Made to Stick (31 page)
Authors: Chip Heath
Denning began to incorporate the story into conversations with colleagues, stressing why the World Bank ought to make knowledge
management a serious priority. Weeks later, he had an opportunity to speak to a committee of senior management. He’d have only ten to twelve minutes on the agenda. In that time he’d have to introduce a new organizational strategy and win the group’s endorsement. A tall order.
First, Denning set up the problem: the difficulties that the World Bank had experienced in pooling its knowledge and the sorry state of its information systems. Then, rather than doing what most people would have done—i.e., rehashing the discipline of knowledge management and quoting some authorities about the importance of knowledge management for the twenty-first century—Denning did something different. He told the Zambia story.
Immediately after the presentation, two executives raced up to Denning and began to bombard him with all the things he should be doing to get the program off the ground. Denning thought, “This is a very strange conversation. Up till ten minutes ago, these people weren’t willing to give me the time of day, and now I’m not doing enough to implement their idea. This is horrible! They’ve stolen my idea!” And then he had a happier thought. “How wonderful! They’ve stolen my idea. It’s become their idea!”
A
few years later, after Denning had left the World Bank, he devoted himself to spreading the lessons he’d learned about storytelling. In 2001, he wrote a very insightful book called
The Springboard
. Denning defines a springboard story as a story that lets people see how an existing problem might change. Springboard stories tell people about possibilities.
One major advantage of springboard stories is that they combat skepticism and create buy-in. Denning says that the idea of telling stories initially violated his intuition. He had always believed in the value of being direct, and he worried that stories were too ambiguous, too peripheral, too anecdotal. He thought, “Why not spell out the
message directly? Why go to the trouble and difficulty of trying to elicit the listener’s thinking indirectly, when it would be so much simpler if I come straight out in an abstract directive? Why not hit the listeners between the eyes?”
The problem is that when you hit listeners between the eyes they respond by fighting back. The way you deliver a message to them is a cue to how they should react. If you make an argument, you’re implicitly asking them to evaluate your argument—judge it, debate it, criticize it—and then argue back, at least in their minds. But with a story, Denning argues, you engage the audience—you are involving people with the idea, asking them to participate with you.
Denning talks about engaging the “little voice inside the head,” the voice that would normally debate the speaker’s points. “The conventional view of communication is to ignore the little voice inside the head and hope it stays quiet and that the message will somehow get through,” Denning says. But he has a different recommendation: “Don’t ignore the little voice…. Instead,
work in harmony
with it. Engage it by giving it something to do. Tell a story in a way that elicits a second story from the little voice.”
In addition to creating buy-in, springboard stories mobilize people to act. Stories focus people on potential solutions. Telling stories with visible goals and barriers shifts the audience into a problem-solving mode. Clearly, the amount of “problem-solving” we do varies across stories. We don’t watch
Titanic
and start brainstorming about improved iceberg-spotting systems. But we do empathize with the main characters and start cheering them on when they confront their problems: “Look out behind you!” “Tell him off now!” “Don’t open that door!”
But springboard stories go beyond having us problem-solve for the main character. A springboard story helps us problem-solve for ourselves. A springboard story is an exercise in mass customization—each audience member uses the story as a springboard to slightly different destinations.
After Denning told the Zambia story, one of the executives at the meeting took the idea of knowledge management to the president of the World Bank, arguing that it was the future of the organization. Denning was invited to present his ideas to the bank’s top leaders, including the president. By the end of the year, the president had announced that knowledge management was one of the bank’s top priorities.
We started the chapter with the nurse story, which comes from the researcher Gary Klein. Klein tells another story that provides a good summary of the ground we’ve covered.
The organizer of a conference once asked Klein’s firm to sum up the results of a conference. The organizer wanted a useful summary of the conference—more compact than a transcript and more coherent than an idiosyncratic collection of the presenters’ PowerPoint slides.
Klein’s firm assigned one person to monitor each of the conference’s five parallel tracks. The monitors attended each panel, and each time someone told a story they jotted it down. At the end of the conference, the monitors compared notes and found that, as Klein said, they had compiled a set of stories that were “funny, and tragic, and exciting.” The group structured and organized the stories and sent the packet to the conference organizer.
She was ecstatic. She found the packet much more vivid and useful than the typical conference takeaway: a set of dry, jargon-filled abstracts. She even requested funds from her organization to convert the notes into a book. Meanwhile, as a courtesy, she sent the summary notes to all of the conference presenters.
