Made to Stick by Chip Heath & Dan Heath PDF

INTRODUCTION WHAT STICKS? Kidney heist. Movie popcorn. Sticky = understandable, memorable, and e ective in changing thought or behavior. Halloween candy. Six principles: SUCCESs. The villain: Curse of Knowledge. It’s hard to be a tapper. Creativity starts with templates. CHAPTER 1 SIMPLE Commander’s...

INTRODUCTION WHAT STICKS? Kidney heist. Movie popcorn. Sticky = understandable, memorable, and e ective in changing thought or behavior. Halloween candy. Six principles: SUCCESs. The villain: Curse of Knowledge. It’s hard to be a tapper. Creativity starts with templates. CHAPTER 1 SIMPLE Commander’s Intent. THE low-fare airline. Burying the lead and the inverted pyramid. It’s the economy, stupid. Decision paralysis. Clinic: Sun exposure. Names, names, and names. Simple = core + compact. Proverbs. The Palm Pilot wood block. Using what’s there. The pomelo schema. High concept: Jaws on a spaceship. Generative analogies: Disney’s “cast members. ” CHAPTER 2 UNEXPECTED The successful ight safety announcement. The surprise brow. Gimmicky surprise and “postdictability. ” Breaking the guessing machine. “The Nordie who … ” “No school next Thursday. ” Clinic: Too much on foreign aid? Saturn’s rings. Movie turning points. Gap theory of curiosity. Clinic: Fund- raising. Priming the gap: NCAA football. Pocketable radio. Man on the moon. CHAPTER 3 CONCRETE Sour grapes. Landscapes as eco-celebrities. Teaching subtraction with less abstraction. Soap-opera accounting. Velcro theory of memory. Brown eyes, blue eyes. Engineers vs. manufacturers. The Ferraris go to Disney World. White things. The leather computer. Clinic: Oral rehydration therapy. Hamburger Helper and Saddleback Sam. CHAPTER 4 CREDIBLE The Nobel-winning scientist no one believed. Flesh-eating bananas. Authority and antiauthority. Pam La n, smoker. Powerful details. Jurors and the Darth Vader toothbrush. The dancing seventy-three year old. Statistics: Nuclear warheads as BBs. The human-scale principle. O cemates as a soccer team. Clinic: Shark attack hysteria. The Sinatra Test. Transporting Bollywood movies. Edible fabric. Where’s the beef? Testable credentials. The Emotional Tank. Clinic: Our awed intuition. NBA rookie camp. CHAPTER 5 EMOTIONAL The Mother Teresa principle: If I look at the one, I will act. Beating smoking with the Truth. Semantic stretch and why unique isn’t unique. Reclaiming “sportsmanship. ” Schlocky but masterful mail-order ads. WIIFY. Cable television in Tempe. Avoiding Maslow’s basement. Dining in Iraq. The popcorn popper and political science. Clinic: Why study algebra? Don’t mess with Texas. Who cares about duo piano? Creating empathy. CHAPTER 6 STORIES The day the heart monitor lied. Shop talk at Xerox. Helpful and unhelpful visualizations. Stories as ight simulators. Clinic: Dealing with problem students. Jared, the 425-pound fast-food dieter. Spotting inspiring stories. The Challenge Plot. The Connection Plot. The Creativity Plot. Springboard stories at the World Bank: A health worker in Zambia. How to make presenters angry with stories. EPILOGUE WHAT STICKS Nice guys nish last. Elementary, my dear Watson. The power of spotting. Curse of Knowledge again. Pay attention, understand, believe, care, and act. Sticky problems: symptoms and solutions. John F. Kennedy versus Floyd Lee. STICKY ADVICE TALKING STRATEGY. Cranium’s CHIFF. Inert strategies. Costco’s “salmon stories. ” Avoiding decision paralysis. Muckers. Australian bank: “We sure as hell don’t want to be third. ” TEACHING THAT STICKS. Mugs as variables. The San Diego Zoo’s food-stealing pony. Teaching functions with crickets. Using emotion: Students as Civil War surgeons. Dissolving eyeballs. Rubber duckies that circled the world. UNSTICKING AN IDEA. “Wedge-drivers” in World War II. Fight sticky with stickier. The Goodtimes Virus parody. How auto “reliability races” convinced people to sit on an explosion. MAKING IDEAS STICK: THE EASY REFERENCE GUIDE NOTES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS WHAT STICKS? A friend of a friend of ours is a frequent business traveler. Let’s call him Dave. Dave was recently in Atlantic City for an important meeting with clients. Afterward, he had some time to kill before his ight, so he went to a local bar for a drink. He’d just nished one drink when an attractive woman approached and asked if she could buy him another. He was surprised but attered. Sure, he said. The woman walked to the bar and brought back two more drinks—one for her and one for him. He thanked her and took a sip. And that was the last thing he remembered. Rather, that was the last thing he remembered until he woke up, disoriented, lying in a hotel bathtub, his body submerged in ice. He looked around frantically, trying to gure out where he was and how he got there. Then he spotted the note: DON’T MOVE. CALL 911. A cell phone rested on a small table beside the bathtub. He picked it up and called 911, his ngers numb and clumsy from the ice. The operator seemed oddly familiar with his situation. She said, “Sir, I want you to reach behind you, slowly and carefully. Is there a tube protruding from your lower back?” Anxious, he felt around behind him. Sure enough, there was a tube. The operator said, “Sir, don’t panic, but one of your kidneys has been harvested. There’s a ring of organ thieves operating in this city, and they got to you. Paramedics are on their way. Don’t move until they arrive. ” You’ve just read one of the most successful urban legends of the past fteen years. The rst clue is the classic urban-legend opening: “A friend of a friend … ” Have you ever noticed that our friends’ friends have much more interesting lives than our friends themselves? You’ve probably heard the Kidney Heist tale before. There are hundreds of versions in circulation, and all of them share a core of three elements: (1) the drugged drink, (2) the ice- lled bathtub, and (3) the kidney-theft punch line. One version features a married man who receives the drugged drink from a prostitute he has invited to his room in Las Vegas. It’s a morality play with kidneys. Imagine that you closed the book right now, took an hourlong break, then called a friend and told the story, without rereading it. Chances are you could tell it almost perfectly. You might forget that the traveler was in Atlantic City for “an important meeting with clients” —who cares about that? But you’d remember all the important stu. The Kidney Heist is a story that sticks. We understand it, we remember it, and we can retell it later. And if we believe it’s true, it might change our behavior permanently—at least in terms of accepting drinks from attractive strangers. Contrast the Kidney Heist story with this passage, drawn from a paper distributed by a nonpro t organization. “Comprehensive community building naturally lends itself to a return-on-investment rationale that can be modeled, drawing on existing practice, ” it begins, going on to argue that “[a] factor constraining the ow of resources to CCIs is that funders must often resort to targeting or categorical requirements in grant making to ensure accountability. ” Imagine that you closed the book right now and took an hourlong break. In fact, don’t even take a break; just call up a friend and retell that passage without rereading it. Good luck. Is this a fair comparison—an urban legend to a cherry-picked bad passage? Of course not. But here’s where things get interesting: Think of our two examples as two poles on a spectrum of memorability. Which sounds closer to the communications you encounter at work? If you’re like most people, your workplace gravitates toward the nonpro t pole as though it were the North Star. Maybe this is perfectly natural; some ideas are inherently interesting and some are inherently uninteresting. A gang of organ thieves—inherently interesting! Nonpro t nancial strategy—inherently uninteresting! It’s the nature versus nurture debate applied to ideas: Are ideas born interesting or made interesting? Well, this is a nurture book. So how do we nurture our ideas so they’ll succeed in the world? Many of us struggle with how to communicate ideas e ectively, how to get our ideas to make a di erence. A biology teacher spends an hour explaining mitosis, and a week later only three kids remember what it is. A manager makes a speech unveiling a new strategy as the sta ers nod their heads enthusiastically, and the next day the frontline employees are observed cheerfully implementing the old one. Good ideas often have a hard time succeeding in the world. Yet the ridiculous Kidney Heist tale keeps circulating, with no resources whatsoever to support it. Why? Is it simply because hijacked kidneys sell better than other topics? Or is it possible to make a true, worthwhile idea circulate as e ectively as this false idea? The Truth About Movie Popcorn Art Silverman stared at a bag of movie popcorn. It looked out of place sitting on his desk. His o ce had long since lled up with fake-butter fumes. Silverman knew, because of his organization’s research, that the popcorn on his desk was unhealthy. Shockingly unhealthy, in fact. His job was to gure out a way to communicate this message to the unsuspecting moviegoers of America. Silverman worked for the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a nonpro t group that educates the public about nutrition. The CSPI sent bags of movie popcorn from a dozen theaters in three major cities to a lab for nutritional analysis. The results surprised everyone. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recommends that a normal diet contain no more than 20 grams of saturated fat each day. According to the lab results, the typical bag of popcorn had 37 grams. The culprit was coconut oil, which theaters used to pop their popcorn. Coconut oil had some big advantages over other oils. It gave the popcorn a nice, silky texture, and released a more pleasant and natural aroma than the alternative oils. Unfortunately, as the lab results showed, coconut oil was also brimming with saturated fat. The single serving of popcorn on Silverman’s desk —a snack someone might scarf down between meals —had nearly two days’ worth of saturated fat. And those 37 grams of saturated fat were packed into a medium-sized serving of popcorn. No doubt a decent-sized bucket could have cleared triple digits. The challenge, Silverman realized, was that few people know what “37 grams of saturated fat” means. Most of us don’t memorize the USDA’s daily nutrition recommendations. Is 37 grams good or bad? And even if we have an intuition that it’s bad, we’d wonder if it was “bad bad” (like cigarettes) or “normal bad” (like a cookie or a milk shake). Even the phrase “37 grams of saturated fat” by itself was enough to cause most people’s eyes to glaze over. “Saturated fat has zero appeal, ” Silverman says. “It’s dry, it’s academic, who cares?” Silverman could have created some kind of visual comparison—perhaps an advertisement comparing the amount of saturated fat in the popcorn with the USDA’s recommended daily allowance. Think of a bar graph, with one of the bars stretching twice as high as the other. But that was too scienti c somehow. Too rational. The amount of fat in this popcorn was, in some sense, not rational. It was ludicrous. The CSPI needed a way to shape the message in a way that fully communicated this ludicrousness. Silverman came up with a solution. CSPI called a press conference on September 27, 1992. Here’s the message it presented: “A medium- sized ‘butter’ popcorn at a typical neighborhood movie theater contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings —combined!” The folks at CSPI didn’t neglect the visuals—they laid out the full bu et of greasy food for the television cameras. An entire day’s worth of unhealthy eating, displayed on a table. All that saturated fat—stu ed into a single bag of popcorn. The story was an immediate sensation, featured on CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN. It made the front pages of USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post’s Style section. Leno and Letterman cracked jokes about fat-soaked popcorn, and headline writers trotted out some doozies: “Popcorn Gets an ‘R’ Rating, ” “Lights, Action, Cholesterol!” “Theater Popcorn is Double Feature of Fat. ” The idea stuck. Moviegoers, repulsed by these ndings, avoided popcorn in droves. Sales plunged. The service sta at movie houses grew accustomed to elding questions about whether the popcorn was popped in the “bad” oil. Soon after, most of the nation’s biggest theater chains—including United Artists, AMC, and Loews—announced that they would stop using coconut oil. On Stickiness This is an idea success story. Even better, it’s a truthful idea success story. The people at CSPI knew something about the world that they needed to share. They gured out a way to communicate the idea so that people would listen and care. And the idea stuck—just like the Kidney Heist tale. And, let’s be honest, the odds were stacked against the CSPI. The “movie popcorn is fatty” story lacks the lurid appeal of an organ-thieving gang. No one woke up in an oil- lled bathtub. The story wasn’t sensational, and it wasn’t even particularly entertaining. Furthermore, there was no natural constituency for the news—few of us make an e ort to “stay up to date with popcorn news. ” There were no celebrities, models, or adorable pets involved. In short, the popcorn idea was a lot like the ideas that most of us tra c in every day—ideas that are interesting but not sensational, truthful but not mind-blowing, important but not “life-or-death. ” Unless you’re in advertising or public relations, you probably don’t have many resources to back your ideas. You don’t have a multimillion-dollar ad budget or a team of professional spinners. Your ideas need to stand on their own merits. We wrote this book to help you make your ideas stick. By “stick, ” we mean that your ideas are understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact—they change your audience’s opinions or behavior. At this point, it’s worth asking why you’d need to make your ideas stick. After all, the vast majority of our daily communication doesn’t require stickiness. “Pass the gravy” doesn’t have to be memorable. When we tell our friends about our relationship problems, we’re not trying to have a “lasting impact. ” So not every idea is stick-worthy. When we ask people how often they need to make an idea stick, they tell us that the need arises between once a month and once a week, twelve to fty-two times per year. For managers, these are “big ideas” about new strategic directions and guidelines for behavior. Teachers try to convey themes and con icts and trends to their students—the kinds of themes and ways of thinking that will endure long after the individual factoids have faded. Columnists try to change readers’ opinions on policy issues. Religious leaders try to share spiritual wisdom with their congregants. Nonpro t organizations try to persuade volunteers to contribute their time and donors to contribute their money to a worthy cause. Given the importance of making ideas stick, it’s surprising how little attention is paid to the subject. When we get advice on communicating, it often concerns our delivery: “Stand up straight, make eye contact, use appropriate hand gestures. Practice, practice, practice (but don’t sound canned). ” Sometimes we get advice about structure: “Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em. Tell ‘em, then tell ‘em what you told ‘em. ” Or “Start by getting their attention—tell a joke or a story. ” Another genre concerns knowing your audience: “Know what your listeners care about, so you can tailor your communication to them. ” And, nally, there’s the most common refrain in the realm of communication advice: Use repetition, repetition, repetition. All of this advice has obvious merit, except, perhaps, for the emphasis on repetition. (If you have to tell someone the same thing ten times, the idea probably wasn’t very well designed. No urban legend has to be repeated ten times.) But this set of advice has one glaring shortcoming: It doesn’t help Art Silverman as he tries to gure out the best way to explain that movie popcorn is really unhealthful. Silverman no doubt knows that he should make eye contact and practice. But what message is he supposed to practice? He knows his audience— they’re people who like popcorn and don’t realize how unhealthy it is. So what message does he share with them? Complicating matters, Silverman knew that he wouldn’t have the luxury of repetition—he had only one shot to make the media care about his story. Or think about an elementary-school teacher. She knows her goal: to teach the material mandated by the state curriculum committee. She knows her audience: third graders with a range of knowledge and skills. She knows how to speak e ectively— she’s a virtuoso of posture and diction and eye contact. So the goal is clear, the audience is clear, and the format is clear. But the design of the message itself is far from clear. The biology students need to understand mitosis—okay, now what? There are an in nite number of ways to teach mitosis. Which way will stick? And how do you know in advance? What Led to Made to Stick The broad question, then, is how do you design an idea that sticks? A few years ago the two of us—brothers Chip and Dan—realized that both of us had been studying how ideas stick for about ten years. Our expertise came from very di erent elds, but we had zeroed in on the same question: Why do some ideas succeed while others fail? Dan had developed a passion for education. He co-founded a start-up publishing company called Thinkwell that asked a somewhat heretical question: If you were going to build a textbook from scratch, using video and technology instead of text, how would you do it? As the editor in chief of Thinkwell, Dan had to work with his team to determine the best ways to teach subjects like economics, biology, calculus, and physics. He had an opportunity to work with some of the most e ective and best-loved professors in the country: the calculus teacher who was also a stand-up comic; the biology teacher who was named national Teacher of the Year; the economics teacher who was also a chaplain and a playwright. Essentially, Dan enjoyed a crash course in what makes great teachers great. And he found that, while each teacher had a unique style, collectively their instructional methodologies were almost identical. Chip, as a professor at Stanford University, had spent about ten years asking why bad ideas sometimes won out in the social marketplace of ideas. How could a false idea displace a true one? And what made some ideas more viral than others? As an entry point into these topics, he dove into the realm of “naturally sticky” ideas such as urban legends and conspiracy theories. Over the years, he’s become uncomfortably familiar with some of the most repulsive and absurd tales in the annals of ideas. He’s heard them all. Here’s a very small sampler: The Kentucky Fried Rat. Really, any tale that involves rats and fast food is on fertile ground. Coca-Cola rots your bones. This fear is big in Japan, but so far the country hasn’t experienced an epidemic of gelatinous teenagers. If you ash your brights at a car whose headlights are o , you will be shot by a gang member. The Great Wall of China is the only man- made object that is visible from space. (The Wall is really long but not very wide. Think about it: If the Wall were visible, then any interstate highway would also be visible, and maybe a few Wal-Mart superstores as well.) You use only 10 percent of your brain. (If this were true, it would certainly make brain damage a lot less worrisome.) Chip, along with his students, has spent hundreds of hours collecting, coding, and analyzing naturally sticky ideas: urban legends, wartime rumors, proverbs, conspiracy theories, and jokes. Urban legends are false, but many naturally sticky ideas are true. In fact, perhaps the oldest class of naturally sticky ideas is the proverb—a nugget of wisdom that often endures over centuries and across cultures. As an example, versions of the proverb “Where there’s smoke there’s re” have appeared in more than fty- ve di erent languages. In studying naturally sticky ideas, both trivial and profound, Chip has conducted more than forty experiments with more than 1,700 participants on topics such as: Why Nostradamus’s prophecies are still read after 400 years Why Chicken Soup for the Soul stories are inspirational Why ine ective folk remedies persist A few years ago, he started teaching a course at Stanford called “How to Make Ideas Stick. ” The premise of the course was that if we understood what made ideas naturally sticky we might be better at making our own messages stick. During the past few years he has taught this topic to a few hundred students bound for careers as managers, public- policy analysts, journalists, designers, and lm directors. To complete the story of the Brothers Heath, in 2004 it dawned on us that we had been approaching the same problem from di erent angles. Chip had researched and taught what made ideas stick. Dan had tried to gure out pragmatic ways to make ideas stick. Chip had compared the success of di erent urban legends and stories. Dan had compared the success of di erent math and government lessons. Chip was the researcher and the teacher. Dan was the practitioner and the writer. (And we knew that we could make our parents happy by spending more quality time together.) We wanted to take apart sticky ideas—both natural and created—and gure out what made them stick. What makes urban legends so compelling? Why do some chemistry lessons work better than others? Why does virtually every society circulate a set of proverbs? Why do some political ideas circulate widely while others fall short? In short, we were looking to understand what sticks. We adopted the “what sticks” terminology from one of our favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell. In 2000, Gladwell wrote a brilliant book called The Tipping Point, which examined the forces that cause social phenomena to “tip, ” or make the leap from small groups to big groups, the way contagious diseases spread rapidly once they infect a certain critical mass of people. Why did Hush Puppies experience a rebirth? Why did crime rates abruptly plummet in New York City? Why did the book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood catch on? The Tipping Point has three sections. The rst addresses the need to get the right people, and the third addresses the need for the right context. The middle section of the book, “The Stickiness Factor, ” argues that innovations are more likely to tip when they’re sticky. When The Tipping Point was published, Chip realized that “stickiness” was the perfect word for the attribute that he was chasing with his research into the marketplace of ideas. This book is a complement to The Tipping Point in the sense that we will identify the traits that make ideas sticky, a subject that was beyond the scope of Gladwell’s book. Gladwell was interested in what makes social epidemics epidemic. Our interest is in how e ective ideas are constructed—what makes some ideas stick and others disappear. So, while our focus will veer away from The Tipping Point’s turf, we want to pay tribute to Gladwell for the word “stickiness. ” It stuck. Who Spoiled Halloween? In the 1960s and 1970s, the tradition of Halloween trick-or-treating came under attack. Rumors circulated about Halloween sadists who put razor blades in apples and booby-trapped pieces of candy. The rumors a ected the Halloween tradition nationwide. Parents carefully examined their children’s candy bags. Schools opened their doors at night so that kids could trick-or-treat in a safe environment. Hospitals volunteered to X-ray candy bags. In 