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KE: Chip, what do you mean by a ‘sticky’ idea?
CH: A sticky idea is an idea that people understand when they hear it, that they remember later on, and that changes how they think and they act. If you think back to the last PowerPoint® presentation that you saw, or the last memo that you read, probably very little of that stuck with you. So, if we want to raise the bar on having messages that really affect how other people think or act, then we might want to raise our aspirations a little bit and go for ‘sticky’ ideas.
KE: What is your favorite example of a sticky idea?
CH: The #1 example we give in the book is when John F. Kennedy, in 1961, proposed to the nation that we put a man on the moon in the decade. That was an incredibly sticky idea. It organized efforts of thousands of people across dozens of organizations. It inspired a whole nation. And, it has a lot of the principles that we will talk about later on. It was a simple idea, yet much unexpected. It got people's attention because it seemed like science fiction at the time. It was also incredibly concrete. If you think about the goals in your organization, they may have something to do with maximizing shareholder value, or growth through innovation, or outstanding customer service. People can disagree about what all of those goals might look like, but nobody could disagree about man, moon or decade.
KE: Why is it important for businesspeople, HR professionals in particular, to learn how to increase the impact of their ideas?
CH: As an HR person, you are playing a critical role in your organization. You may be helping train new people, you are certainly helping coach managers to get their messages across, you are communicating your own messages. All of us have important ideas that we need to help other people understand and take action on. There are certain important ideas that all of us have in our lives and the question is, how do we make those ideas have an impact on the other people that we are talking to?
KE: One of the things I so appreciated about the book was its application across all aspects of life and work. We can all relate to the enormous amount of “blah, blah…” going on each day. You are encouraging us to rise above the “blah, blah…”. To stand out.
CH: Yes, it’s a pervasive problem. The scary test is we looked across lots of domains - business, politics, the nonprofit world, education – and what was sobering was that there were very few ideas that really had the impact that we thought they deserved to have. All of us have good ideas and it’s important for us to get them across.
What is an interesting contrast is when you consider the ridiculous ideas that propagate with no authority behind them, with no PR dollars, blogs or newscasts. Have you ever heard the urban legend about the kidney heist? The story goes: A guy goes into a bar, meets an attractive woman, who then buys him a drink and drugs him in the process. The victim then wakes up in an ice-filled bathtub with one of his kidneys missing. What is amazing to me is that this bogus idea is completely bizarre, completely false and yet, that idea propagates on its own. What would it be like if the mission statement or the strategy statement for our organization propagated from person to person within our companies as easily as the kidney thieves' urban legend?
KE: In your book you outline six principles of sticky ideas, and being true to form, you have an acronym to help us remember them. Very sticky of you. Why don’t we take a look at them?
CH: The acronym is unfortunately a little hulkier than we had hoped for but we are willing to humble ourselves in order to help people have a better chance of remembering. So it came out to be the word ‘SUCCESs.’ The principles that we talk about in the book are that sticky ideas are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and many take the form of Stories.
KE: What are some ways to ensure our ideas follow your principle of being simple?
CH: If we think about managing a team or organization, and having to knit together the efforts of lots of people, there is actually an interesting analogy that we can look at, and that is of Hollywood movie-making. In Hollywood, you have to get the buy in from the finance people to make a movie, you have to get art directors, composers and set designers to work together. In Hollywood they typically have a single short summary of the movie that is conveyed in a couple of sentences, very often using an analogy that helps people keep their efforts aligned. And so the real trick to simplicity is prioritizing what is most important about the idea that you have in common.
A successful defense lawyer explained to us that if he walked into a courtroom with 10 good arguments, even if all 10 were individually really good, the jurors would basically remember nothing in the end. In Hollywood, if you tell people 10 things about your movie, they might go off in 10 different directions. So, a concept is a way of keeping people aligned. Here’s a test. Suppose that you are making a scary science fiction movie and you are pitching the movie that was later to become Alien. How would you convey that idea in a very compact way? It turns out that the high concept pitch for Alien was “Jaws on a spaceship.” Think about the incredible amount of information that is conveyed in that very short phrase.
If you are the finance person at the studio, do you want to fund Jaws on a spaceship? Well probably, because Jaws was one of the most successful movies of all time. Suppose that you are a set designer and you are thinking in your mind, “Well, it has a spaceship and therefore I need to look at Star Trek as my inspiration.” The analogy immediately corrects you, because Jaws was not the kind of lint-free, Lycra-filled environment that the Star Trek spaceship was. And so, if you are doing Jaws on a spaceship, maybe you want a little more lived-in, organic, sweat-filled environment – one that better reflected the Jaws ship setting. It was a ship that could disintegrate at any moment and that added to the impact of the movie.
So for everyone involved, ranging from the finance person at the studio to the set designer, there is a lot of information packed into that small nugget. Now, the implication for the rest of us is that if we are starting a conversation and trying to get people on board, we might want to think about the high concept pitch for our idea. And that is not the end of the conversation, but it is a way of setting priorities and getting everybody in the same neighborhood very, very quickly; by drawing the right analogy, and making it simple.
KE: The next principle you talk about is Unexpectedness. What do you mean by unexpectedness as it relates to communicating ideas in a business setting?
CH: The problem that a lot of us encounter with our ideas is that we talk about things and assume they are common sense. Let’s say you tell your employees, “We are really into outstanding customer service.” Well, everybody makes that claim, so the question becomes, what do we mean in our company by outstanding customer service? Innovative companies say that they believe in innovation, but everybody else is saying the same thing.
