Who Defines Stickiness?

We’reached the final chapter of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survivie and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath. The authors have covered the “basics” of stickiness, and now point to four villains that will undo and circumvent stickiness every time:

• The natural tendency to bury the lead – to hide (usually unintentionally) what the real point is.

• A focus on the presentation rather than the message. The forms of a slide show, a formal speech, or a press release are not what should determine what you’re trying to say.

• Decision paralysis – when you have too much choice ot the situation is ambiguous.

• The “Curse of Knowledge” – where you confuse how you arrived at your idea or message and confuse it with how to communicate it. In other words, you communicate it like you were the audience (more on that word in a bit).

A good example the Heaths cite is that tool that has done more to destroy communicate than aything else in the modern era: PowerPoint. “Business managers,” they write, “seem to believe that, once they’ve clicked through a PowerPoint presentation showcasing their conclusions, they’ve successfully communicated their ideas. What they’ve done is share data.”

The point of all this is simple: don’t treat the people you’re trying to communicated with as an audience.

I wrote a paper on this once. I said that, for communication purposes and any other purpose, for that matter, employees are not an audience. No one you’re trying to communicate with is an audience. The word assumes a passive group of people who will listen and “get educated” or be entertained. A group of people watching a movie in a theater is an audience; a person watching a television show may be part of an audience. The person sitting in a conference room listening to you talk, the person in a large hall listening to you speak, or the people joining you for lunch are not an audience. Instead, they are people you’re trying to communicate with, perhaps build a relationship with or become part of a community with.

But they are anything but passive. And today they’re often tweeting what you’re saying while you say it, and offering their own commentary in the process.

(By the way, I wrote in my paper that “message,” as in “my message points,” also should be tossed on the trash heap of bad communications.)

Ultimately, it is the people you’re trying to communicate with who will define stickness. Understanding them, their needs, their desires, and how best to talk with them will make what you’re saying stick or be ignored as superfluous.


Laura Boggess has been leading a discussion of Made to Stick at The High Calling. Last weels discussion on stories can be found here.

The posts in this series:

On Simple: The One Time Something I Did Went Viral

On Unexpected: Singing Opera in Journalism Class

On Credible: As Concrete – as Air

On Concrete: It Was All in the Numbers

On Emotional: An Engineer Got Emotional
 
On Stories: The Sticky Stories of Billy Coffey

Another Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday

Once more, it’s that time of the week, when our intrepid leader Duane Scott officiates at Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays.

Yesterday, page visits to a blog post I did earlier this month skyrocketed (well, “skyrocketed” may be too strong a term, but my normal number of page visits quadrupled in a day). I couldn’t figure out why – there didn’t appear to be a single source. And then I found out that High Calling Editor Marcus Goodyear had included that post of mine in a Faith in the Workplace newsletter he does for Christianity Today Magazine (online).

Thank you, Marcus. That was an awfully nice thing to do.

In August, something similar (but smaller) happened when someone took a poem I’d posted and linked it in StumbleUpon. Whoosh went the page visits. Thank you, Someone.

I’m familiar with this stuff, and I know this online stuff, but I still get amazed when it happens.

It’s been two weeks since I went to the High Calling editorial team to Laity Lodge near San Antonio (that’s “near” in Texas terms; it was actually about 140 miles away). Since then, the High Calling web site has merged with the High Calling Blogs web site; the combined site is simply The High Calling. I really like the design; and I’ve successfully maneuvered the Drupal platform and actually posted an article this week: Is God More Pleased with My Work than I Am?

Ann Kroeker, one of our number at Laity Lodge, did a blog post this week on the experiences they had at their lodge house (Lodestar) with scorpions. We didn’t have scorpions at our lodge house (Song Bluff). I did have to get rid of a wandering cricket in my bedroom, though. A couple of people closer to the main lodge had experiences with tarantulas. And I was followed by a couple of vultures while hiking one of the trails. (That was a little unnerving; I think I’m on a hike and they think they’re looking at dinner).

I’ve been reading a lot of good stuff lately:


• Billy Coffey’s novel Snow Day was officially published on Monday. It’s storytelling like only Billy Coffey can do it.

• I finished Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, the book we’ve been discussing for The High Calling; my last post on it will be Sunday afternoon.

• I read Three Roads Home, a group of three love story novellas by Travis Thrasher published in 2003.

• I’ve started reading Another Hotel Room: Selected Poems 1988-2008 by Steven Marty Grant.

