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Sticky Tricks
Communicating in a way that makes ideas stick
‘
Made to Stick’ by Chip Heath and Dan Heath is a great little book that is packed with practical ideas, many of which can be related to insight.
The book focuses on how to communicate more effectively, so that your ideas really stick in the minds of those you’re addressing. It’s based on six principles that start with the letters in ‘SUCCES’: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions and Stories. We’ll take a closer look at these in future issues.
Do you know too much?
However, in this issue, we are going to focus on what they describe as the ‘villain’ in their story – ‘The Curse of Knowledge’. This is illustrated by a story from a 1990 PhD thesis by Elizabeth Newton. She set up a game that involved two groups of people – tappers and listeners. The tappers had a list of 25 well-known songs, including ‘Happy Birthday to You’ and ‘The Star Spangled Banner’. Each tapper had to pick a song and tap out the rhythm on a table to the listener.
The listener had the challenge of trying to guess the song. Their success rate was only one song in 40. Beforehand, Newton asked the tappers to predict how many songs they thought that the listeners would guess correctly and they predicted a 50% success rate.
The difference between the predicted and actual results derives from the fact that the tapper is able to ‘hear’ the song in their head, but the listener can’t hear the tune. They only hear a bunch of disconnected taps - they lack the knowledge of the tapper.
Keep it simple
This illustrates the curse of knowledge. When we have knowledge, it is impossible for us to remember what it was like not to have that knowledge. If we want to communicate clearly, we have to simplify our thoughts and convey the essence of our ideas in a simple way. ‘Made to Stick’ suggests ways of helping us to do that.
The authors emphasise their point by referring to J F Kennedy’s famous 1961 call to: “Put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade”. They say that if he had been a CEO, he would probably have said: “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry, due to a maximum team-centred innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives” - which would have lost everybody. Instead he created and communicated a brilliant and beautiful idea that motivated the actions of millions of people for a decade.
As insight professionals, we are often speaking from a position of considerable knowledge and are trying to get our ideas across to people who don’t share that knowledge. We need to remember the ‘curse of knowledge’ so that we find the core message that we want to communicate and then put it across simply and clearly.
