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Meet the MasterMinds: Dan Heath on How Sticky Ideas Make a Difference

Dan Heath is a Director at Duke Corporate Education, a provider of custom executive learning programs. He is the coauthor (with his brother, Chip Heath) of the bestseller, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

We talked to Heath about one of the most important skills for consultants to master: how to get clients and colleagues to understand, accept, and act on our best ideas.

McLaughlin: Let’s start with the definition of a sticky idea—what is it? And why would we want ideas to be sticky?

Heath: A sticky idea is one that is easily understood, remembered, and that changes opinions, behaviors, or values. We can all use the principles of sticky ideas to inspire and motivate action.

For example, consultants need to communicate new ideas that change behaviors in their clients’ organizations and they need to make those changes stick. A team leader needs to convey the project strategy to the team so that everyone is pulling in the same direction. And the CEO of a company needs to make the corporate vision stick with employees.

One classic sticky idea from history is John F. Kennedy’s Man on the Moon speech in 1961. He challenged Americans to put a man on the moon and return him safely within the decade. That idea took hold and inspired decades of research and innovation.

McLaughlin: Don’t some ideas take root because of the power of advertising? We think of Southwest Airlines as the low-fare choice, but is this a sticky idea or effective advertising?

Heath: Southwest’s strategy to be the low-fare airline in its markets is a sticky idea, primarily because it’s meaningfully simple. It’s certainly not a story, and not particularly emotional.

Herb Kelleher, Southwest’s founder, once posed an interesting scenario to demonstrate the power of Southwest’s simple message.

Here’s an example, he said: Tracy from marketing comes into your office and presents survey results indicating that passengers on the long flight from Houston to Las Vegas might enjoy something more substantial to eat than peanuts. She thinks a chicken Caesar salad would be popular. What do you say?

You ask her if adding that chicken salad will help make us the low-fare airline. If not, we’re not serving any chicken salad.

Executives often have to make hard choices between values. Kelleher compares the value of customer satisfaction to the value of economy and says that, at Southwest, customer satisfaction is essential, but economy wins.

An executive in a different environment might make the opposite choice. Imagine if the head of Singapore Air was telling that story—the chicken salad might win.

Southwest’s low-fare message reminds us that an idea doesn’t have to have all six principles of stickiness to work. It definitely does not cover the sticky principles as well as the Man on the Moon speech does. And yet it’s been incredibly successful within and outside of Southwest.

McLaughlin: Given that simplicity is so critical, why do you think most corporate communications are so convoluted?

Heath: One problem is the “Curse of Knowledge,” a concept that psychologists and behavioral economists discovered in the early 1990s. They found that the more we know about something—the more expertise we have—the harder it is for us to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. And that interferes with our ability to communicate what we know to others.

We’ve all experienced the Curse of Knowledge. Think of the stereotypical IT guy in the office you call when you’re having a computer problem. You may find it hard to make sense of what he says. You just want to know what button to push. He thinks in terms of databases, back-end servers, and connectivity, which complicates his ability to help you.

The better we get at solving certain kinds of problems, the more knowledge we accrue and the harder it is for us to share what we know. The real problem, and this is particularly true for consultants, is that we are all like that IT person in our fields of expertise. We begin to use complex vocabulary and jargon and to make assumptions about what the listener knows.

McLaughlin: Corporate mission statements are among the least sticky messages we hear and read. Do they have to be so unmemorable, and what can we do to make them stickier?

Heath: It’s a great irony that the expression of a company’s loftiest goal—the mission statement—is the most impenetrable part of corporate communications. It’s almost unthinkable that the world has unfolded this way because it’s the essence of what businesses are trying to accomplish.

It seems obvious that if you’re going to call something a mission statement, it needs to have a mission in it.

Here are two mission statements that reinforce the point.

Exxon Mobil says its guiding principle is: “Exxon Mobil Corporation is committed to being the world’s premier petroleum and petrochemical company. To that end our goal is to continuously achieve superior financial and operating results while adhering to the highest standards of business conduct.” Sadly, this is just idea Teflon.

