Made to Stick (15 page)

Memory, then, is not like a single filing cabinet. It is more like Velcro. If you look at the two sides of Velcro material, you’ll see that one is covered with thousands of tiny hooks and the other is covered
with thousands of tiny loops. When you press the two sides together, a huge number of hooks get snagged inside the loops, and that’s what causes Velcro to seal.

Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory. Your childhood home has a gazillion hooks in your brain. A new credit card number has one, if it’s lucky.

Great teachers have a knack for multiplying the hooks in a particular idea. A teacher from Iowa named Jane Elliott once designed a message so powerful—tapping into so many different aspects of emotion and memory—that, twenty years later, her students still remember it vividly.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated on April 4, 1968. The next day, Jane Elliott, an elementary-school teacher in Iowa, found herself trying to explain his death to her classroom of third-graders. In the all-white town of Riceville, Iowa, students were familiar with King but could not understand who would want him dead, or why.

Elliott said, “I knew it was time to deal with this in a concrete way, because we’d
talked
about discrimination since the first day of school. But the shooting of Martin Luther King, one of our ‘Heroes of the Month’ two months earlier, couldn’t be explained to little third-graders in Riceville, Iowa.”

She came to class the next day with a plan: She aimed to make prejudice tangible to her students. At the start of class, she divided the students into two groups: brown-eyed kids and blue-eyed kids. She then made a shocking announcement: Brown-eyed kids were superior to blue-eyed kids—“They’re the better people in this room.” The groups were separated: Blue-eyed kids were forced to sit at the back of the classroom. Brown-eyed kids were told that they were smarter.
They were given extra time at recess. The blue-eyed kids had to wear special collars, so that everyone would know their eye color from a distance. The two groups were not allowed to mix at recess.

Elliott was shocked at how quickly the class was transformed. “I watched those kids turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating third-graders … it was ghastly,” she said. “Friendships seemed to dissolve instantly, as brown-eyed kids taunted their blue-eyed former friends. One brown-eyed student asked Elliott how she could be the teacher “if you’ve got dem blue eyes.”

At the start of class the following day, Elliott walked in and announced that she had been wrong. It was actually the
brown-eyed
children who were inferior. This reversal of fortune was embraced instantly. A shout of glee went up from the blue-eyed kids as they ran to place their collars on their lesser, brown-eyed counterparts.

On the day when they were in the inferior group, students described themselves as sad, bad, stupid, and mean. “When we were down,” one boy said, his voice cracking, “it felt like everything bad was happening to us.” When they were on top, the students felt happy, good, and smart.

Even their performance on academic tasks changed. One of the reading exercises was a phonics card pack that the kids were supposed to go through as quickly as possible. The first day, when the blue-eyed kids were on the bottom, it took them 5.5 minutes. On the second day, when they were on top, it took 2.5 minutes. “Why couldn’t you go this fast yesterday?” Elliott asked. One blue-eyed girl said, “We had those collars on….” Another student chimed in, “We couldn’t stop thinking about those collars.”

Elliott’s simulation made prejudice concrete—brutally concrete. It also had an enduring impact on the students’ lives. Studies conducted ten and twenty years later showed that Elliott’s students were significantly less prejudiced than their peers who had not been through the exercise.

Students still remember the simulation vividly. A fifteen-year
reunion of Elliott’s students broadcast on the PBS series
Frontline
revealed how deeply it had moved them. Ray Hansen, remembering the way his understanding changed from one day to the next, said, “It was one of the most profound learning experiences I’ve ever had.” Sue Ginder Rolland said, “Prejudice has to be worked out young or it will be with you all your life. Sometimes I catch myself [discriminating], stop myself, think back to the third grade, and remember what it was like to be put down.”

