are the beginnings of a wilderness the size of Yosemite. The brown hills are an important watershed for the San Francisco Bay, but they are
quickly being chipped away by Silicon Valley sprawl. Although the area is important ecologically, it is not like the redwoods or the coast, with beautiful visuals that engage people’s imaginations. The hills are covered with grass interspersed with a few oak trees. Most of the year, the grass is brown. Sweeney admits that it’s not very sexy. Even local groups in the Silicon Valley area that were interested in protecting open spaces weren’t paying attention to the brown hills. But, says Sweeney, “We don’t go after stuff because it’s pretty. We go after it because it’s an ecologically important part of creation.”

TNC named the oak savanna the Mount Hamilton Wilderness (based on its highest peak, the site of a local observatory). Identifying the area as a coherent landscape and naming it put it on the map for local groups and policymakers. Before, Sweeney says, Silicon Valley groups wanted to protect important areas close to their homes, but they didn’t know where to start. “If you say, ‘There’s a really important area to the east of Silicon Valley,’ it’s just not exciting, because it’s not tangible. But when you say, ‘The Mount Hamilton Wilderness,’ their interest perks up.”