Probably not one person, including the CEO of the company, could repeat that statement from memory. And would any employee want to get out of bed in the morning for that goal? Business leaders seem to feel compelled to publish mission statements and yet invest almost no recognizable human emotion or aspiration in them.

Contrast that with Johnson & Johnson’s credo: “We believe our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses and patients, mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services.” That is a radically different mission because there are human beings in it. You can understand why someone might get out of bed to be of service to doctors, nurses, mothers, and fathers.

Here’s another effective mission statement. Patagonia says, “We’ll build the best products, do no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” That has some emotion and passion behind it.

I don’t fully understand why this is such a hard problem for the corporate world. It seems obvious that if you’re going to call something a mission statement, it needs to have a mission in it.

McLaughlin: If it’s done right, what impact should a mission statement have?

Heath: Well, look, Exxon Mobil is doing quite well, so it’s not that mission statements are a necessary component of corporate success. But it is a wasted opportunity because a powerful mission statement can change and guide behavior. It can motivate employees and be a rallying cry for everyone in the organization.

Leaders shouldn’t waste any chance to use smart communications to help people understand the mission and make decisions that support the company’s reason for being.

McLaughlin: And yet most corporate communication is stripped of sticky principles. Is there something in the nature of business communication that encourages that void?

Heath: I agree with you that it’s a puzzle. My best theory is that until very recently, there wasn’t a whole lot of choice about where any of us went to work. Given the institutional history of business, maybe it’s natural that work evolved in a way that people divorced their emotions from it.

In the current era, though, people want a calling, not a day at the salt mines. So to be more effective, business communications should evoke an emotional response. I don’t mean emotion like from a tearjerker movie, but in the sense of tapping into what people care about.

I think the Johnson & Johnson and Patagonia mission statements do that.

McLaughlin: It seems that politicians have become masters of sticky ideas, particularly with negative campaign tactics. What makes those ideas stick so well?

Campaign ads are an unfortunate reminder that sticky doesn’t mean true.

Heath: Think of the Swift Boat campaign, for instance, which challenged John Kerry’s military record during the 2004 US presidential campaign. That was an utterly, irredeemably despicable campaign and I think everyone who was involved with it should be ashamed of themselves.

But, the ads were incredibly effective, at least for a time, and the reasons are not hard to spot: They were unexpected because they were counter to our expectations about Kerry’s military service. They were also concrete, told stories, and stirred up a lot of emotion—all traits of stickiness.

Campaign ads are an unfortunate reminder that sticky doesn’t mean true. To prove that, you don’t need to look further than urban legends. A good example is the myth that you use only 10 percent of your brain.

Urban legends get wide acceptance despite the fact that they’re false. The bright side here is that honest people can learn to make truthful messages stickier using these exact same techniques. Our hope with this book was that we could give people the tools to do that.

McLaughlin: If you could give a consultant one piece of advice to help make an idea stickier, what would it be?

Heath: I would say tell more stories, especially about people taking specific actions in time. You don’t have to entertain or be riveting. Nobody’s going to option your stories for a screenplay. They just have to be real and human.

Here’s my sense of what consultants do: They research and gather huge piles of concrete information and real-world examples and then they use their brainpower to find the overarching lessons and the strategies that are implied by those examples. That’s exactly why the world needs consultants.

But we’re back to the Curse of Knowledge. When consultants share their findings, they tend to skip straight to the overarching lessons and strategies and leave out the examples that led there. And that will not stick. It’s like trying to build a new house by starting with the roof.

You’ve got to give your audiences the same building blocks you used to reach your conclusions, and those building blocks are stories. I suspect that most people’s presentations contain about 80 percent analysis and 20 percent stories. A practical rule of thumb would be to flip that ratio. I think we’d all be better off.

McLaughlin: That’s great advice. Thanks for your time.

Find out more at www.dukece.com and www.madetostick.com.