Thanks to all you who commented on my post yesterday – the one about approaching a tough decision on what to do with our elderly dog. I talked with the vet Wednesday, and we’ve worked out a process for sometime in the next two weeks or so. I was so cool, calm and totally professional with the vet on the phone. I only lost it twice.

Finally, it wouldn't be an official Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday without a new photo of the world’s greatest grandson. My daughter-in-law Stephanie took this picture while trying to fit him for clothes – and she found this hat. So, here’s Cameron in a bear hat.

The Sticky Stories of Billy Coffey

I wrote speeches for corporate executives for a long time, and now, more often than not, I’m writing speeches for myself. And while substance is absolutely critical, I learned long ago that you can write the most brilliant speeches with the most brilliant thoughts imaginable – but if you want people to remember them, you need to have stories.

And not just any kind of kinds, but personal ones, stories that surprise and entertain and help make the point of what the speaker was talking about. Many speakers often asked for “a good joke” but they were usually the people who hadn’t heard any good ones themselves and would tell jokes poorly, or at least not well. Humor is always a dangerous thing in a speech; the safest humor is always self-deprecating, allowing listeners to laugh with you and at you. Not many executives are comfortable with that, however.

In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip Heath and Dan Heath talk about the three kinds of stories that help ideas stick: challenge plot stories, where a formidable challenge has to be overcome (they give the example of David and Goliath); connection plot stories, in which people develop a relationship that bridges a gap (consider Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan); and creativity plot stories, in which someone makes a mental breakthrough, solves a problem or does something really innovative (the story of the apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head, for example).

For stickiness, those three types cover the waterfront. I speak from personal (and unexpected) experience. I gave a talk in June at a conference of university public relations people, and the person who introduced me had done their homework. I was speaking on corporate use of social media, but the introducer included one thing about me – that I edited an online poetry journal called TweetSpeak Poetry. Guess what all the questions were about at the end?

If you need to see examples of sticky stories – where you can find all three kinds the Heath brothers talk about in one place, you need to look at the blog site of Billy Coffey.

You want to find stories that include a challenge? They’re there. Or stories that make connections? Look no further. Or stories where people do unexpected and creative things? You’ve got them with this blog.

Billy Coffey, a writer in Virginia, tells what I call true stories. He watches and listens, and he carries a notebook around to record notes. He overhears conversations; he remembers stories from high school. He recalls people when he first knew them and what they became, and how they handled success and defeat and victory and tragedy.

Some of the stories he tells include all three types of stickiness. There about challenges, connections and creativity. Not once have I known a story of his to disappoint or fall flat.

Tomorrow is the official publication date of his first novel, Snow Day. There’s a Facebook party scheduled; see his blog for details. I will be posting my review of the novel tomorrow as well. (Earlier today, Jennifer Dukes-Lee interviewed Billy Coffey about the novel.)

But you can be assured of this: Snow Day is sticky, exactly the kind of sticky described in Made to Stick.

Laura Boggess is leading a discussion of Made To Stick over at The High Calling. Last week's discussion can be found here.


Previous blog posts in this series:

On Simple: The One Time Something I Did Went Viral

On Unexpected: Singing Opera in Journalism Class

On Credible: As Concrete – as Air

On Concrete: It Was All in the Numbers

On Emotional: An Engineer Got Emotional

An Engineer Got Emotional

In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, the authors cite emotion as one of the critical factors in why some things last, and others quickly fade away. By “emotion” they don’t mean an appeal to the emotions exclusively, although there is some of that in what they discuss. What they really mean is appealing to the particular instead of the general, to the recognizably human rather than the unrecognizable abstract.

I once wrote a speech for an executive that did that. In fact, it did more than that. I’ve described the man I write it in a post in August at The High Calling Blogs.

The executive, a chemical engineer by background, was speaking to a joint meeting of 1,500 chemical engineers in London. It was 1988, a time of environmental ferment and change: drought, excessive heat, Time naming the earth as “plant of the year,” syringes washing up on New Jersey beaches, and general rising awareness and concern about environmental issues. Feeding these issues had been the tragedy at Bhopal, India, three years earlier, when a leak of a chemical resulted in the deaths of 10,000 people.

The executive believed he had a prime opportunity to put all of the issues and concerns in context, and appeal to fellow chemical engineers to help address the problems. It might also be an opportunity to seize some high ground, and position the company in a better light than “one of the usual villainous suspect.”

