How to make your idea stick: it takes more than knowledge to craft a memorable message

Information Outlook, Nov, 2006

If you have important information to communicate--say, about the value of your position to your organization--you want to make sure your audience remembers it. You want to make it stick. Charts, graphs, and tables of statistics may not be the best way to get others to notice and remember what you have to say.

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In their new book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath illustrate the differences between sticky and unsticky ideas and show readers how to make their messages stand out.

Chip--who will keynote the SLA Leadership Summit in January--recently spoke about the book with Information Outlook.

Why do information professionals need to worry about "sticky" ideas?

A "sticky idea" is one that people can understand, remember, and act on. But creating sticky ideas is not easy for professionals. Research has shown that professionals of all kinds have a problem with the "Curse of Knowledge."

The Curse of Knowledge happens regularly to experts who know enough to find an answer. They may be engineers solving an engineering problem. They may be doctors solving a medical problem. Experts are great at coming up with solutions, but our very expertise cripples us in our ability to communicate our solution to other people.

If you've ever talked to an IT person about what's wrong with your computer, you've been on the other side of the Curse of Knowledge. The IT person knows exactly what they're talking about, but we're sitting there listening to a fog of confusing, abstract, disconnected information.

As information professionals, you all are experts and it's important for you to understand that you may be prone to the Curse of Knowledge when you're dealing with your field. You have important ideas to share, so you want to be conscious about how you share them.

How do you overcome the "Curse of Knowledge" and make an idea "sticky"?

In the book, we talk about six principles that characterize all sticky ideas--ranging from urban legends or proverbs to scientific theories and important political ideas. It turns out that all these very different sticky ideas share a few properties in common.

One of the most important properties, for example, is that sticky ideas are concrete. Urban legends and fables are all about concrete characters taking concrete action. Take the story about the fox who is trying to reach the grapes. When he can't reach them, he walks away muttering, "I bet they were sour anyway." That's a fable that Aesop wrote over 2,000 years ago, but it captures a kind of human behavior that we see time and time again. In fact, in dozens of cultures across the world, there is a version of the phrase that we say in English, "sour grapes." We all occasionally disparage things we can't have, and Aesop captures that tendency in a concrete story. The concreteness makes it stick.

Similarly most scientific theories succeed because someone comes up with a tangible demonstration of the abstract theory. Einstein's theory of relativity didn't catch on until a famous concrete experiment that showed starlight bent during an eclipse in exactly the way he predicted.

The trick for us, when we're getting our ideas across, especially as professionals, is to move from the abstract level that we use to think about the world, down into a very concrete example that someone else might understand. "Information" is intangible. We should always paint a concrete picture for the people we're trying to help about how they might use that information.

What are some of the other characteristics of sticky ideas?

Another principle is turning things into stories. Librarians constantly have to justify a return on investment for their services: "How do I justify my existence when it comes time to budget time?"

One of my favorite examples in the book is about a guy named Steven Denning at the World Bank. At one point, he was put in charge of knowledge management at the World Bank. He started going around talking to people about knowledge management, and their first reaction was, "We don't do knowledge. We're a bank, we loan money."

After beating his head against that wall for a while, he found himself getting more traction when he would actually tell a simple story about what knowledge management could do. Here's his story: "In 1995 in Kamana, Zambia, a health worker logged on to the Web site for the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta and got the answer to a question on how to treat malaria."

"Now," he would say, "what's interesting about that story is it's 1995, it's not 1999. This is five years before the dot-com boom when everyone was talking about the Internet.

"The second thing to notice is this is not the capital of Zambia. This is a small town several hundred miles from the capital.

"The third thing to notice is that the World Bank is nowhere in that story. The Center for Disease Control has their information on the Web where people can learn from it and use it, but we don't."

And he said, "Look, we're a bank and we loan money. Because of our loans, we know lots of things about building effective roads in developing nations. We know lots of things about creating water purification plants that work. What if we could make our loans more productive by making sure that, when we invest in a road, they're using the best roadway technology? That's what knowledge management is about and that's why my job is." So he told a story, and all of a sudden, people stopped asking him to justify his return on investment.