All the notes were taken directly from the source mentioned.
– – –
Create something remarkable and put it infant of people predispose to care
Create ideas with an eye to maximizing their stickiness
SUCCESs
• Simplicity: One sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it
• Unexpectedness: Generate interest
• Concreteness: Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images
• Credibility: Carry credentials
• Emotions: Make them feel something
• Stories
Curse of Knowledge: Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. It becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others because we can’t readily re-create the other person position. You can’t unlearn what you already know.
Invent new ideas, not new rules.
SIMPLE
Find Core Idea
As a commander, I could spend a lot of time enumerating every specific task, but as soon as people know what the intent is they begin generating their own solutions.
• If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must
• The sing, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is
The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important but just aren’t the most important.
“A designer knows he as achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away” Saint-Exupery
Southwest Longest-serving CEO: Herb Kelleher
IDEAO Tom Kelly
For journalist “Inverted Pyramid”: The most important info at the top. Common mistake is to get so steeped in the details that you fail to see the message’s core.
Irrelevant uncertainty can paralyze us.
Know the priorities is not enough, you need to effectively share and achieve those priorities
Simple = Core + Compact
To make a profound idea compact you need to tap into the existing memory terrain of your audience, use what is already there.
Schemas help us to create complex messages from simple materials
People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.
Analogies make it possible to understand a compact message because they invoke concepts that you already know. Some are so useful that they don’t merely shed light on a concept, they actually become platforms for novel thinking… Generative analogies/metaphors create new perceptions, explanations and inventions
• Cast members don’t interview for a job, they audition for a role.
• When they are walking around the park, they are onstage.
• People visiting Disney are guests, not customers.
• Jobs are performances; uniforms are costumes.
UNEXPECTED
Surprise jolts us to attention. It must be postdictable, the twist make sense after you think about it “Break the guessing machine and then fix it”
• Identify the core
• Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message
• Communicate by breaking the guessing machine
Mysteries are powerful because they need to create closure.
Each turning point creates curiosity. Curiosity happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.
One implication of the gap theory is that we need to open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First they need to realize they need the facts: Highlight the message they are missing.
To prove their is a gap, it may be necessary to highlight some knowledge firs.
When we feel that we’re close to the solution of a puzzle, curiosity takes over and propels us to finish.
There is value in sequencing information – not dumpling a stack of information on someone at once but dropping clue after clue
The Gap Theory by Lowenstein
Unexpected ideas set up big knowledge gaps, but not so big that they seemed insurmountable (Audacious and provocative but not paralyzing)
CONCRETE
Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it.
If you can examine something with your sense, it’s concrete.
Trying to teach an abstract principle without concrete foundation is like trying to start a house by building a roof in the air.
CREDIBLE
OLIVER SACHS – NEUROSCIENCE & ALAN GREENSPAN FOR ECONOMICS
Stephen Covey – The 8th Habit
It can be the honesty and trustworthiness of our sources, not their status, that allow them to act as authorities
External credibility: Celebrity/expert or antiauthority.
The message needs to have “internal credibility” by using a strong example.
Testable credential: “See it for yourself” “Try before you buy”
• A person’s knowledge of details is often a good proxy for her expertise
• Truthful, core and vivid details boost credibility
• Statistics should always be used to illustrate a relationship (makes it more tangible). Use them as input, not output
• The right scale changes everything, it allows to bring our intuition to bear in assessing whether the content of a message is credible
EMOTIONAL
The mere act of calculation reduces people’s charity, once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.
Make people care by appealing to the things that matter to them.
Feelings inspire people to act.
Spell the benefit of the benefit:
“People don’t buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children’s picture”
• Use 2nd person rather than 3rd person: You will enjoy… rather than people will enjoy..
• It’s enough to promise reasonable benefits that people can easily imagine themselves enjoying
Abraham Maslow Psychologist – List of human needs
• Transcendence: help others realize their potential
• Self-actualization: realize our own potential, self-fulfillment, peak experiences
• Aesthetic: symmetry, order, beauty, balance
• Learning: know, understand, and mentally connect.
• Esteem: achieve, be competent, gain approval, independence, status
• Belonging: love, family, friends, affection
• Security: protection, safety, stability
• Physical: hunger, thirst, bodily comfort
Self-interest isn’t the whole story. Principles – equality, individualism, ideals about government, human rights etc might matter to us even when it violates our immediate self-interest.
Asking why helps remind us of the core values, the core principles, that underlie our ideas.
How to make people care
Use associations to other things people care.
Appeal to self-interest and identity (not only to who they are but also to who they want to be).
Take off their analytical hats, creating empathy for a specific individual.
STORIES
Books:
Gary Klein “The Power of Stories”
Denning “The Springboard”
Credible ideas, make people believe. Emotional Ideas make people care, right stories make people act.
Humanity 101 – We want to talk to other people about the things we have in common.
A story is a simulation
Mental simulations help us manage emotions, and help us anticipate appropriate response to future situations.
Mental practice alone produces about 2/3 of the benefits of actual physical practice.
“Don’t just imagine being rich, also replay the steps that led to our being poor”.
The group that visualize how this problem arose, the beginning of it in detail, Step by step, visualizing the actions you took, the words you said, what you did, the environment the people and the place you were. That gives better preparation to cope with current problems than just positive visualization.
Visualize exposure to the thing you fear (the event itself, the process not the outcome)
That’s why in a book we should not be tempted to skip directly to the tips and leave the story out!
Stories provide inspiration, inspiration drives action.