1985, an ABC News poll showed that 60 percent of parents worried that their children might be victimized. To this day, many parents warn their children not to eat any snacks that aren’t prepackaged. This is a sad story: a family holiday sullied by bad people who, inexplicably, wish to harm children. But in 1985 the story took a strange twist. Researchers discovered something shocking about the candy-tampering epidemic: It was a myth. The researchers, sociologists Joel Best and Gerald Horiuchi, studied every reported Halloween incident since 1958. They found no instances where strangers caused children life-threatening harm on Halloween by tampering with their candy. Two children did die on Halloween, but their deaths weren’t caused by strangers. A ve-year-old boy found his uncle’s heroin stash and overdosed. His relatives initially tried to cover their tracks by sprinkling heroin on his candy. In another case, a father, hoping to collect on an insurance settlement, caused the death of his own son by contaminating his candy with cyanide. In other words, the best social science evidence reveals that taking candy from strangers is perfectly okay. It’s your family you should worry about. The candy-tampering story has changed the behavior of millions of parents over the past thirty years. Sadly, it has made neighbors suspicious of neighbors. It has even changed the laws of this country: Both California and New Jersey passed laws that carry special penalties for candy- tamperers. Why was this idea so successful? Six Principles of Sticky Ideas The Halloween-candy story is, in a sense, the evil twin of the CSPI story. Both stories highlighted an unexpected danger in a common activity: eating Halloween candy and eating movie popcorn. Both stories called for simple action: examining your child’s candy and avoiding movie popcorn. Both made use of vivid, concrete images that cling easily to memory: an apple with a buried razor blade and a table full of greasy foods. And both stories tapped into emotion: fear in the case of Halloween candy and disgust in the case of movie popcorn. The Kidney Heist, too, shares many of these traits. A highly unexpected outcome: a guy who stops for a drink and ends up one kidney short of a pair. A lot of concrete details: the ice- lled bathtub, the weird tube protruding from the lower back. Emotion: fear, disgust, suspicion. We began to see the same themes, the same attributes, re ected in a wide range of successful ideas. What we found based on Chip’s research— and by reviewing the research of dozens of folklorists, psychologists, educational researchers, political scientists, and proverb-hunters—was that sticky ideas shared certain key traits. There is no “formula” for a sticky idea—we don’t want to overstate the case. But sticky ideas do draw from a common set of traits, which make them more likely to succeed. It’s like discussing the attributes of a great basketball player. You can be pretty sure that any great player has some subset of traits like height, speed, agility, power, and court sense. But you don’t need all of these traits in order to be great: Some great guards are ve feet ten and scrawny. And having all the traits doesn’t guarantee greatness: No doubt there are plenty of slow, clumsy seven- footers. It’s clear, though, that if you’re on the neighborhood court, choosing your team from among strangers, you should probably take a gamble on the seven-foot dude. Ideas work in much the same way. One skill we can learn is the ability to spot ideas that have “natural talent, ” like the seven-foot stranger. Later in the book, we’ll discuss Subway’s advertising campaign that focused on Jared, an obese college student who lost more than 200 pounds by eating Subway sandwiches every day. The campaign was a huge success. And it wasn’t created by a Madison Avenue advertising agency; it started with a single store owner who had the good sense to spot an amazing story. But here’s where our basketball analogy breaks down: In the world of ideas, we can genetically engineer our players. We can create ideas with an eye to maximizing their stickiness. As we pored over hundreds of sticky ideas, we saw, over and over, the same six principles at work. PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY How do we nd the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any. ” To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission—sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it. PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. A bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whole day’s worth of fatty foods! We can use surprise—an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus—to grab people’s attention. But surprise doesn’t last. For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. How do you keep students engaged during the forty- eighth history class of the year? We can engage people’s curiosity over a long period of time by systematically “opening gaps” in their knowledge— and then lling those gaps. PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions—they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images— ice- lled bathtubs, apples with razors—because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush. ” Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience. PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY How do we make people believe our ideas? When the former surgeon general C. Everett Koop talks about a public-health issue, most people accept his ideas without skepticism. But in most day-to-day situations we don’t enjoy this authority. Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves—a “try before you buy” philosophy for the world of ideas. When we’re trying to build a case for something, most of us instinctively grasp for hard numbers. But in many cases this is exactly the wrong approach. In the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics demonstrating the sluggishness of the economy. Instead, he asked a simple question that allowed voters to test for themselves: “Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better o today than you were four years ago. ” PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. In the case of movie popcorn, we make them feel disgusted by its unhealthiness. The statistic “37 grams” doesn’t elicit any emotions. Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is nding the right emotion to harness. For instance, it’s di cult to get teenagers to quit smoking by instilling in them a fear of the consequences, but it’s easier to get them to quit by tapping into their resentment of the duplicity of Big Tobacco. PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Fire ghters naturally swap stories after every re, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a re and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental ight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and e ectively. Those are the six principles of successful ideas. To summarize, here’s our checklist for creating a successful idea: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. A clever observer will note that this sentence can be compacted into the acronym SUCCESs. This is sheer coincidence, of course. (Okay, we admit, SUCCESs is a little corny. We could have changed “Simple” to “Core” and reordered a few letters. But, you have to admit, CCUCES is less memorable.) No special expertise is needed to apply these principles. There are no licensed stickologists. Moreover, many of the principles have a commonsense ring to them: Didn’t most of us already have the intuition that we should “be simple” and “use stories”? It’s not as though there’s a powerful constituency for overcomplicated, lifeless prose. But wait a minute. We claim that using these principles is easy. And most of them do seem relatively commonsensical. So why aren’t we deluged with brilliantly designed sticky ideas? Why is our life lled with more process memos than proverbs? Sadly, there is a villain in our story. The villain is a natural psychological tendency that consistently confounds our ability to create ideas using these principles. It’s called the Curse of Knowledge. (We will capitalize the phrase throughout the book to give it the drama we think it deserves.) Tappers and Listeners In 1990, Elizabeth Newton earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: “tappers” or “listeners. ” Tappers received a list of twenty- ve well-known songs, such as “Happy Birthday to You” and “The Star-Spangled Banner. ” Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a listener (by knocking on a table). The listener’s job was to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped. (By the way, this experiment is fun to try at home if there’s a good “listener” candidate nearby.) The listener’s job in this game is quite di cult. Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only 2.5 percent of the songs: 3 out of 120. But here’s what made the result worthy of a dissertation in psychology. Before the listeners guessed the name of the song, Newton asked the tappers to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted that the odds were 50 percent. The tappers got their message across 1 time in 40, but they thought they were getting their message across 1 time in 2. Why? When a tapper taps, she is hearing the song in her head. Go ahead and try it for yourself—tap out “The Star-Spangled Banner. ” It’s impossible to avoid hearing the tune in your head. Meanwhile, the listeners can’t hear that tune—all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a kind of bizarre Morse Code. In the experiment, tappers are abbergasted at how hard the listeners seem to be working to pick up the tune. Isn’t the song obvious? The tappers’ expressions, when a listener guesses “Happy Birthday to You” for “The Star-Spangled Banner, ” are priceless: How could you be so stupid? It’s hard to be a tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we nd it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes di cult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re- create our listeners’ state of mind. The tapper/listener experiment is reenacted every day across the world. The tappers and listeners are CEOs and frontline employees, teachers and students, politicians and voters, marketers and customers, writers and readers. All of these groups rely on ongoing communication, but, like the tappers and listeners, they su er from enormous information imbalances. When a CEO discusses “unlocking shareholder value, ” there is a tune playing in her head that the employees can’t hear. It’s a hard problem to avoid—a CEO might have thirty years of daily immersion in the logic and conventions of business. Reversing the process is as impossible as un-ringing a bell. You can’t unlearn what you already know. There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge reliably. The rst is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them. This book will teach you how to transform your ideas to beat the Curse of Knowledge. The six principles presented earlier are your best weapons. They can be used as a kind of checklist. Let’s take the CEO who announces to her sta that they must strive to “maximize shareholder value. ” Is this idea simple? Yes, in the sense that it’s short, but it lacks the useful simplicity of a proverb. Is it unexpected? No. Concrete? Not at all. Credible? Only in the sense that it’s coming from the mouth of the CEO. Emotional? Um, no. A story? No. Contrast the “maximize shareholder value” idea with John F. Kennedy’s famous 1961 call to “put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade. ” Simple? Yes. Unexpected? Yes. Concrete? Amazingly so. Credible? The goal seemed like science ction, but the source was credible. Emotional? Yes. Story? In miniature. Had John F. Kennedy been a CEO, he would have “Our mission is to become the international said, leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives. ” Fortunately, JFK was more intuitive than a modern-day CEO; he knew that opaque, abstract missions don’t captivate and inspire people. The moon mission was a classic case of a communicator’s dodging the Curse of Knowledge. It was a brilliant and beautiful idea—a single idea that motivated the actions of millions of people for a decade. Systematic Creativity Picture in your mind the type of person who’s great at coming up with ideas. Have a mental image of the person? A lot of people, when asked to do this, describe a familiar stereotype—the “creative genius, ” the kind of person who thinks up slogans in a hot advertising agency. Maybe, like us, you picture someone with gelled hair and hip clothing, carrying a dog-eared notebook full of ironies and epiphanies, ready to drop everything and launch a four-hour brainstorming session in a room full of ca eine and whiteboards. Or maybe your stereotype isn’t quite so elaborate. There’s no question that some people are more creative than others. Perhaps they’re just born that way. So maybe you’ll never be the Michael Jordan of sticky ideas. But the premise of this book is that creating sticky ideas is something that can be learned. In 1999, an Israeli research team assembled a group of 200 highly regarded ads—ads that were nalists and award winners in the top advertising competitions. They found that 89 percent of the award-winning ads could be classi ed into six basic categories, or templates. That’s remarkable. We might expect great creative concepts to be highly idiosyncratic—emerging from the whims of born creative types. It turns out that six simple templates go a long way. Most of these templates relate to the principle of unexpectedness. For example, the Extreme Consequences template points out unexpected consequences of a product attribute. One ad emphasizes the power of a car stereo system—when the stereo belts out a tune, a bridge starts oscillating to the music, and when the speakers are cranked up the bridge shimmies so hard that it nearly collapses. This same template also describes the famous World War II slogan devised by the Ad Council, a nonpro t organization that creates public-service campaigns for other nonpro ts and government agencies: “Loose Lips Sink Ships. ” And speaking of extreme consequences, let’s not forget the eggs sizzling in the 1980s commercial “This is your brain on drugs” (by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America). The template also pops up spontaneously in naturally sticky ideas—for example, the legend that Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head. (For the other templates, see the endnotes.) The researchers also tried to use their six templates to classify 200 other ads—from the same publications and for the same types of products— that had not received awards. Amazingly, when the researchers tried to classify these “less successful” ads, they could classify only 2 percent of them. The surprising lesson of this story: Highly creative ads are more predictable than uncreative ones. It’s like Tolstoy’s quote: “All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. ” All creative ads resemble one another, but each loser is uncreative in its own way. But if creative ads consistently make use of the same basic set of templates, perhaps “creativity” can be taught. Perhaps even novices—with no creative experience—could produce better ideas if they understood the templates. The Israeli researchers, curious about the ability to teach creativity, decided to see just how far a template could take someone. They brought in three groups of novices and gave each group some background information about three products: a shampoo, a diet-food item, and a sneaker. One group received the background information on the products and immediately started generating ads, with no training. An experienced creative director, who didn’t know how the group had been trained, selected its top fteen ads. Then those ads were tested by consumers. The group’s ads stood out: Consumers rated them as “annoying. ” (Could this be the long-awaited explanation for the ads of local car dealerships?) A second group was trained for two hours by an experienced creativity instructor who showed the participants how to use a free-association brainstorming method. This technique is a standard method for teaching creativity; it’s supposed to broaden associations, spark unexpected connections, and get lots of creative ideas on the table so that people can select the very best. If you’ve ever sat in a class on brainstorming great ideas, this method is probably the one you were taught. Again, the fteen best ads were selected by the same creative director, who didn’t know how the group had been trained, and the ads were then tested by consumers. This group’s ads were rated as less annoying than those of the untrained group but no more creative. The nal group was trained for two hours on how to use the six creative templates. Once again, the fteen best ads were selected by the creative director and tested with consumers. Suddenly these novices sprouted creativity. Their ads were rated as 50 percent more creative and produced a 55 percent more positive attitude toward the products advertised. This is a stunning improvement for a two-hour investment in learning a few basic templates! It appears that there are indeed systematic ways to produce creative ideas. What this Israeli research team did for advertisements is what this book does for your ideas. We will give you suggestions for tailoring your ideas in a way that makes them more creative and more e ective with your audience. We’ve created our checklist of six principles for precisely this purpose. But isn’t the use of a template or a checklist con ning? Surely we’re not arguing that a “color by numbers” approach will yield more creative work than a blank-canvas approach? Actually, yes, that’s exactly what we’re saying. If you want to spread your ideas to other people, you should work within the con nes of the rules that have allowed other ideas to succeed over time. You want to invent new ideas, not new rules. This book can’t o er a foolproof recipe. We’ll admit it up front: We won’t be able to show you how to get twelve-year-olds to gossip about mitosis around the camp re. And in all likelihood your process-improvement memo will not circulate decades from now as a proverb in another culture. But we can promise you this: Regardless of your level of “natural creativity, ” we will show you how a little focused e ort can make almost any idea stickier, and a sticky idea is an idea that is more likely to make a di erence. All you need to do is understand the six principles of powerful ideas. SIMPLE Every move an Army soldier makes is preceded by a staggering amount of planning, which can be traced to an original order from the president of the United States. The president orders the Joint Chiefs of Sta to accomplish an objective, and the Joint Chiefs set the parameters of the operation. Then the orders and plans begin to cascade downward—from generals to colonels to captains. The plans are quite thorough, specifying the “scheme of maneuver” and the “concept of res” —what each unit will do, which equipment it will use, how it will replace munitions, and so on. The orders snowball until they accumulate enough speci city to guide the actions of individual foot soldiers at particular moments in time. The Army invests enormous energy in its planning, and its processes have been re ned over many years. The system is a marvel of communication. There’s just one drawback: The plans often turn out to be useless. “The trite expression we always use is No plan survives contact with the enemy, ” says Colonel Tom Kolditz, the head of the behavioral sciences division at West Point. “You may start o trying to ght your plan, but the enemy gets a vote. Unpredictable things happen—the weather changes, a key asset is destroyed, the enemy responds in a way you don’t expect. Many armies fail because they put all their emphasis into creating a plan that becomes useless ten minutes into the battle. ” The Army’s challenge is akin to writing instructions for a friend to play chess on your behalf. You know a lot about the rules of the game, and you may know a lot about your friend and the opponent. But if you try to write move-by-move instructions you’ll fail. You can’t possibly foresee more than a few moves. The rst time the opponent makes a surprise move, your friend will have to throw out your carefully designed plans and rely on her instincts. Colonel Kolditz says, “Over time we’ve come to understand more and more about what makes people successful in complex operations. ” He believes that plans are useful, in the sense that they are proof that planning has taken place. The planning process forces people to think through the right issues. But as for the plans themselves, Kolditz says, “They just don’t work on the battle eld. ” So, in the 1980s the Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander’s Intent (CI). CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plan’s goal, the desired end-state of an operation. At high levels of the Army, the CI may be relatively abstract: “Break the will of the enemy in the Southeast region. ” At the tactical level, for colonels and captains, it is much more concrete: “My intent is to have Third Battalion on Hill 4305, to have the hill cleared of enemy, with only ine ective remnants remaining, so we can protect the ank of Third Brigade as they pass through the lines. ” The CI never speci es so much detail that it risks being rendered obsolete by unpredictable events. “You can lose the ability to execute the original plan, but you never lose the responsibility of executing the intent, ” says Kolditz. In other words, if there’s one soldier left in the Third Battalion on Hill 4305, he’d better be doing something to protect the ank of the Third Brigade. Commander’s Intent manages to align the behavior of soldiers at all levels without requiring play-by-play instructions from their leaders. When people know the desired destination, they’re free to improvise, as needed, in arriving there. Colonel Kolditz gives an example: “Suppose I’m commanding an artillery battalion and I say, ‘We’re going to pass this infantry unit through our lines forward. ’ That means something di erent to di erent groups. The mechanics know that they’ll need lots of repair support along the roads, because if a tank breaks down on a bridge the whole operation will come to a screeching halt. The artillery knows they’ll need to re smoke or have engineers generate smoke in the breech area where the infantry unit moves forward, so it won’t get shot up as it passes through. As a commander, I could spend a lot of time enumerating every speci c task, but as soon as people know what the intent is they begin generating their own solutions. ” The Combat Maneuver Training Center, the unit in charge of military simulations, recommends that o cers arrive at the Commander’s Intent by asking themselves two questions: If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must. _______________ The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is. _______________ No plan survives contact with the enemy. No doubt this principle has resonance for people who have no military experience whatsoever. No sales plan survives contact with the customer. No lesson plan survives contact with teenagers. It’s hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. If we’re to succeed, the rst step is this: Be simple. Not simple in terms of “dumbing down” or “sound bites. ” You don’t have to speak in monosyllables to be simple. What we mean by “simple” is nding the core of the idea. “Finding the core” means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence. To get to the core, we’ve got to weed out super uous and tangential elements. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important but just aren’t the most important idea. The Army’s Commander’s Intent forces its o cers to highlight the most important goal of an operation. The value of the Intent comes from its singularity. You can’t have ve North Stars, you can’t have ve “most important goals, ” and you can’t have ve Commander’s Intents. Finding the core is analogous to writing the Commander’s Intent—it’s about discarding a lot of great insights in order to let the most important insight shine. The French aviator and author Antoine de Saint- Exupéry once o ered a de nition of engineering elegance: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. ” A designer of simple ideas should aspire to the same goal: knowing how much can be wrung out of an idea before it begins to lose its essence. In fact, we’ll follow our own advice and strip this book down to its core. Here it is: There are two steps in making your ideas sticky—Step 1 is to nd the core, and Step 2 is to translate the core using the SUCCESs checklist. That’s it. We’ll spend the next half chapter on Step 1, and the remainder of the book on Step 2. The rst step in unpacking these ideas is to explore why Southwest Airlines deliberately ignores the food preferences of its customers. Finding the Core at Southwest Airlines It’s common knowledge that Southwest is a successful company, but there is a shocking performance gap between Southwest and its competitors. Although the airlines industry as a whole has only a passing acquaintance with pro tability, Southwest has been consistently pro table for more than thirty years. The reasons for Southwest’s success could (and do) ll up books, but perhaps the single greatest factor in the company’s success is its dogged focus on reducing costs. Every airline would like to reduce costs, but Southwest has been doing it for decades. For this e ort to succeed, the company must coordinate thousands of employees, ranging from marketers to baggage handlers. Southwest has a Commander’s Intent, a core, that helps to guide this coordination. As related by James Carville and Paul Begala: Herb Kelleher [the longest-serving CEO of Southwest] once told someone, “I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are THE low-fare airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can. “Here’s an example, ” he said. “Tracy from marketing comes into your o ce. She says her surveys indicate that the passengers might enjoy a light entrée on the Houston to Las Vegas ight. All we o er is peanuts, and she thinks a nice chicken Caesar salad would be popular. What do you say?” The person stammered for a moment, so Kelleher responded: “You say, ‘Tracy, will adding that chicken Caesar salad make us THE low-fare airline from Houston to Las Vegas? Because if it doesn’t help us become the unchallenged low-fare airline, we’re not serving any damn chicken salad. ’” Kelleher’s Commander’s Intent is “We are THE low-fare airline. ” This is a simple idea, but it is su ciently useful that it has guided the actions of Southwest’s employees for more than thirty years. Now, this core idea— “THE low-fare airline” —isn’t the whole story, of course. For instance, in 1996 Southwest received 124,000 applications for 5,444 openings. It’s known as a great place to work, which is surprising. It’s not supposed to be fun to work for penny-pinchers. It’s hard to imagine Wal-Mart employees giggling their way through the workday. Yet somehow Southwest has pulled it o. Let’s think about the ideas driving Southwest Airlines as concentric circles. The central circle, the core, is “THE low-fare airline. ” But the very next circle might be “Have fun at work. ” Southwest’s employees know that it’s okay to have fun so long as it doesn’t jeopardize the company’s status as THE low-fare airline. A new employee can easily put these ideas together to realize how to act in unscripted situations. For instance, is it all right to joke about a ight attendant’s birthday over the P.A.? Sure. Is it equally okay to throw confetti in her honor? Probably not—the confetti would create extra work for cleanup crews, and extra clean-up time means higher fares. It’s the lighthearted business equivalent of the foot soldier who improvises based on the Commander’s Intent. A well- thought-out simple idea can be amazingly powerful in shaping behavior. A warning: In the future, months after you’ve put down this book, you’re going to recall the word “Simple” as an element of the SUCCESs checklist. And your mental thesaurus will faithfully go digging for the meaning of “Simple, ” and it’s going to come back with associations like dumbing down, shooting for the lowest common denominator, making things easy, and so on. At that moment, you’ve got to remind your thesaurus of the examples we’ve explored. “THE low-fare airline” and the other stories in this chapter aren’t simple because they’re full of easy words. They’re simple because they re ect the Commander’s Intent. It’s about elegance and prioritization, not dumbing down. Burying the Lead News reporters are taught to start their stories with the most important information. The rst sentence, called the lead, contains the most essential elements of the story. A good lead can convey a lot of information, as in these two leads from articles that won awards from the American Society of Newspaper Editors: A healthy 17-year-old heart pumped the gift of life through 34- year-old Bruce Murray Friday, following a four-hour transplant operation that doctors said went without a hitch. JERUSALEM, Nov. 4—A right-wing Jewish extremist shot and killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin tonight as he departed a peace rally attended by more than 100,000 in Tel Aviv, throwing Israel’s government and the Middle East peace process into turmoil. After the lead, information is presented in decreasing order of importance. Journalists call this the “inverted pyramid” structure—the most important info (the widest part of the pyramid) is at the top. The inverted pyramid is great for readers. No matter what the reader’s attention span—whether she reads only the lead or the entire story—the inverted pyramid maximizes the information she gleans. Think of the alternative: If news stories were written like mysteries, with a dramatic payo at the end, then readers who broke o in mid-story would miss the point. Imagine waiting until the last sentence of a story to nd out who won the presidential election or the Super Bowl. The inverted pyramid also allows newspapers to get out the door on time. Suppose a late-breaking story forces editors to steal space from other stories. Without the inverted pyramid, they’d be forced to do a slow, careful editing job on all the other articles, trimming a word here or a phrase there. With the inverted pyramid structure, they simply lop o paragraphs from the bottom of the other articles, knowing that those paragraphs are (by construction) the least important. According to one account, perhaps apocryphal, the inverted pyramid arose during the Civil War. All the reporters wanted to use military telegraphs to transmit their stories back home, but they could be cut o at any moment; they might be bumped by military personnel, or the communication line might be lost completely—a common occurrence during battles. The reporters never knew how much time they would get to send a story, so they had to send the most important information rst. Journalists obsess about their leads. Don Wycli , a winner of prizes for editorial writing, says, “I’ve always been a believer that if I’ve got two hours in which to write a story, the best investment I can make is to spend the rst hour and forty- ve minutes of it getting a good lead, because after that everything will come easily. ” So if nding a good lead makes everything else easy, why would a journalist ever fail to come up with one? A common mistake reporters make is that they get so steeped in the details that they fail to see the message’s core—what readers will nd important or interesting. The longtime newspaper writer Ed Cray, a professor of communications at the University of Southern California, has spent almost thirty years teaching journalism. He says, “The longer you work on a story, the more you can nd yourself losing direction. No detail is too small. You just don’t know what your story is ” anymore. This problem of losing direction, of missing the central story, is so common that journalists have given it its own name: Burying the lead. “Burying the lead” occurs when the journalist lets the most important element of the story slip too far down in the story structure. The process of writing a lead—and avoiding the temptation to bury it—is a helpful metaphor for the process of nding the core. Finding the core and writing the lead both involve forced prioritization. Suppose you’re a wartime reporter and you can telegraph only one thing before the line gets cut, what would it be? There’s only one lead, and there’s only one core. You must choose. Forced prioritization is really painful. Smart people recognize the value of all the material. They see nuance, multiple perspectives—and because they fully appreciate the complexities of a situation, they’re often tempted to linger there. This tendency to gravitate toward complexity is perpetually at war with the need to prioritize. This di cult quest—the need to wrestle priorities out of complexity—was exactly the situation that James Carville faced in the Clinton campaign of 1992. “If You Say Three Things, You Don’t Say Anything. ” A political campaign is a breeding ground of decision angst. If you think your organization has problems, imagine this challenge: You must build a nationwide organization from scratch, using primarily unpaid and largely unskilled workers. You’ve got about a year to pull the team together and line up an endless supply of doughnuts. Everyone in the organization needs to sing from the same hymnal, but you don’t have much time to rehearse the choir. And the media prod you to sing a new song every day. To make matters worse, you must constantly contend with opponents who will seize on every errant word. Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign was a classic example of sticky ideas at work in a di cult environment. Not only did the campaign have the normal set of complexities, Clinton himself added a few new wrinkles. First, there were the “bimbo eruptions, ” which need not be reexamined here. Second, Clinton was a policy wonk by nature, which meant that he was inclined to ponti cate on virtually every issue that he was asked about, instead of staying focused on a few key principles. As his key political adviser, James Carville had to cope with this complexity. One day, struggling to maintain his focus, he wrote three phrases on a whiteboard for all the campaign workers to see. One of the phrases on the impromptu list was “It’s the economy, stupid. ” This message would become the core of Clinton’s successful campaign. The word “stupid” was added as a taunt to the campaign workers themselves, reminding them not to lose focus on what was important. “It was simple and it was self-e acing, ” Carville explained. “I was trying to say, ‘Let’s don’t be too clever here, don’t come down here thinking we’re too smart. Let’s just remember the basics. ’” The need for focus extended to Bill Clinton himself, perhaps especially to Clinton himself. At one point, Clinton was frustrated that he’d been advised to stop talking about balanced budgets despite the fact that Ross Perot, the third- party candidate for president in 1992, was getting positive attention for his stand on the balanced budget. Clinton said, “I’ve been talking about these things for two years, why should I stop talking about them now because Perot is in?” Clinton’s advisers had to tell him, “There has to be message triage. If you say three things, you don’t say anything. ” “It’s the economy, stupid” was the lead of the Clinton story —and it was a good one, because in 1992 