They were furious. They were insulted to have the stories scooped out of their overall structure—they didn’t want to be remembered as people who told a bunch of stories and anecdotes. They felt that
they’d invested countless hours into distilling their experiences into a series of recommendations. Indeed, their abstracts—which had been submitted to the conference organizers—were filled with tidbits of wisdom, such as “Keep the lines of communication open” and “Don’t wait too long when problems are building up.”
Klein said, “We want to explain to them how meaningless these slogans are in contrast to stories, such as the one that showed
how
they had kept the lines of communication open during a difficult incident in which a plant was shut down.” But the presenters were adamant, and the project was abandoned.
This story is one of our favorites in the book, because the dynamics are so clear. We’re not trying to portray the presenters as bad, idea-hating people. Put yourself in their shoes. You’ve created this amazing presentation, summarizing years of your work, and your goal is to help people master a complex structure that you’ve spent years constructing. You’ve erected an amazing intellectual edifice! Then Klein’s crew approaches your edifice, plucks a few bricks out of the wall, and tries to pass them off as the sum of all your labors. The nerve!
The problem, of course, is that it’s impossible to transfer an edifice in a ninety-minute presentation. The best you can do is convey some building blocks. But you can’t pluck building blocks from the roof, which is exactly what you’re doing with a recommendation like “Keep the lines of communication open.”
Suppose you’re a manager at Nordstrom, addressing a conference of your peers. The final slide in your presentation might read, “Lessons from Nordstrom: In retail, outstanding customer service is a key source of competitive advantage.” While discussing your fourth slide you might have mentioned, as a humorous aside, the Nordie who gift-wrapped a present bought at Macy’s. These jokers from Klein’s firm want to keep your gift-wrapping story but drop your punch line. And they’re absolutely right.
In the “Simple” and “Unexpected” chapters, we said that good messages must move from common sense to uncommon sense. In contrast, there’s nothing
but
common sense in recommendations such as “Keep the lines of communication open” and “Don’t wait too long when problems are building up.” (Klein comments that these lessons are presumably designed for people who would rather close lines of communication and sit around when they’re facing a daunting problem.)
Once again, the Curse of Knowledge has bewitched these presenters. When they share their lessons—“Keep the lines of communication open”—they’re hearing a song, filled with passion and emotion, inside their heads. They’re remembering the experiences that taught them those lessons—the struggles, the political battles, the missteps, the pain. They are tapping. But they forget that the audience can’t hear the same tune they hear.
Stories can almost single-handedly defeat the Curse of Knowledge. In fact, they naturally embody most of the SUCCESs framework. Stories are almost always Concrete. Most of them have Emotional and Unexpected elements. The hardest part of using stories effectively is making sure that they’re Simple—that they reflect your core message. It’s not enough to tell a great story; the story has to reflect your agenda. You don’t want a general lining up his troops before battle to tell a Connection plot story.
Stories have the amazing dual power to simulate and to inspire. And most of the time we don’t even have to use much creativity to harness these powers—we just need to be ready to spot the good ones that life generates every day.
WHAT STICKSS
ometimes ideas stick despite our best efforts to stop them. In 1946, Leo Durocher was the coach of the Dodgers. His club was leading the National League, while the team’s traditional archrival, the New York Giants, was languishing in the bottom of the standings.
During a game between the Dodgers and the Giants, Durocher was mocking the Giants in front of a group of sportswriters. One of the sportswriters teased Durocher, “Why don’t you be a nice guy for a change?” Durocher pointed at the Giants’ dugout and said, “Nice guys! Look over there. Do you know a nicer guy than [Giants’ manager] Mel Ott? Or any of the other Giants? Why, they’re the nicest guys in the world! And where are they? In seventh place!”
As recounted by Ralph Keyes in his book on misquotations,
Nice Guys Finish Seventh
, the metamorphosis of Durocher’s quote began a year later. The
Baseball Digest
quoted Durocher as saying, “Nice guys finish in last place in the second division.” Before long, as his quip was passed along from one person to another, it evolved, becoming simpler and more universal, until it emerged as a cynical comment on life: “Nice guys finish last.” No more reference to the
Giants, no more reference to seventh place—in fact, no more reference to baseball at all. Nice guys finish last.
This quote, polished by the marketplace of ideas, irked Durocher. For years, he denied saying the phrase (and, of course, he was right), but eventually he gave up.
Nice Guys Finish Last
was the title of his autobiography.
O
ne of the most famous misquotations of all time is attributed to the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” This seems hard to believe—the quote is perfectly suited to our schema of Holmes. In fact, if you asked someone to name one Sherlock Holmes quote, this would be it. His most famous quote is the one he never said.
