
Communication researchers Chip and Dan Heath have investigated what makes a message stick. By stick, they mean that a person’s ideas “are understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact – they change your audience’s opinions or behaviors.”[1] What they discovered was that sticky ideas shared certain traits. And while they admit there is no formula for sticky ideas, sticky ideas do draw from a common group of traits.[2]
The first characteristic is that the message is simple. Communicating with simplicity is finding the core of the idea. This means we need to strip the idea down to its most crucial essence, weeding out the superfluous. The key is finding the most important idea and not getting bogged down with good ideas. Finding the core is about shedding many great ideas so that the main idea can shine. Communication designers must work to discover how much can be stripped out of an idea before it begins to loose its essence.[3]
Too much superfluous information can lead to decision paralysis. Research has found that the “mere existence of uncertainty seemed to alter how people made decisions.” Another study noted that decision paralysis could be caused by choice. Too many choices create situations where people do nothing. As a result, prioritization in the message is key. “Prioritization rescues people from the quicksand of decision angst, and that’s why finding the core is so valuable. The people who listen to us will be constantly making decisions in an environment of uncertainty. They will suffer anxiety from the need to choose – even when the choice is between two good options…”[4]
Simplicity is both core and compact. Simple ideas function like proverbs. They are “short sentences (compact) drawn from long experience (core).”[5] Only ideas with profound compactness are valuable. To accomplish this, the communicator needs to pack a lot of meaning into a little bit of messaging. Using flags, tapping into the memory of an audience, using what is already there does this.
The second characteristic of sticky communication is unexpectedness. The first part of communication is to get people’s attention. Some communicators have the authority to get attention. A policeman or a parent would be good examples. However, the most basic way to get someone’s attention is to break a pattern.
Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns. Constant sensory stimulation makes a person tune out. For instance, the hum of an air conditioner, or traffic noise, or the smell of a candle are sensory stimuli that a person gets used to and often does not recognize after a period of consistent exposure. The person may become aware of these stimuli only when something about them changes.
The brain is designed to be aware of changes and communicators will not succeed in communication unless they break through the clutter to get people’s attention. In addition, we complicate our messages to the point that we will not succeed unless we keep people’s attention.
To understand this, communicators need to understand two emotions that are commonly provoked by naturally sticky ideas. The first is surprise. The second is interest. Surprise gets a person’s attention, while interest keeps that attention.[6]
Schemas enable profound simplicity and help create complex messages from simple materials. Schemas are like guessing machines. They help a person predict what will happen and how he should make decisions. When something unexpected happens, the schemas have failed and the person is surprised.
Surprise jolts one to attention. It is triggered when a person’s schemas fail and it prepares him to understand why the failure occurred. When those schemas fail, surprise grabs our attention so that they can be repaired for the future. Surprise acts as an emergency override when a person confronts something unexpected and his guessing machines fail. Activity comes to a halt and is interrupted and his attention focuses involuntarily on the event that surprised him.
Unexpected ideas, then, are more likely to stick because surprise makes one pay attention and think. That extra attention and thinking sears unexpected events into the memory. Surprise can prompt a person to hunt for underlying causes, to imagine other possibilities, and to figure out how to avoid surprises in the future. Surprises make a person want to find an answer and big surprises call for big answers. If communicators want to motivate people to pay attention, they should seize the power of big surprises.[7]
The surprise, however, is not enough. Communicators also need insight. To be surprising, an event cannot be predictable. But to be satisfying, the surprise must be “post-dictable”. The twist makes sense after someone thinks about it, but it is not something he would see coming. To make ideas sticky, communicators have to break a person’s guessing machine and then fix it.
A good process for making ideas sticky, then, is to first identify the central message to be communicated. In other words, find the core. Next, figure out what is counter-intuitive about the message. For example, What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally? Next, communicate the message in a way that breaks an audience’s guessing machines along the critical, counter-intuitive dimension. Then once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.[8] Read the rest of this entry »
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