The speech told a story of two chemical industries, one which had brought unparalleled progress and the other unparalleled environmental damage. Of course, there two were the same industry, and the listeners knew it.

And then came the finish.

The speech could have done this: “In Bhopal, more than 10,000 people died because of an accident. We must never let it happen again.”

This is how the speech actually ended, describing a BBC-TV special on Bhopal:

“A few weeks after that tragedy, a British film crew went to Bhopal and interviewed dozens of people there victims and non victims. The resulting program, called ‘The Killing of Bhopal,’ recently aired on public television in the United States. And what it dramatically showed was what we might call the public's answer to all of our sophisticated risk assessments, risk probabilities, risk quantifications and public education programs on how safe our industry is.

“It showed doctors and nurses frantically trying to learn what had happened, to know how to treat the victims.

“It showed a mother describing how her baby died in her arms, choking to death.

“It showed a young wife who watched her husband die.

“It showed a 12 year old boy who was the only survivor of his large family.

“For all our talk about the safety of chemicals, these scenes from Bhopal are the end point of chemical risk. We must live up to what the public expects of us, and do our jobs as we know we can.

“Anything less is failing the trust we have to the public.

“Anything less is failing ourselves.”

And what did those 1,500 engineers do?

They stood and cheered. They asked the executive to videotape the speech, and they sent tapes all over the world, to every chapter of their international association. Requests for printed copies of the speech poured in, and kept pouring in – for the next seven years. The speech led to amazing changes at our company, and within the industry at large.

And I believe that ending had a lot to do with it. It made the speech stick.


Laura Boggess is leading the discussion on Made to Stick over at the High Calling Blogs. Last week's discussion, on "credible," can be found here.

Previous blog posts in this series:

On Simple: The One Time Something I Did Went Viral

On Unexpected: Singing Opera in Journalism Class

On Concrete: As Concrete – as the Air

On Credible: Credibility – It’s all in the numbers

Credibility -- It Was All in the Numbers

For the High Callings Blogs, we’ve been discussing Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Last week, we focused on the third characteristic of why some ideas survive –that of concreteness (the first two being simplicity and unexpectedness).

I gave an example of the company I worked for in the late 1980s, and how it dealt with a new law requiring disclosure of toxic emissions to air, and water. What the CEO did was announce a goal to reduce toxic air emissions by 90 percent by the end of four years. It was a startling goal, one which evoked skepticism from both within the industry (and other manufacturers outside the industry) and from the environmentalist community. “Impossible,” said the first group. “They’ll cheat and lie,” said the second group.

The credibility of the initiative was the key to its success. If no one believed the results, it wouldn’t matter if the initiative was successful or not.

As it turned out, the answer came from what created the issue in the first place – the public reporting of the data on an annual basis. Reports had to be filed with the U.S. EPA. The reports would be made public. If the air reduction program was making progress, the reports would show it. Numbers. Data. Examples from almost 30 manufacturing plants. Filed with and checked by the EPA.

Credibility.

Inside the company, there was a debate about the chemicals involved themselves. The 120 or so chemicals on the list had been derived from two different lists of chemicals, all thrown together to make one list (such is how regulations often occur). There were some materials on the list that were harmless, and those would likely be removed eventually. There were other materials not on the list, but should have been. Obviously, some things would be added. What could you do if the base from which you were measuring was going to be changing over the four-year period?

The decision was made to adjust accordingly. If a chemical was taken off the list by the EPA, it would be removed from the reduction program as if it had never been there. If one was added, it would be added to the reduction program as if it had been there from the beginning. This took careful planning and some calculated guesswork as what the EPA was likely to do. But it was absolutely critical for the credibility of the program, even if it made things complicated.

In Made to Stick, the Heath brothers cite the kinds of things that made an idea, a program, an initiative or any sustained effort credible:

• The source is reliable and believable. Few might believe a chemical company, but data checked and verified by the federal government would be.

• The information has lots of vivid details. The reports would cover 120 chemicals and, for the company, more than 30 facilities, both large and small. Reports would be made available by zip code. There would be plenty of detailed ways to measure whether the reduction program was working.

• Statistics are used. We had more statistics than you could imagine.

• Statics are brought to human scale. A billion pounds of toxic air emissions in the United States sounds large but almost meaningless. But 250,000 pounds in Alvin, Texas, made the information much more real to people who lived in that community.

• One example alone may prove the case. Early reductions were published, with details of how they had happened.

The program wasn’t easy, but it stuck. It inspired a host of similar initiatives within the chemical industry and beyond. It was extended beyond air emissions to include water and land, with the same reporting programs.