Why did this nonexistent quote stick? It’s not hard to imagine what must have happened. Holmes frequently said, “My dear Watson,” and he often said, “Elementary.” A natural mistake, for someone inclined to quote from a Holmes mystery, would be to combine the two. And, like an adaptive biological mutation, the newly combined quote was such an improvement that it couldn’t help but spread. This four-word quotation, after all, contains the essence of Holmes: the brilliant detective never too busy to condescend to his faithful sidekick.
I
n the “Simple” chapter, we told the story of the 1992 Clinton campaign and Carville’s famous proverb, “It’s the economy, stupid.” We mentioned that this proverb was one of three phrases that Carville wrote on a whiteboard. Here’s a trivia question: What were the other two?
The other two phrases were “Change vs. more of the same” and “Don’t forget health care.” Those phrases didn’t stick. So should
Carville have been pleased with the success of “It’s the economy, stupid” as an idea? On the one hand, his phrase resonated so strongly that it became a powerful tool in framing the election. On the other hand, he got only one third of his message across!
We bring up these examples because, in making ideas stick, the audience gets a vote. The audience may change the meaning of your idea, as happened with Durocher. The audience may actually improve your idea, as was the case with Sherlock Holmes. Or the audience may retain some of your ideas and jettison others, as with Carville.
All of us tend to have a lot of “idea pride.” We want our message to endure in the form we designed. Durocher’s response, when the audience shaped his idea, was to deny, deny, deny … then eventually accept.
The question we have to ask ourselves in any situation is this: Is the audience’s version of my message still core? In Chapter 1 (“Simple”), we discussed the importance of focusing on core messages—honing in on the most important truths that we need to communicate. If the world takes our ideas and changes them—or accepts some and discards others—all we need to decide is whether the mutated versions are still core. If they are—as with “It’s the economy, stupid”—then we should humbly embrace the audience’s judgment. Ultimately, the test of our success as idea creators isn’t whether people mimic our exact words, it’s whether we achieve our goals.
Carville, Durocher, and Arthur Conan Doyle were all creators of ideas. They produced ideas from scratch. But let’s not forget that it’s just as effective to spot sticky ideas as it is to create them.
Think about Nordstrom. You can’t very well create from scratch a bunch of stories about sales reps cheerfully gift-wrapping presents
from Macy’s. But when you come across a real story like that, you’ve got to be alert to the idea’s potential. And this isn’t as easy as it sounds.
The barrier to idea-spotting is that we tend to process anecdotes differently than abstractions. If a Nordstrom manager is hit with an abstraction, such as “Increase customer satisfaction scores by 10 percent this quarter,” that abstraction kicks in the managerial mentality: How do we get there from here? But a story about a tire-chain-exchanging, cold-car-warming sales rep provokes a different way of thinking. It will likely be filed away with other kinds of day-to-day personal news—interesting but ultimately trivial, like the fact that John Robison shaved his head or James Schlueter showed up late seven days in a row. In some sense, there’s a wall in our minds separating the little picture—stories, for instance—from the big picture. Spotting requires us to tear down that wall.
How do we tear down the wall? As a rough analogy, think about the way we buy gifts for loved ones. If we know that Christmas or a birthday is approaching, there’s a little nagging process that opens up in our minds, reminding us that “Dad is a gadget guy, so keep an eye out for cool gadgets.” It’s barely conscious, but if we happen upon a Retractable Roto-Laser-Light on December 8, chances are we’ll immediately spot it as a possible fit for Dad.
The analogy to the idea world is maintaining a deeply ingrained sense of the core message that we want to communicate. Just as we can put on Dad Gift Glasses, allowing us to view merchandise from his perspective, we can also put on Core Idea Glasses, allowing us to filter incoming ideas from that perspective. If you’re a Nordstrom manager, obsessed with improving customer service, this filter helps you spot the warming-cars episode as a symbol of perfection, rather than as an interesting anecdote.
In the Introduction, we debunked the common assumption that you need natural creative genius to cook up a great idea. You don’t. But, beyond that, it’s crucial to realize that creation, period, is unnecessary.
Think of the ideas in this book that were spotted rather than created: Nordies. Jared. The mystery of Saturn’s rings. Pam Laffin, the smoking antiauthority. The nurse who ignored the heart monitor, listened with her stethoscope, and saved the baby’s life. If you’re a great spotter, you’ll always trump a great creator. Why? Because the world will always produce more great ideas than any single individual, even the most creative one.
