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

Information Outlook, Nov, 2006

Say you're part of the institution--you've been in the information center for a number of years--how do you get out of the mode of the same way of thinking?

I think, and this is a shameless plug for the Leadership Forum, I think that's exactly what professional conferences are about.

We all tend to get comfortable in our immediate environments, yet it's only by going out of our immediate environments that we are in a position to be surprised. Once we find something that surprises us, it's probably going to surprise other people inside our organization.

So part of finding what's uncommon sense is to get out of our institutions and encounter others from different organizations in different industries. Because it really is hard to just sit in the nice cocoon that most of us build around ourselves and to discover what is uncommon sense.

College professors are prone to this problem, so I have to be aware of this myself. You don't solve problems with your research by talking to your colleagues down the hall. They've been hearing you talk about your research for three years; and if they had a good idea about improving your research, they would have given it to you two-and-a-half years ago. The way that you actually get new insights is by going on the road and talking to people at other universities.

So, part of discovering uncommon sense is actually getting out into contact with other people from different arenas, and finding out what we should know.

Now you're in contact with students, some of whom may become information professionals. How are they reacting to these ideas? It's not the kind of class you'd expect to see in the course offerings of most universities. Why are they taking it and what are you learning from the students as you're teaching it?

I get a wide range of students in my course. A lot of them, because I teach in a business school, are business students. But I get people from the communications department who want to become film directors and they know that they're going to have to pitch their movies. I get medical students who want to get involved in public health and they know that they're going to have to convey complex health information to the public.

The framework that we talk about in the book was developed over five or six years with several hundred master's and undergraduate students at Stanford from many departments, really trying to struggle with this question, "How would we craft more effective messages?"

And in struggling with those questions, we discovered principles such as concreteness or storytelling that we've already talked about. All of the principles became clear by doing exercises in class and seeing what worked for us.

Are you finding that your students these days are coming in better prepared or thinking more in those terms than your earlier classes were?

Unfortunately, I've only been teaching this for about five years, so I don't have enough history to notice a trend like that.

But all of us in our media culture have internalized a certain model of "sticky messages" based on the advertising we've seen over the years, and that model is probably worthless in most circumstances.