Jane Elliott put hooks into the idea of prejudice. It would have been easy for her to treat the idea of prejudice the way other classroom ideas are treated—as an important but abstract bit of knowledge, like the capital of Kansas or the definition of “truth.” She could have treated prejudice as something to be learned, like the story of a World War II battle. Instead, Elliott turned prejudice into an
experience
. Think of the “hooks” involved: The sight of a friend suddenly sneering at you. The feel of a collar around your neck. The despair at feeling inferior. The shock you get when you look at your own eyes in the mirror. This experience put so many hooks into the students’ memories that, decades later, it could not be forgotten.

Jane Elliott’s simulation of prejudice is compelling evidence of the power of concreteness. But if concreteness is so powerful, why do we slip so easily into abstraction?

The reason is simple: because the difference between an expert and a novice is the ability to think abstractly. New jurors are struck by lawyers’ personalities and factual details and courtroom rituals. Meanwhile, judges weigh the current case against the abstract lessons of past cases and legal precedent. Biology students try to remember whether reptiles lay eggs or not. Biology teachers think in terms of the grand system of animal taxonomy.

Novices perceive concrete details as concrete details. Experts perceive concrete details as symbols of patterns and insights that they have learned through years of experience. And, because they are capable of
seeing
a higher level of insight, they naturally want to talk on a higher level. They want to talk about chess strategies, not about bishops moving diagonally.

And here is where our classic villain, the Curse of Knowledge, inserts itself. A researcher named Beth Bechky studied a manufacturing firm that designed and built the complicated machinery used to produce silicon chips. To build such machinery, the firm needed two sets of skills: engineers who could create brilliant designs, and skilled manufacturing people who could transform those designs into complex physical machines.

If the firm was to succeed, these two sets of people had to be able to communicate smoothly. But, not surprisingly, they spoke different languages. The engineers tended to think abstractly—they spent their day agonizing over drawings and blueprints. The manufacturing team, on the other hand, tended to think on a physical level—they spent their day building machines.

What’s most revealing for the Curse of Knowledge is what happened when something went wrong on the manufacturing floor. The manufacturing folks would sometimes run into a problem—something didn’t fit or perhaps wasn’t receiving enough power. The manufacturers would bring the problem to the engineers, and the engineers would immediately get to work. Specifically, they’d get to work
fixing their drawings
.

For example, the manufacturing team might find a part that didn’t fit on the machine. When the team showed the part to the engineers, they wanted to pull out the blueprints and move things around on the drawing. In other words, the engineers instinctively wanted to jump to a higher level of abstraction.

The engineers, Bechky found, made their drawings “increasingly
elaborate” in the hope that the enhanced drawings would clarify the process for the manufacturers. Over time, the drawings became more abstract, which further hampered communication.

The engineers were behaving like American tourists who travel to foreign countries and try to make themselves understood by speaking English more slowly and loudly. They were suffering from the Curse of Knowledge. They had lost the ability to imagine what it was like to look at a technical drawing from the perspective of a nonexpert.

The manufacturing people were thinking,
Why don’t you just come down to the factory floor and show me where the part should go?
And the engineering people were thinking,
What do I need to do to make the drawings better?

The miscommunication has a quality that is familiar, no doubt, to many readers who don’t work on silicon chip—making machinery. So how do you fix it? Should both parties learn greater empathy for the other and, in essence, meet in the middle? Actually, no. The solution is for the engineers to change their behavior. Why? As Bechky notes, the physical machine was the most effective and relevant domain of communication.
Everyone
understands the machines fluently. Therefore problems should be solved at the level of the machine.

It’s easy to lose awareness that we’re talking like an expert. We start to suffer from the Curse of Knowledge, like the tappers in the “tappers and listeners” game. It can feel unnatural to speak concretely about subject matter we’ve known intimately for years. But if we’re willing to make the effort we’ll see the rewards: Our audience will understand what we’re saying and remember it.

The moral of this story is not to “dumb things down.” The manufacturing people faced complex problems and they needed smart answers. Rather, the moral of the story is to find a “universal language,” one that everyone speaks fluently. Inevitably, that universal language will be concrete.

