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

Information Outlook, Nov, 2006

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Our tendency, when we really want to make something stick, is to resort to Madison Avenue advertising slogans. But advertising slogans don't even work for advertisers--advertisers have to spend millions of dollars repeating their ads to make them stick. An advertising slogan is very ineffective compared with Steven Denning's story.

So I think we've overdosed on advertising, and we've forgotten about some older, more effective principles like storytelling that have informed political and cultural and religious traditions over many centuries.

Do you think in the long term things like the Internet will help people frame their storytelling better? There are so many social networking sites out there--My Space, Yahoo! Answers--and they're growing all the time. Do you think that's going to help people get better at this?

True, we have all these technologies that are making it easier for us to communicate with other people, but that doesn't necessarily mean we know how to communicate. The Curse of Knowledge almost guarantees--for the ideas that we care most about--we're going to have trouble expressing our ideas in a way that will stick.

If you've ever talked to a doctor about your medical problems, you've been on the other side of the Curse of Knowledge. The reason we went to the doctor in the first place was because he or she knew enough to solve our problem. There's no question our doctor is an expert.

But even when doctors have talked with lots of patients, they have a tendency, unless they are very conscious of it, to talk in medicalese--to talk in such an abstract, jargon-filled, complex way that the patient walks away not knowing exactly what their problem is or how to take care of it at home. And giving doctors a My Space account is not going to solve their underlying problem.

Luckily, medical schools have started adding classes about how to communicate with patients. In addition to the years of classes that doctors get to learn how to solve medical problems, medical schools have actually started having patient interaction classes to teach them how to get their messages to stick.

Unfortunately, many other professions haven't done the same. I was in graduate school in psychology, and I took years of classes on psychology but zero classes on how to teach psychology to my future students.

So, even as we have more and more venues to communicate with others, the challenge for us is really to understand how to communicate, especially about the things that we're most passionate about.

After an information professional reads your book, what's the first thing he or she should do?

The most important thing is to realize that when you have an important message, it's worth taking time to think about how to make it stick with others. Because if we just start talking to others about our brilliant insight, they're not going to get it.

You don't have to improve every message in your life. Small talk in the hallways doesn't need to stick. But for key ideas--like how an information center is a good return on investment--it's worth thinking about how to express that message most clearly and most compellingly.