the U.S. economy was mired in a recession. But if “It’s the economy, stupid” is the lead, then the need for a balanced budget can’t also be the lead. Carville had to stop Clinton from burying the lead. Decision Paralysis Why is prioritizing so di cult? In the abstract, it doesn’t sound so tough. You prioritize important goals over less important goals. You prioritize goals that are “critical” ahead of goals that are “bene cial. ” But what if we can’t tell what’s “critical” and what’s “bene cial”? Sometimes it’s not obvious. We often have to make decisions between one “unknown” and another. This kind of complexity can be paralyzing. In fact, psychologists have found that people can be driven to irrational decisions by too much complexity and uncertainty. In 1954, the economist L. J. Savage described what he perceived as a basic rule of human decision-making. He called it the “sure-thing principle. ” He illustrated it with this example: A businessman is thinking about buying a piece of property. There’s an election coming up soon, and he initially thinks that its outcome could be relevant to the attractiveness of the purchase. So, to clarify his decision, he thinks through both scenarios. If the Republican wins, he decides, he’ll buy. If the Democrat wins, he’ll do the same. Seeing that he’d buy in either scenario, he goes forward with the purchase, despite not knowing the outcome. This decision seems sensible—not many people would quibble with Savage’s logic. Two psychologists quibbled. Amos Tversky and Eldar Sha r later published a paper proving that the “sure-thing principle” wasn’t always a sure thing. They uncovered situations where the mere existence of uncertainty seemed to alter how people made decisions—even when the uncertainty was irrelevant to the outcome, as with the businessman’s purchase. For instance, imagine that you’re in college and you’ve just completed an important nal exam a couple of weeks before the Christmas holidays. You’d been studying for this exam for weeks, because it’s in a subject that’s important to your future career. You’ve got to wait two days to get the exam results back. Meanwhile, you see an opportunity to purchase a vacation during the holidays to Hawaii at a bargain-basement price. Here are your three options: You can buy the vacation today, pass on it today, or pay a ve-dollar fee to lock in the price for two days, which would allow you to make your decision after you got your grade. What would you do? You may feel some desire to know the outcome of your exam before you decide, as did the students who faced this choice in the original experiment. So Tversky and Sha r simply removed this uncertainty for two groups of participants. These groups were told up front how they did on the exam. Some students were told that they passed the exam, and 57 percent of them chose to go on the trip (after all, it makes for a good celebration). Other students were told that they failed the exam, and 54 percent of them chose to go on the trip (after all, it makes for good recuperation). Both those who passed and those who failed wanted to go to Hawaii, pronto. Here’s the twist: The group of students who, like you, didn’t know their nal exam results behaved completely di erently. The majority of them (61 percent) paid ve dollars to wait for two days. Think about that! If you pass, you want to go to Hawaii. If you fail, you want to go to Hawaii. If you don’t know whether you passed or failed, you … wait and see? This is not the way the “sure-thing principle” is supposed to behave. It’s as if our businessman had decided to wait until after the election to buy his property, despite being willing to make the purchase regardless of the outcome. Tversky and Sha r’s study shows us that uncertainty— even irrelevant uncertainty—can paralyze us. Another study, conducted by Sha r and a colleague, Donald Redelmeier, demonstrates that paralysis can also be caused by choice. Imagine, for example, that you are in college and you face the following choice one evening. What would you do? 1. Attend a lecture by an author you admire who is visiting just for the evening, or 2. Go to the library and study. Studying doesn’t look so attractive compared with a once in a lifetime lecture. When this choice was given to actual college students, only 21 percent decided to study. Suppose, instead, you had been given three choices: 1. Attend the lecture. 2. Go to the library and study. 3. Watch a foreign lm that you’ve been wanting to see. Does your answer di er? Remarkably, when a di erent group of students were given the three choices, 40 percent decided to study—double the number who did before. Giving students two good alternatives to studying, rather than one, paradoxically makes them less likely to choose either. This behavior isn’t “rational, ” but it is human. Prioritization rescues people from the quicksand of decision angst, and that’s why nding the core is so valuable. The people who listen to us will be constantly making decisions in an environment of uncertainty. They will su er anxiety from the need to choose—even when the choice is between two good options, like the lecture and the foreign lm. Core messages help people avoid bad choices by reminding them of what’s important. In Herb Kelleher’s parable, for instance, someone had to choose between chicken salad and no chicken salad—and the message “THE low-fare airline” led her to abandon the chicken salad. Idea Clinics The goal of this book is to help you make your ideas stick. So, periodically throughout the book, we will present “Idea Clinics, ” which illustrate, in practical terms, how an idea can be made stickier. The Clinics were inspired by the classic “before and after” photos used by weight-loss centers— visible evidence that the diet works. Like patients trying a new diet, the initial ideas in the Clinics vary in their need for change; some need dramatic help, like a stomach-stapling and liposuction, and some only need to lose a few pounds around the waistline. The point of the Clinics is not to wow you with our creative genius, and it’s fortunate for readers and authors alike that this is not the goal, because we are not creative geniuses. The point is simply to model the process of making ideas stickier. In contrast to traditional disclaimers, this is something you should try at home. Think about each message and consider how you would improve it using the principles in the book. You can safely skip the Clinics—they are intended as sidebars to the text, rather than as building blocks—but we hope you’ll nd them useful. C LINIC Warning: Sun Exposure Is Dangerous THE SITUATION: Health educators at Ohio State University want to inform the academic community about the risks of sun exposure. MESSAGE 1: Here’s a Web page with facts about sun exposure from Ohio State University. We’ve added numbers to each paragraph so that we can analyze the message later: Sun Exposure: Precautions and Protection (1) A golden, bronze tan is often considered a status symbol. Perhaps this supports the idea that people who have time to lie in the sun long enough to develop a deep tan, or who can travel to warm climates during winter, have more money or leisure time than “common folk. ” Nevertheless, the goal of many is a deep tan early in spring or to return from vacation with that hearty, healthy glow. Whether a tan suggests status or not, careless exposure to the sun can be harmful. Ultraviolet rays from the sun will damage skin but can also create vision problems, allergic reactions, and depressed immune systems. (2) Tanning and burning are caused by ultraviolet rays from the sun. These rays cannot be seen or felt, but penetrate the skin and stimulate cells containing a brownish pigment called melanin. Melanin protects the skin by absorbing and scattering ultraviolet rays. People with dark skins have high amounts of melanin, have greater natural protection from ultraviolet rays, and tan more easily. Blondes, redheads, and people with fair skins have less melanin and, therefore, burn more quickly. (3) As melanin is stimulated by ultraviolet rays, it rises to the skin’s surface as a tan and provides protection against future sun exposure. Individuals with dark skins such as olive, brown, or black are not immune to burning and skin damage caused by careless exposure to the sun. (4) Two types of ultraviolet rays (UV) from the sun exist: UVA and UVB. UVB cause burning of the skin or the red associated with sunburn, skin cancer, and premature aging of skin. UVA rays stimulate tanning but are also linked to other problems such as impaired vision, skin rashes, and allergic or other reactions to drugs. (5) Skin damage from overexposure to the sun is cumulative over the years and cannot be reversed. Once damage occurs, it cannot be undone. Most serious and lasting damage occurs before age 18. Protection should start early, particularly with children who enjoy outdoor play on sunny days. Before you read our comments below, go back and reread Message 1. What can you do to improve it? COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 1: What’s the lead here? What’s the core? The rst paragraph dives into tanned skin as a status symbol, which is simply an interesting red herring. (In fact, the text acknowledges as much when it says, “Whether a tan suggests status or not … ”) To us, Paragraph 5 ashes in neon lights as the core: Skin damage … is cumulative over the years and cannot be reversed. Wow. Isn’t that the single most important thing we’d want to tell sun-worshippers? By contrast, Paragraphs 2-4 provide super uous mechanics. As an analogy, do smokers really need to understand the workings of the lungs in order to appreciate the dangers of smoking? MESSAGE 2: In the text below, we have reordered the points and tinkered with the prose a bit in the hope of unburying the lead. Sun Exposure: How to Get Old Prematurely (5) Skin damage from overexposure to the sun is like getting older: It is cumulative over the years and cannot be reversed. Once damage occurs, it cannot be undone. Most serious and lasting damage occurs before age 18. Fortunately, unlike aging, skin damage can be prevented. Sun protection should start early, particularly with children who enjoy playing outdoors on sunny days. (2, 3, 4) Tanning and burning are caused by ultraviolet rays from the sun. Ultraviolet rays cause sunburn, which is a temporary sign of deeper underlying skin damage. Sunburns eventually disappear, but the underlying damage persists and may eventually cause premature aging or skin cancer. (1) Ironically, a golden, bronze tan is often considered a sign of good health. But ultraviolet rays not only damage skin, they can also create vision problems, allergic reactions, and depressed immune systems. So instead of a “healthy tan, ” perhaps we should call it a “sickly tan. ” COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 2: The core of this message is that skin damage is cumulative and irreversible. So we’ve rewritten the message to stress that point and eliminate nonessential information. We’ve done this to illustrate the process of forced prioritization; we’ve had to eliminate some interesting stu (such as the references to melanin) in order to let the core shine through. We’ve tried to emphasize the core in a couple of ways. First, we’ve unburied the lead—putting the core right up front. Second, we’ve added the analogy to aging to hammer home the idea that damage is irreversible. Third, we’ve added a concrete and perhaps unexpected image: Sunburns are a signal of damage; they may disappear, but the underlying damage does not. SCORECARD Checklist Message 1 Message 2 Simple - Unexpected - Concrete - Credible - - Emotional - - Story - - PUNCH LINE: Avoid burying the lead. Don’t start with something interesting but irrelevant in hopes of entertaining the audience. Instead, work to make the core message itself more interesting. Names, Names, and Names Dunn, North Carolina, is a