Each year in the second session of Chip’s “Making Ideas Stick” class at Stanford, the students participate in an exercise, a kind of testable credential to show what kinds of messages stick and don’t stick. The students are given some data from a government source on crime patterns in the United States. Half of them are asked to make a one-minute persuasive speech to convince their peers that nonviolent crime is a serious problem in this country. The other half are asked to take the position that it’s not particularly serious.
Stanford students, as you’d expect, are smart. They also tend to be quick thinkers and good communicators. No one in the room ever gives a poor speech.
The students divide into small groups and each one gives a one-minute speech while the others listen. After each speech, the listeners rate the speaker: How impressive was the delivery? How persuasive?
What happens, invariably, is that the most polished speakers get the highest ratings. Students who are poised, smooth, and charismatic are rated at the top of the class. No surprise, right? Good speakers score well in speaking contests.
The surprise comes next. The exercise appears to be over; in fact, Chip often plays a brief
Monty Python
clip to kill a few minutes and distract the students. Then, abruptly, he asks them to pull out a sheet of paper and write down, for each speaker they heard, every single idea that they remember.
The students are flabbergasted at how little they remember. Keep in mind that only ten minutes have elapsed since the speeches were given. Nor was there a huge volume of information to begin with—at most, they’ve heard eight one-minute speeches. And yet the students are lucky to recall one or two ideas from each speaker’s presentation. Many draw a complete blank on some speeches—unable to remember a single concept.
In the average one-minute speech, the typical student uses 2.5 statistics. Only one student in ten tells a story. Those are the speaking statistics. The “remembering” statistics, on the other hand, are almost a mirror image: When students are asked to recall the speeches, 63 percent remember the stories. Only 5 percent remember any individual statistic.
Furthermore, almost no correlation emerges between “speaking talent” and the ability to make ideas stick. The people who were captivating speakers typically do no better than others in making their ideas stick. Foreign students—whose less-polished English often leaves them at the bottom of the speaking-skills rankings—are suddenly on a par with native speakers. The stars of stickiness are the students who made their case by telling stories, or by tapping into emotion, or by stressing a single point rather than ten. There is no question that a ringer—a student who came into the exercise having read this book—would squash the other students. A community college student for whom English is a second language could easily outperform unwitting Stanford graduate students.
Why can’t these smart, talented speakers make their ideas stick? A few of the villains discussed in this book are implicated. The first villain is the natural tendency to bury the lead—to get lost in a sea of information. One of the worst things about knowing a lot, or having access to a lot of information, is that we’re tempted to share it all. High school teachers will tell you that when students write research papers they feel obligated to include every unearthed fact, as though the value were in the quantity of data amassed rather than in its pur
pose or clarity. Stripping out information, in order to focus on the core, is not instinctual.
The second villain is the tendency to focus on the presentation rather than on the message. Public speakers naturally want to appear composed, charismatic, and motivational. And, certainly, charisma will help a properly designed message stick better. But all the charisma in the world won’t save a dense, unfocused speech, as some Stanford students learn the hard way.
There are two other key villains in the book that the Stanford students don’t have to wrestle with. The first is decision paralysis—the anxiety and irrationality that can emerge from excessive choice or ambiguous situations. Think about the students who missed both a fantastic lecture and a great film because they couldn’t decide which one was better, or how hard it was for Jeff Hawkins, the leader of the Palm Pilot development group, to get his team to focus on a few issues rather than on many.
To beat decision paralysis, communicators have to do the hard work of finding the core. Lawyers must stress one or two points in their closing arguments, not ten. A teacher’s lesson plans may contain fifty concepts to share with her students, but in order to be effective that teacher must devote most of her efforts to making the most critical two or three stick. Managers must share proverbs—”Names, names, and names” or “THE low-fare airline”—that help employees wring decisions out of ambiguous situations.
The archvillain of sticky ideas, as you know by now, is the Curse of Knowledge. The Stanford students didn’t face the Curse of Knowledge because the data on crime was brand-new to them—they were more akin to reporters trying to avoid burying the lead on a news story than to experts who have forgotten what it’s like not to know something.
The Curse of Knowledge is a worthy adversary, because in some
sense it’s inevitable. Getting a message across has two stages: the Answer stage and the Telling Others stage. In the Answer stage, you use your expertise to arrive at the idea that you want to share. Doctors study for a decade to be capable of giving the Answer. Business managers may deliberate for months to arrive at the Answer.
Here’s the rub: The same factors that worked to your advantage in the Answer stage will backfire on you during the Telling Others stage. To get the Answer, you need expertise, but you can’t dissociate expertise from the Curse of Knowledge. You know things that others don’t know, and you can’t remember what it was like not to know those things. So when you get around to sharing the Answer, you’ll tend to communicate
as if your audience were you
.