In the last chapter, we closed with two unexpected slogans that were used to motivate and coordinate large groups of smart people. The slogans were challenges to build a “pocketable radio” and to “put a man on the moon within the decade.” Notice that these slogans are also pleasingly concrete. It is doubtful that Japanese engineers were paralyzed with uncertainty about their mission, or that much time was spent at NASA quibbling about the meaning of “man,” “moon,” or “decade.”

Concreteness makes targets transparent. Even experts need transparency. Consider a software start-up whose goal is to build “the next great search engine.” Within the start-up are two programmers with nearly identical knowledge, working in neighboring cubes. To one “the next great search engine” means completeness, ensuring that the search engine returns everything on the Web that might be relevant, no matter how obscure. To the other it means speed, ensuring pretty good results very fast. Their efforts will not be fully aligned until the goal is made concrete.

When Boeing prepared to launch the design of the 727 passenger plane in the 1960s, its managers set a goal that was deliberately concrete: The 727 must seat 131 passengers, fly nonstop from Miami to New York City, and land on Runway 4-22 at La Guardia. (The 4-22 runway was chosen for its length—less than a mile, which was much too short for any of the existing passenger jets.) With a goal this concrete, Boeing effectively coordinated the actions of thousands of experts in various aspects of engineering or manufacturing. Imagine how much harder it would have been to build a 727 whose goal was to be “the best passenger plane in the world.”

Stone Yamashita Partners, a small consulting firm in San Francisco, was founded by Robert Stone and Keith Yamashita, former Apple creatives.
Stone Yamashita is a master of using concrete techniques to help organizations create change. “Almost everything we do is visceral and visual,” Keith Yamashita says. The “product” of most consulting firms is often a PowerPoint presentation. At Stone Yamashita, it’s much more likely to be a simulation, an event, or a creative installation.

Around 2002, Stone Yamashita was approached by Hewlett-Packard (HP). HP’s top management team hoped to win a partnership with Disney, and they asked Stone Yamashita to help prepare a proposal that would highlight HP research, and show how it could help Disney run its theme parks.

HP, like many technology firms, generates great research in its laboratories, but that research isn’t always translated into tangible physical products. Researchers get excited about pushing the boundaries of a technology, making products that are complex and sophisticated, while customers generally seek out products that are easy and reliable. The desires of researchers and customers don’t always dovetail.

The “presentation” that Stone Yamashita designed was an exhibit that filled 6,000 square feet. Yamashita describes the gist: “We invented a fictitious family called the Ferraris, three generations of them, and built an exhibit about their life and their visit to Disney World.”

Walking into the exhibit, you began in the Ferraris’ living room, furnished with family photos. Each subsequent room followed the Ferraris through various scenes of their Disney World vacation. HP technology helped them buy tickets, sped their entry into the park, and scheduled their reservations for dinner. Another bit of technology helped them enjoy their favorite rides while minimizing waiting time. Back inside their hotel room at the end of the day, there was a final twist: A digital picture frame had automatically downloaded a picture of them as they rode a Disney World roller coaster.

Stone Yamashita, working with HP’s engineers, turned a message about the benefits of collaboration—what could have been a Power-Point presentation—into a living, breathing simulation. Stone Yamashita
put hooks into the idea of e-services. They took an abstract idea and made it concrete with an intense sensory experience.

Note that there were two different audiences for the exhibit. The first audience was Disney. Disney’s execs were the “novices”—they needed to be shown, in tangible terms, what HP’s technology could do for them. Then there were HP’s employees, particularly the engineers. They were far from novices. Many engineers had been skeptical about the value of Yamashita’s demos. Once the exhibit opened, however, it produced tremendous enthusiasm within HP. It was initially intended to stay up long enough to make the Disney pitch, but, because it was so popular, it remained for three or four months afterward. One observer said, “It became very viral in that others began to ask, ‘Did you see that great thing that the labs team did? Did you know that we could do this? Did you know that they did it in only twenty-eight days?’”