3 Basic Plots
• Challenge plot: A protagonist overcomes a formidable challenge and succeeds. It make us want to work harder, take on new challenges and overcome obstacles. (Ex: David and Goliath)
• Connection plot: Inspiration in social ways, help to see ourselves reflected in others.
• Creativity Plot: Involves someone making a mental breakthrough, solving a long-standing puzzle, or attacking a problem in an innovative way.
Learn to spot satires that have potential.
The problem is that when you hit listeners between the eyes they respond by fighting back in a debate (judging it, debating it, criticizing it, and argue back) With a story, you involve people with the idea, asking them to participate with you.
Villains of Stickness
• Natural Tendency to bury the lead and get lost in a sea of information
One of the worst things of knowing a lot is that you are tempted to share it all
• Focusing on the presentation rather than on the message
• Decision paralysis: Excessive choice or ambiguous situations
Getting a message across: You use your expertise to get to what you want, but when you want to tell others the same factors that worked for your advantage to understand it will backfire when telling others because of the curse of knowledge.
Making an idea stick by making the audience:
• Pay Attention: Unexpected
• Understand and remember it: Concrete
• Agree/Believe: Credible
• Care: Emotional
• Be able to act on it: Story
Simply goes in the answer stage were you are formulating what you want to communicate.
Problems getting people to
pay attention to a message?
“No one is listening to me” or “They seem bored—they hear this stuff all the time.”
Solution: Surprise them by breaking their guessing machines—tell
them something that is uncommon sense.
“I lost them halfway through” or “Their attention was wavering toward the end.”
Solution: Create curiosity gaps—tell people just enough for them to realize the piece that’s missing from their knowledge. Or create mysteries or Puzzles that are slowly solved over the course of the communication.
Problems getting people to understand and remember
“They always nod their heads when | explain to them, but it never seems to translate into action.”
Solution: Make the message simpler and use concrete language. Use concrete, real world examples.
“We have these meetings where it seems like everyone is talking past each other” or “Everyone has such different levels of knowledge that it’s hard to teach them.”
Solution: Create a highly concrete turf where people can apply their knowledge. Have people grapple with specific examples of cases rather than concepts.
Problems getting people to
believe you or agree
“They’re not buying it.”
Solution: Find the telling details for your message. Use fewer authorities and more anti-authorities.
“They quibble with everything I say” or “I spend all my time arguing with them about this.”
Solution: Quiet the audience’s mental skeptics by using a spring-board story, switching them into creative mode. Move away from statistics and facts toward meaningful examples. Use an anecdote that passes the Sinatra Test.
Problems getting people to care
“They are so apathetic” or “No one seems fired up about this.”
Solution: Remember the Mother Teresa effect—people care more about individuals than they do about abstractions. Tell them an inspiring Challenge plot or Creativity plot story. Tap into their sense of their own identities, like the “Don’t Mess with Texas” ads, which suggested that not littering was the Texan thing to do.
“The things that used to get people excited just aren’t doing it anymore.”
Solution: Get out of Maslow’s basement and try appealing to more profound types of self-interest.
Problems getting people to act
“Everyone nods their heads, and then nothing happens.”
Solution: Inspire them with a Challenge plot story (Jared, David and Goliath) or engage them by using a springboard story (the World Bank). Make sure your message is simple and concrete enough to be useful—turn it into a proverb (“Names, names, and names”).
A strategy is a guide to behavior, good strategy drives action
Book:
The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
Every organization must make choices among attractive options: Customer service versus cost minimization. Revenue growth versus maximizing profitability. Quality versus speed to market. People development versus the needs of the quarter. Mix together lots of these tensions—an atmosphere full of potential opportunities and risks and uncertainties and incomplete information —and you’ve got a recipe for paralysis.
The hardest decision are the ones where we must decide between two good options
In any entrepreneurial organization, there’s a natural tension between efficiency and experimentation
Executives need to use incentives to reward people who are improvers, not inventors
Same understanding of a strategy, people can disagree constructively
Common strategic language allows everyone to contribute
Barriers to talking strategy:
Curse of Knowledge, Decision paralysis and lack of common strategic vocabulary.
Making your strategy stick
Be Concrete: (specific and sensory so that everyone understands the message in a similar way)
Say something unexpected: What’s new about it? What’s different?
Tell stories: You can reconstruct the moral from the story, but you can’t reconstruct the story from the moral.
Rather than just using repetition to communicate your strategy:
• Determine the right strategy
• Communicate in a way that allows it to become part of the organizational vocabulary
• Wove into day-to-day conversations and decisions
How to unstick ideas? Ricky sticky with stickier ideas
Summary
FIND THE CORE
Determine the most important thing
Beat decision paralysis through relentless prioritization
SHARE THE CORE
Simple= core + compact
Tap into existing schemas
Create a high-concept pitch
Use a generative analogy
GET ATTENTION: SURPRISE
Break a pattern
Break people’s guessing machines
HOLD ATTENTION: INTEREST
Create a mystery
The Gap Theory of Curiosity
HELP PEOPLE TO UNDERSTAND AND REMEMBER
Concreteness of a fable
Make abstraction concrete
HELP PEOPLE COORDINATE
Find common ground
Make it real
HELP PEOPLE BELIEVE
Authority and antiauthority
Use convincing details
MAKE PEOPLE CARE
USE THE POWER OF ASSOCIATION
APPEAL TO SELF INTEREST
APPEAL TO IDENTITY
GET PEOPLE TO ACT
STORIES AS INSPIRATION
USE WHAT STICKS
***
Thanks for reading. Did you like the content you just read? You can help me spread these ideas by sharing this blog post through your social media channels or sending it as a direct message to your friends.