And at the end of four years, it had succeeded, confounding all the critics.

Laura Boggess is leading the discussion on Made to Stick over at the High Calling Blogs. Last week's discussion, on "concrete," can be found here.

Previous blog posts in this series:

On Simple: The One Time Something I Did Went Viral

On Unexpected: Singing Opera in Journalism Class

On Concrete: As Concrete – as the Air

As Concrete as -- the Air

Concrete.

The word suggests heavy, solid, firm, substantive. (Except in St. Louis, where “concrete” means ice cream.)

One of the characteristics of “stickiness” described by Chip Heath and Dan Heath in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die,” is concreteness: the idea has to be about something substantive and memorable. Then the Heaths say this: “Concreteness makes targets transparent. Even experts need transparency.”

That’s a true statement if ever there was one.

In December, 1984, a leak of a toxic chemical at a Union Carbide (now part of Dow) at Bhopal, India, killed more than 10,000 people. The worldwide chemical industry went into a kind of collective shock. There were all kinds of responses, some enlightened and some dumb. Three years later, finally agreeing on a regulatory response, the U.S. Congress passed a law with a long name but referred to simply as “Title III.”

The law was simple in concept: all manufacturers would have to report emissions of toxic chemicals to the air, water and later, and report it every year. That’s all they had to do – report it. No other action as required.

In terms of creating change, the law was brilliant. Because the information wouldn’t be stored somewhere; no, the U.S. EPA would be required to publish the data. The public would get access to it. All of it.

It wasn’t only chemical companies which be reporting. Any company in any industry that used the chemicals on the list would have to report. Chemical companies would have the biggest totals, of course. But a lot of companies no one had ever dreamed used toxic chemicals would have to report, too.

Like your local newspaper.

I was working for a chemical company at the time, and it fell to my team to deal with the communications relating to the new law and its implementation. We had about eight months to prepare. And while this is a very long and involved story, we knew from the beginning that we had to convince the company that two things would be required.

First, we would disclose our data to the public as soon as we filed it with the EPA, and not wait almost a year for EPA to report. In other words, we would have to take responsibility for our emissions by disclosing the numbers ourselves, even if everything was legal and under permit.

Second, we would have to make a public commitment to reduce those emissions.

The first requirement had unassailable logic behind it: if we didn’t, the government and everyone who hated chemical companies surely would.

The second drew blank, sometimes hostile stares. More than one executive said that “we will not reduce emissions for the sake of reducing emissions. That’s ridiculous.” The same response in presentation after presentation. Along with a few side comments about the PR department having lost its mind.

We made it all the way to the CEO. He looked at the estimated numbers. He looked at what he knew was likely to happen with public perception. And he said, “We will start with air emissions. We will pledge to reduce our toxic air emissions by 90 percent in four years.”

Shocked silence. And then he said, “And then we going to work on all the other emissions, too. Get busy.”

The CEO had lost his mind along with the PR department.

Ninety percent in four years. A concrete target whose progress could be tracked simply by reading the reports filed with the EPA.

Next week, the subject of Made to Stick is credibility. I’ll finish this story by explaining how a chemical company could make a commitment like this credible.

Over at the High Calling Blogs, Laura Boggess has started a discussion on Made to Stick. You can find last week’s discussion, on the concept of “unexpected,” here.

Previous blog posts in this series:

On Simple: The One Time Something I Did Went Viral

On Unexpected: Singing Opera in Journalism Class

Singing Opera in Journalism Class

In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, the authors relate a story by the writer Nora Ephron, who described how a high school journalism teacher have her class its first assignment – to write an article for the student newspaper about all the teachers and staff would be in a seminar on Thursday. The students dutifully wrote their stories. The teacher read them and then noted they had all missed the lead, at least as far as their readers were concerned – school would be closed on that day.

It was an unexpected thought or conclusion – and the entire class had missed it. Being unexpected is one of the attributes of ideas that are “made to stick.”

I have one of those journalism stories, too.

I took my first journalism course – Introductory News Reporting (J 51, as we called it) – in my sophomore year. The instructor was relatively young for the faculty at that time – somewhere around 40. There were stories that he had been in the military, and there were stories he had been a Jesuit priest. Both could have been true.

We all knew that something would be different about this class when he gave us a week to memorize the Associated Press Style Book. And we were expected to have it for every class. After that week, he gave us our first in-class assignment: write a news article from our “Assignment Jonesville” workbook.