small town about forty miles south of Raleigh. It has 14,000 residents and its workforce is primarily blue collar. The local diner is packed in the morning with people eating big breakfasts and drinking co ee. Waitresses call you “hon. ” The town recently got a Wal-Mart. All in all, Dunn is a pretty normal place, except for one fact: Almost everyone there reads the local paper, the Daily Record. As a matter of fact, more than everyone in Dunn reads the paper. The Daily Record’s penetration in the Dunn community is 112 percent, which is the highest penetration of any newspaper in the country. For a community penetration to exceed 100 percent, one of two things must be true: (1) People from outside Dunn—perhaps people commuting to jobs in Dunn—are buying the paper; or (2) some households are buying more than one paper. Maybe it’s hard for some couples in Dunn to share. What’s the explanation for this remarkable success? The people of Dunn certainly have plenty of options for their news: USA Today, the Raleigh News & Observer, CNN, the Internet, and hundreds of other outlets. So why is the Daily Record so popular? The Dunn Daily Record was founded in 1950 by Hoover Adams. Adams was born with ink in his blood. He got his rst byline by sending dispatches from his Boy Scout camp. By the time he was in high school he was serving as a stringer—a freelance reporter—for the Raleigh paper. After World War II, Adams became the editor of the Dunn Dispatch. Eventually, he grew restless at the Dispatch and decided to start his own paper, the Daily Record. In 1978, after twenty- eight years of head-to-head competition, the Dispatch nally gave up and sold out to him. Across the fty- ve years of his tenure as publisher, Adams has had a remarkably consistent editorial philosophy. He believes that newspapers should be relentlessly local in their coverage. In fact, he’s a zealot about community coverage. In 1978, frustrated by what he felt was insu cient focus on local issues in the paper, he wrote a memo to his sta , explaining his views: “All of us know that the main reason anybody reads a local newspaper is for local names and pictures. That’s the one thing we can do better than anybody else. And that’s the thing our readers can’t get anywhere else. Always remember, the mayor of Angier and the mayor of Lillington are just as important to those towns as the mayor of New York is to his people. ” Let’s be clear: Adams’s focus on local coverage is not a revolutionary sentiment. In fact, among publishers of small newspapers it would be utterly uncontroversial. Yet it’s easy enough to see that the idea has not become a reality at most papers. The average local newspaper is loaded with wire stories, analyses of pro sports teams, and spot photos with nary a person in sight. In other words, nding the core isn’t synonymous with communicating the core. Top management can know what the priorities are but be completely ine ective in sharing and achieving those priorities. Adams has managed to nd and share the core. How did he do it? Sharing the Core Adams found the core of his newspaper operations: local focus. Then he turned his attention to sharing his core message—making it stick with his sta. For the rest of the chapter—in fact, the rest of the book—we will discuss ways to get core messages to stick. And we will start by studying the way Adams has made his “local focus” message stick. While many publishers pay lip service to the value of local focus, Adams is an extremist about it. He’s willing to hurt the bottom line for local focus: The fact is, a local newspaper can never get enough local names. I’d happily hire two more typesetters and add two more pages in every edition of each paper if we had the names to ll them up. He’s willing to be boring for local focus: I’ll bet that if the Daily Record reprinted the entire Dunn telephone directory tonight, half the people would sit down and check it to be sure their name was included…. When somebody tells you, “Aw, you don’t want all those names, ” please assure them that’s exactly what we want, most of all! He gleefully exaggerates in order to emphasize the value of local focus, quoting a saying of a friend, Ralph Delano, who runs the local paper in Benson: If an atomic bomb fell on Raleigh, it wouldn’t be news in Benson unless some of the debris and ashes fell on Benson. In fact, asked why the Daily Record has been so successful, Adams replies, “It’s because of three things: Names, names, and names. ” What’s going on here? Adams has found the core idea that he wants to communicate—that local focus is the key to his newspaper’s success. That’s Step 1. Step 2 is to communicate the core to others. And he does that brilliantly. Look at the techniques Adams uses to communicate his seriousness about local focus. He uses an analogy: comparing the mayor of Angier to the mayor of New York. (We’ll have more to say about analogy later in this chapter.) He says he’d hire more typesetters if the re porters could generate enough names. This is forced prioritization: Local focus is more important than minimizing costs! (Not a common sentiment among small-town papers. See the “Unexpected” chapter.) He also speaks in clear, tangible language. What does he want? Names. He wants lots of individual names in the newspaper every day. (See the “Concrete” chapter.) This idea is concrete enough that everyone in the organization can comprehend and use it. Is there any room for misunderstanding? Is there a sta er who won’t understand what Adams means by “names”? “Names, names, and names” is a simple statement that is symbolic of a core truth. It’s not just that names are helpful. In Adams’s mind, names trump costs. Names trump well- written prose. Names trump nuclear explosions in neighboring communities. For fty- ve years, since Adams founded the paper, his core value of community focus has helped hundreds of people at the paper, in thousands of circumstances, make good decisions. As a publisher, Adams has presided over close to 20,000 issues. And each of those issues involved countless decisions: Which stories do we cover? What’s important in the stories? Which photos do we run? Which do we cut out to save space? Adams can’t possibly be personally involved in the vast majority of these hundreds of small decisions. But his employees don’t su er from decision paralysis, because Adams’s Commander’s Intent is clear: “Names, names, and names. ” Adams can’t be everywhere. But by nding the core and communicating it clearly, he has made himself everywhere. That’s the power of a sticky idea. Simple = Core + Compact Adams is a clever wordsmith, but his most useful bit of wordplay is probably his least clever: “Names, names, and names. ” This phrase is useful and memorable because it is highly concrete, but also because it is highly succinct. This example illustrates a second aspect of simplicity: Simple messages are core and compact. At one level, the idea of compactness is uncontroversial. Rarely will you get advice to make your communications lengthy and convoluted, unless you write interest-rate disclosures for a credit card company. We know that sentences are better than paragraphs. Two bullet points are better than ve. Easy words are better than hard words. It’s a bandwidth issue: The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be. But let’s be clear: Compactness alone isn’t enough. We could latch on to a compact message that isn’t core; in other words, a pithy slogan that doesn’t re ect our Commander’s Intent. Compact messages may be sticky, but that says nothing about their worth. We can imagine compact messages that are lies (“The earth is at”), compact messages that are irrelevant (“Goats like sprouts”), and compact messages that are ill-advised (“Never let a day pass without a shoe purchase”). In other cases, compactness itself can come to seem an unworthy goal. Lots of us have expertise in particular areas. Becoming an expert in something means that we become more and more fascinated by nuance and complexity. That’s when the Curse of Knowledge kicks in, and we start to forget what it’s like not to know what we know. At that point, making something simple can seem like “dumbing down. ” As an expert, we don’t want to be accused of propagating sound bites or pandering to the lowest common denominator. Simplifying, we fear, can devolve into oversimplifying. So if we’re going to de ne “simple” as core and compact, we need to assure ourselves that compactness is worth striving for. We’ve already got core, why do we need compact? Aren’t “stripped-down” ideas inherently less useful than fully elaborated ideas? Suppose we took compactness to its most extreme form. Is it possible to say something meaningful in the span of a sound bite? “A Bird in the Hand” For thousands of years, people have exchanged sound bites called proverbs. Proverbs are simple yet profound. Cervantes de ned proverbs as “short sentences drawn from long experience. ” Take the English-language proverb: “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. ” What’s the core? The core is a warning against giving up a sure thing for something speculative. The proverb is short and simple, yet it packs a big nugget of wisdom that is useful in many situations. As it turns out, this is not just an English-language proverb. In Sweden, the saying is “Rather one bird in the hand than ten in the woods. ” In Spain: “A bird in the hand is better than a hundred ying birds. ” In Poland: “A sparrow in your hand is better than a pigeon on the roof. ” In Russia: “Better a titmouse in the hand than a crane in the sky. ” Other variants can be found in Romanian, Italian, Portuguese, German, Icelandic, and even medieval Latin. The rst documented case in English is from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678. But the proverb may be much older still. In one of Aesop’s fables, a hawk seizes a nightingale, who pleads for its life, arguing that it is too tiny a morsel to satisfy the hawk. The hawk replies, “I would be foolish to release the bird I have in my hand to pursue another bird that is not even in sight. ” This story dates from 570 B.C. The “bird in hand” proverb, then, is an astoundingly sticky idea. It has survived for more than 2,500 years. It has spread across continents, cultures, and languages. Keep in mind that nobody funded a “bird in hand” advertising campaign. It spreads on its own. Many other proverbs share this longevity. In fact, a repertoire of proverbs has been found in almost every documented culture. Why? What is their purpose? Proverbs are helpful in guiding individual decisions in environments with shared standards. Those shared standards are often ethical or moral norms. Proverbs o er rules of thumb for the behavior of individuals. The Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, ” is so profound that it can in uence a lifetime of behavior. The Golden Rule is a great symbol of what we’re chasing in this chapter: ideas that are compact enough to be sticky and meaningful enough to make a di erence. Great simple ideas have an elegance and a utility that make them function a lot like proverbs. Cervantes’s de nition of “proverbs” echoes our de nition of Simple ideas: short sentences (compact) drawn from long experience (core). We are right to be skeptical of sound bites, because lots of sound bites are empty or misleading—they’re compact without being core. But the Simple we’re chasing isn’t a sound bite, it’s a proverb: compact and core. Adams managed to turn his core idea—the need to focus relentlessly on local issues—into a journalistic proverb. “Names, names, and names” is an idea that helps guide individual decision-making in a community of shared standards. If you’re a photographer, the proverb has no value as a literal statement, unless you plan to shoot name tags. But when you know that your organization thrives on names —i.e., the speci c actions taken by speci c members of the local community—that knowledge