Making Your Ideas "Stick"

February 12, 2010

Interview with Chip Heath, co-author of the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

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Mike Carruthers:
Some ideas stick with us for a long time; other ideas die the minute after we hear them.

Chip Heath:
Ideas that stick - JFK's Man on the Moon speech, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, Aesop's fable that has stuck for twenty-five hundred years, the "this is your brain on drugs" campaign from the 80's.
 

Chip Heath, co-author of the book Made to Stick... 

And if you want to look for ideas that didn't stick, think back to what you remember about the last presentation you saw or the last memo you read - probably zero.

There are some principles that underlie all good or sticky ideas, says Chip.

One of the most common that we see is: very concrete tangible images that you can see in your mind. So, when John F. Kennedy talks about putting a man on the moon that puts an image in your mind. The egg in "this is your brain on drugs" campaign- and you saw it drop into the skillet and you heard it sizzle, that's a tangible concrete image. But unfortunately most of us when we try to communicate our ideas, we talk in abstractions and that prevents our ideas from sticking.

A good idea is usually simple and doesn't offer a lot of options.

One of the things that we found was if people have two good choices they're actually less likely to chose either than if they have one good choice. And so many times in life we're confronted with eight core values for our organizations or a thirteen point policy plan - how are we going to make choices about priorities when we're confronting that many options.