And then he said: “You have your style books with you, and the dictionary is right here. All the facts are in the assignment. Just so you know, if you make a style error, it’s an automatic F. Same thing for a misspelled word. And for a factual error. You can now start.”

Shock set in immediately. Then came the second shock.

He started doing calisthenics. Side-straddle hops (jumping jacks). Push-ups. When he finished, he started singing. Opera. (And he wasn’t bad.) Then back to calisthenics.

To say that the class was rattled would be an understatement. Every one of us was convinced we had fallen into the hands of a lunatic. And we had – a lunatic for writing accuracy. A lunatic for writing properly. A lunatic for learning how to do your work in a noisy, distracting newsroom. A lunatic for teaching you how to work under tight deadlines and do it accurately in the middle of chaos.

It worked. Well, it worked for some of us. But the end of the semester, 70 percent of the class was gone, most having transferred over to advertising (I'm making no moral judgments here). I stayed. I took the second journalism course with him, and a history of journalism course, and two independent studies. After that first year, he was moved from teaching the introductory courses – the Journalism School grew alarmed at how many people were switching majors. But the quality of student journalism skyrocketed.

What I learned stuck. And a lot of it still sticks, 40 years later. I can often block out the entire world to get writing done.

And all because a teacher chose an unexpected way to help us learn. the Heath brothers, I think, would smile.


Over at the High Calling Blogs, Laura Boggess has started a discussion on Made to Stick. You can find last week’s discussion on the concept of “simple” here. This weeks's discussion is on "unexpected," so take a look at Laura's post, "Unexpected Journey."

The one time something I did went viral

Over at the High Calling Blogs, Laura Boggess is starting a new book discussion on Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The book was first published in 2007, and if today you head the word “stickiness” about the power of ideas, you can attribute that comment to the Heath brothers.

The authors outline six characteristics for ideas that stick:
• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional and
• Stories.

(Note what’s spelled when you combine the first letter of each word.)

The book is divided into six longish chapters on each characteristic, followed by an epilogue. The first chapter is about simple – the simplicity of powerful ideas – or the idea that ideas need to be simple to become powerful.

I once did a project that went viral inside the company I was working for at the time. And it has all six characteristics of “stickiness.”

In 1993, a colleague went to a communications conference and came backnotes from one of the sessions she’d attended – a person for ATT had talked about their company’s email employee newsletter.

Yes, I know what that sounds like in 2010; antique and quaint. But 17 years ago, it was so revolutionary that it was almost frightening. The only other company that had one was an insurance company in British Columbia. And I thought, what a great idea! My team was responsible for employee communications, among other things. So we set out to figure out how to do it.

IT said no; it would crash the system. And I said a simply text-only newsletter will crash the system? And they nodded their heads. Vigorously. I spent several weeks patiently arguing, and then had a blinding flash of the obvious: the only way to stop the newsletter would be to shut down the email system. So I said we would do a test – 100 people worldwide, crossing different computers, systems, firewalls, everything (In the days before Microsoft Office, things were borderline riots when it came to consistency and compatibility.

We launch the newsletter to the 100 people in August, and told them they were free to forward it to colleagues. Within a month, the newsletter had saturated the email system. Everyone wanted to be in the distribution. We never advertised its existence. In four weeks, our little text newsletter had moved from 100 people to tens of thousands.

The CEO would later tell a senior management meeting that our newsletter was one of the two most innovative things done by the company in 1993. And he specifically cited two things: its reach across the company in a way nothing else had ever done before, and its voice.

The voice was what was simple. We assumed that employees were adults and could handle bad news and disagreement. Our letters policy was simple: no personal attacks, no profanity. Other than that, everything was a go. We had employees debating each other on company products and policies – and it was extraordinary to see employees teaching each other. We had people talk about products in one part of the world that people in other parts of the world had no idea even existed within the company. PR helped create markets and sell products.

We also didn’t get clearances for anything we did from Law or HR. That’s what the CEO meant by “voice” – it was the voice of employees that wasn’t being stifled. And the impact showed up in surveys we did – the email newsletter had the highest credibility rating of any communication medium in the company – and that included immediate supervisors and top management.

It was a simple idea, with a simple philosophy. And it worked beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. Including mine.

Related:

Today's discussion at The High Calling Blogs.

Six Steps to Going Viral by L.L. Barkat at Green Inventions Central.

At the Core of Action by Monica Sharman at My Big Three.