informs the kinds of photo ops you look for. Do you shoot the boring committee deliberations or the gorgeous sunset over the park? Answer: the boring committee deliberations. Palm Pilot and the Visual Proverb Compact ideas help people learn and remember a core message. But they may be even more important when it comes time to help people act properly, particularly in an environment where they have to make lots of choices. Why do remote controls have more buttons than we ever use? The answer starts with the noble intentions of engineers. Most technology and product-design projects must combat “feature creep, ” the tendency for things to become incrementally more complex until they no longer perform their original functions very well. A VCR is a case in point. Feature creep is an innocent process. An engineer looking at a prototype of a remote control might think to herself, “Hey, there’s some extra real estate here on the face of the control. And there’s some extra processing capacity on the chip. Rather than let it go to waste, what if we give people the ability to toggle between the Julian and Gregorian calendars?” The engineer is just trying to help—to add another gee- whiz feature that will improve the remote control. The other engineers on the team, meanwhile, don’t particularly care about the calendar-toggle. Even if they think it’s lame, they probably don’t care enough to stage a protest: “Either the calendar-toggle button goes or I quit!” In this way, slowly and quietly, remote controls—and, by extension, other types of technologies—are featured to death. The Palm Pilot team, aware of this danger, took a hard line against feature creep. When the team began its work, in the early 1990s, personal digital assistants (PDAs) had an unblemished record of failure. Apple’s famous debacle with its Newton PDA had made other competitors gun-shy. One of the competitors on the PDA market in 1994 looked like a malnourished computer. It was a bulky device with a keyboard and multiple ports for peripherals. Je Hawkins, the Palm Pilot team leader, was determined that his product would avoid this fate. He wanted the Palm Pilot to be simple. It would handle four things: calendars, contacts, memos, and task lists. The Palm Pilot would do only four things, but it would do them well. Hawkins fought feature creep by carrying around a wooden block the size of the Palm. Trae Vassallo, a member of the Palm V design team, says, “The block was dumb, which resonated with the simple technological goals of the product, but it was also small, which made the product elegant and di erent. ” Hawkins would pull out the wooden block to “take notes” during a meeting or “check his calendar” in the hallway. Whenever someone suggested another feature, Hawkins would pull out the wooden block and ask them where it would t. Vassallo said that the Palm Pilot became a successful product “almost because it was de ned more in terms of what it was not than in terms of what it was. ” Tom Kelley, from IDEO, a prominent Silicon Valley design rm, made a similar point: “The real barrier to the initial PDAs … was the idea that the machine had to do nearly everything. ” Hawkins knew that the core idea of his project needed to be elegance and simplicity (and a tenacious avoidance of feature creep). In sharing this core idea, Hawkins and his team used what was, in essence, a visual proverb. The block of wood became a visual reminder to do a few things and do them well. There is a striking parallel between the development of the Palm Pilot and the Clinton campaign led by James Carville. In both cases, the teams were composed of people who were knowledgeable and passionate about their work. Both teams boasted plenty of people who had the capability and the desire to do a lot of di erent things—argue every issue and engineer every feature. Yet in both cases the team needed a simple reminder to ght the temptation to do too much. When you say three things, you say nothing. When your remote control has fty buttons, you can’t change the channel anymore. Using What’s There Our messages have to be compact, because we can learn and remember only so much information at once. But suppose we’ve assessed the core of our message and we have too much information to aspire to the compactness of a proverb. How do we convey lots of information when we need to? The following exercise is designed to reinforce the need for compactness and to provide a hint about how to cram more information into a compact message. Here are the rules of this exercise: Spend ten to fteen seconds, no more, studying the letters below. Then close the book, pull out a sheet of paper, and write down as many letters as you can remember. Spoiler alert: Don’t turn the page until you’ve nished the exercise. J FKFB INAT OUP SNA SAI RS If you’re like most people, you probably remembered about seven to ten letters. That’s not much information. Compactness is essential, because there’s a limit to the amount of information we can juggle at once. Now turn the page and try the exercise again. There’s a twist this time. We haven’t changed the letters or the sequence. All we’ve done is change the way the letters are grouped. Once again, study the letters for ten to fteen seconds, then close the book and test your recall. JFK FBI NATO UPS NASA IRS Chances are you did much better the second time. Suddenly the letters meant something, which made them easier to remember. In Round 1, you were trying to remember raw data. In Round 2, you were remembering concepts: John F. Kennedy, the FBI, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, UPS, NASA, the IRS. But wait a second. Why is it easier to remember “John F. Kennedy” than the random letters F, J, K? Surely John F. Kennedy is a bigger bundle of information than the three random letters! Think of all the associations with JFK— politics, relationships, his assassination, and his famous family. If remembering was like weight lifting, it would be ridiculous to think we could “lift” JFK easier than three little letters! The secret, of course, is that we’re not “lifting” JFK. All the remembering work related to JFK has already been done. We’ve already built those muscles—the concept of JFK, and all its associations, is already embedded in our memories. What we’re remembering is simply a pointer to this information—we’re posting a little ag on the terrain of our memory. With the raw letters, we’re posting three separate ags. In the end, it’s one bit of information (or one ag) versus three, and it’s no surprise that one is easier to remember. So what? Is this just neat brain trivia? Here’s where we’re going: We’ve seen that compact ideas are stickier, but that compact ideas alone aren’t valuable—only ideas with profound compactness are valuable. So, to make a profound idea compact you’ve got to pack a lot of meaning into a little bit of messaging. And how do you do that? You use ags. You tap the existing memory terrain of your audience. You use what’s already there. The Pomelo Schema So far we have presented situations in which one simple idea, or a handful of simple ideas, were useful in guiding behavior. But, let’s face it, most people in the world do complicated things. It’s not our intention to argue that complicated things —law, medicine, construction, programming, teaching—can be pared down to two or three compact messages. We obviously can’t replace a school of architecture with a single compact idea (“Keep the building from falling down”). This leads us to an important issue that we haven’t discussed yet: How do you turn a freshman into an architect? How does complexity emerge from simplicity? We will argue that it is possible to create complexity through the artful use of simplicity. If simple ideas are staged and layered correctly, they can very quickly become complex. Let us teach you what a “pomelo” is. (If you already know what a pomelo is, be a good sport and feign ignorance.) Here is one way that we can explain to you what a pomelo is: EXPLANATION 1: A pomelo is the largest citrus fruit. The rind is very thick but soft and easy to peel away. The resulting fruit has a light yellow to coral pink esh and can vary from juicy to slightly dry and from seductively spicy-sweet to tangy and tart. Quick question: Based on this explanation, if you mixed pomelo juice half and half with orange juice, would it taste good? You might make a guess, but the answer is probably a bit ambiguous. Let’s move on to an alternative explanation: EXPLANATION 2: A pomelo is basically a supersized grapefruit with a very thick and soft rind. Explanation 2 sticks a ag on a concept that you already know: a grapefruit. When we tell you that a pomelo is like a grapefruit, you call up a mental image of a grapefruit. Then we tell you what to change about it: It’s “supersized. ” Your visualized grapefruit grows accordingly. We’ve made it easier for you to learn a new concept by tying it to a concept that you already know. In this case, the concept is “grapefruit. ” “Grapefruit” is a schema that you already have. (“Schema” is a bit of technical jargon from psychology, but it’s so useful that we think it’s worth carrying through the book.) Psychologists de ne schema as a collection of generic properties of a concept or category. Schemas consist of lots of prerecorded information stored in our memories. If someone tells you that she saw a great new sports car, a picture immediately springs to mind, lled with generic properties. You know what “sports cars” are like. You picture something small and two-door, with a convertible top perhaps. If the car in your picture moves, it moves fast. Its color is almost certainly red. Similarly, your schema of “grapefruit” also contains a cluster of generic properties: yellow-pink color, tart avor, softball-sized, and so on. By calling up your grapefruit schema, we were able to teach you the concept of pomelo much faster than if we had mechanically listed all the attributes of a pomelo. Note, too, that it’s easier to answer the question about the blend of pomelo and orange juice. You know that grapefruit juice blends well with OJ, so the pomelo schema inherits this property from the grapefruit schema. (By the way, to be complete, Explanation 1 is itself full of schemas. “Citrus fruit” is a schema, “rind” is a schema, and “tangy” is a schema. Explanation 2 is easier to parse only because “grapefruit” is a higher-level schema—a schema composed of other schemas.) By using schemas, Explanation 2 improves both our comprehension and our memory. Let’s think about the two de nitions of “pomelo” in terms of the inverted pyramid structure. What’s the lead? Well, with Explanation 1 the lead is: citrus fruit. After the lead, there is no clear hierarchy; depending on what catches people’s attention, they might remember the rind info (“very thick but soft and easy to peel away”) or the color info (“light yellow to coral pink”) or the juiciness info or the taste info. With Explanation 2, the lead is: grapefruit-like. The second paragraph is: supersized. The third paragraph is: very thick and soft rind. Six months from now, people will remember—at best!— the lead of our story. That means that with one story they’d remember “fruit” or “citrus fruit. ” With the other story they’d remember “grapefruit. ” The second story is clearly better—it isn’t a judgment call. This concludes what will probably be the last psychological discussion of citrus fruit you’ll ever encounter. But though the concept of “pomelo” may not be worth the neurons you just burned on it, the underlying concept—that schemas enable profound simplicity—is critical. Good teachers intuitively use lots of schemas. Economics teachers, for instance, start with compact, stripped-down examples that can be understood by students who have no preexisting economics schemas. “Let’s say that you grow apples and I grow oranges. We’re the only two people around. Let’s also say that we’d prefer to eat some of both fru