Making Your Ideas Stick: Part 1 - PowerPoint Presentation

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Making Your Ideas Stick: Part 1Slide2

In Made to Stick, Chip & Dan Heath introduced us to their checklist of sticky principles

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implicityUnexpectednessConcretenessCredibilityEmotionsStories

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Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, 2007

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implicity

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nexpectedness

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oncreteness

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redibility

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motions

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toriesSlide3

1. Simplicity

“If you say three things, you say nothing”

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His point is that the minds are limited

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overcommunicated environments, people are selective about the information they acceptIf there’s too much quantity and too little clarity, they simply ignore what you have to say and default to their incumbent positions4Slide5

So a critical component of simplicity is that ideas must be compact

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=

On a bus

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In space

They’ve identified the core of their concept and expressed it effectively

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, 2007Slide6

Lets imagine for a moment that you were hired to design the sets for the movie Alien

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Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, 2007Slide7

Which of the following age categories accounts for the greatest % of breast cancer cases

<40 years

40-50 years51-60 years>60 years7The Science of Fear, by Daniel Gardner, 2008 Slide8

Which of the following age categories accounts for the greatest % of breast cancer cases

<40

years 40-50 years 51-60 years >60 years 8

<40 years

40-50 years

51-60 years

>60 years

<40 years 3.6%

40-50 years 12.4%

51-60 years 17%

>60 years 67%

The Science of Fear, by Daniel Gardner, 2008 Slide9

Why were Americans so

w

rong?A 2001 analysis of breast cancer articles in US magazines* revealed:84% of women profiled in these articles were <50 years oldOnly 2.3% of women profiled in these articles were >70 years oldExplanation: Selective exposure led to an error in our base rate assumptionsTragedy of young mothers prematurely leaving their children behind makes more compelling story

The Science of Fear, by Daniel Gardner, 2008 Slide10

2. Unexpectedness

The “Gap Theory” of curiosity

Curiosity happens when we uncover a gap in our knowledgeOne important implication of this theory is that we need to open gaps before we can close them10Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, 2007Slide11

Four ways to open gaps in our knowledge

Pose a question or puzzle that

exposes such a gapPoint out that someone else knows something they don’tPresent them with situations that have unknown resolutionsWe can challenge them to predict the outcome of an event11

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, 2007Slide12

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motion plays an important role in triggering our response to the unexpected

Emotions like anger, fear and surprise have biological purposesBiological purpose of surprise is to jolt us to attention when our existing assumptions are proven wrongIn these instances, surprise grabs our attention so we can repair our assumptions for the future12Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, 2007Slide13

Attack on Pearl Harbor remains one of the most unexpected events in US history

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Seeing What Others Don’t, by Gary Klein 2013Slide14

3. Concreteness

Abstraction makes it harder..

to understand ideas to remember ideasto coordinate activities with others 14Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, 2007Slide15

Aesop was a master of concreteness

His famous fables illustrate universal human shortcomings in the form of stories

These universal truths are conceptual in natureAesop makes them sticky by encoding them with concrete images15Slide16

A sample of Aesop’s work

Universal human truth

Slow and steady wins the race uDon’t let greed drive unprofitable actionsDon’t give false alarm uConcrete imageThe tortoise and the hare uThe goose that laid the golden eggs

gThe boy who cried wolf

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Art Silverman is another master of concreteness

Art

worked at The Center for Science in Public InterestHis organization conducted a nutritional analysis of movie popcorn from around the countryUS Department of Agriculture recommends that normal daily diet contain <20g of saturated fat Art found that average medium popcorn contained 37g of fatArt’s job was to make people care about that

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Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, 2007Slide18

Art’s First Instinct Was to Use a Bar Chart

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+85%

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, 2007Slide19

Art and his team eventually landed on something more concrete

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>

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, 2007Slide20

The story was an

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mmediate sensationFeatured on CBS, NBC, ABC and CNNFront pages of USA Today, LA Times, Wash. PostLate Night Talk Show hosts, Jay Leno & David Letterman, used it in their opening monologuesThe biggest movie chains all announced they would stop using coconut oil to pop their pop corn

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, 2007Slide21

Concreteness facilitates coordination

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Summary

There are six principles that dictate why some ideas stick while others don’t

The first is simplicity, sticky ideas must be compact but they must also capture the core of a concept and express it clearlyThe second is unexpectedness, sticky ideas capture attention by opening gaps in our knowledge and then filling those gaps we can repair our faulty assumptionsThe third is concreteness, while concrete ideas are easier to understand and remember than abstract ones, they also make it easier to coordinate activities22