Take the example of Sony. In post World War II Tokyo they were trying to build a young organization that was going to be focused on technology. In 1952, they had an idea that helped guide them for the first few years of their organization and that idea was of a “pocketable radio.” The idea of a pocketable radio was an unexpected one back then, and to recognize how unexpected it was at the time, you have to remember that radio factories employed cabinetmakers. Radios were pieces of furniture, they weren’t something that you slipped into your pocket. Talk about an idea that would motivate a really talented group of scientists and engineers, that very concrete, unexpected vision of a radio that you can slip into your pocket.
That is a much more powerful message than, “We want to be the most innovative company in Japan,” because it is tangible, it’s concrete, and it captures the imagination. In fact, that was the idea that guided them for the first couple of years of their existence as a company. They took successive steps and eventually they released the world's first transistor radio, even though the Japanese Ministry of Trade had told them that transistor technology was a little too new and they believed that Sony was too young a company to tackle it.
If you want to get people's attention and especially a really smart, talented group of people, then you might want to talk about a really unexpected concrete vision of the future.
KE: What is a recent example where a company did a good job of communicating using unexpectedness?
CH: Steve Jobs is a classic master at getting his ideas to stick, and he talks in exactly these terms. When the iPod came out, he was playing the enforcer, saying, “This has to be simple, it has to be elegant, I want to put my entire collection of CDs onto one device that I can slip into my pocket.” And what resulted was the 2004 version of a pocketable radio.
KE: Let’s move to your third element. You talk about the importance of being concrete. What might that look like?
CH: Let’s start with what concrete doesn’t look like. One of my favorite downloads from the web is a business buzzword generator. You are supposed to take a word from column 1, 2 and 3 to come up with your own business word. We can make up terms such as “strategic empowering vision” or “reciprocal cost-based re-engineering.” It really does seem plausible that we could find ourselves using terms like these. It goes back to the “blah blah…” syndrome that we talked about earlier.
So, what does it mean to be concrete? The New York City Transit Authority is the group in New York that runs the bus and the subway system. Way back before the revitalization of New York, before the Guiliani years, before New York became a hot place to live again, there was a time when people were worried that it was going to go bankrupt as a city. The subways in those years were scary places. They were filled with graffiti, the lights didn’t work, riders were deserting the subway in droves. They felt unsafe in the subway. Even though statistics at the time were very clear that you were actually more likely to be mugged on the streets of New York City back then than you were in the subway system, nobody felt that way. So how do you get that idea across?
The managers at the New York City Transit Authority started out with some typical sounding “blah blah…” jargon. They talked about re-engineering the customer experience, and building a new paradigm in public transit. That was the level of conversation that leaders were engaged in. But, what happened in one part of the organization was that a couple of smart team leaders started asking, “What if we had no graffiti”? They started train by train and station by station, taking the graffiti off the trains. They wouldn’t allow a subway train to go back into service if it had been tagged by a subway graffiti tagger the night before.
They would whitewash the graffiti off the walls; they would re-install the light bulbs. All of a sudden, riders in the station started to come back. Talk about a vision that would inspire both customers and employees, it turned out that “no graffiti” was a much more concrete, much more powerful vision than “building a new paradigm in public transportation.”
KE: How is it that we get caught up in language such as “building a new paradigm in public transportation”?
CH: It turns out that there is a villain, and it’s a villain that we kept seeing throughout the writing of our book. As experts, we experienced something that psychologists and behavioral economists have called the ‘curse of knowledge.’ Expertise is great for coming up with the solution to a problem, but one of the things that expertise prevents us from doing is being able to take the perspective of somebody that doesn’t know what we know. So if you have ever been in conversation with an IT person at your company about what is wrong with your computer, you have been on the other side of the ‘curse of knowledge.’
That person knows what they are talking about, but they talk in such a complex abstract way, that it is impossible for the rest of us to understand. But, here is the irony. All of us are like that IT person in our own domain of expertise. We think about the world in complex and abstract ways because we are an expert. And yet, what we know about effective communication, and effective messages, is that they need to be simple and they need to be concrete, and that is the opposite of the complexity and abstraction that experts love.
KE: It is interesting how this shows up in my work with client leaders. We talk about the importance of sitting in the seat of the listener and hearing the words from the listener's perspective, level of knowledge and understanding. This exercise seems to shift the “expert’s” choice of language and level of detail.
CH: That is right, imagining your listener will help. Another thing that would help you is just to take this abstract term that is in your speech or in your memo and provide an example along with it. Give one single concrete example. It turns out that this exercise was something that Dan and I had to follow in writing the book. We would write three pages and we would say, "Oh wow! This is all pretty abstract. Where is our example for talking about this, where is the story that we want to tell to bring these points home?” We found this framework really useful in diagnosing the problem that we were having getting our message across.
KE: I have memories of starting a new job and being handed a stack of three-inch binders to go through during my first week on the job. That is an organization that would have benefited from this interview!
CH: That is right because we are experts, and because we think about the world in complex ways. I'll give you a Silicon Valley engineering equivalent to the HR example you just gave. The reason that we all have remote controls in our houses with 42 buttons on them is because the engineers know how to use all those 42 buttons. But, the rest of us are just trying to find the one for volume. If you are an HR professional, you know the material in those three-inch binders but the question is, how would you prioritize the ideas and make the message simple for somebody that does not share your expertise?
The trick for all of us in getting across the ideas that we have at work is to think about how do we evoke the senses? How do we evoke people’s visual apparatus, their memories, and their own experiences in getting across the things that we want to get across as part of our job? We have an example coming up in a second about credibility that I think is going to give another hint in that. We all have to deal with abstract things at work. The question is how do we take those abstractions and ground them in examples; ground them in something sensory that makes them concrete?
KE: The next element in your acronym SUCCESs is credibility.
CH: We are basically talking here about how we get people to believe our ideas. There are lots of things that people understand and remember, but do they believe them enough to act on them - to change their thinking and/or their behavior? For example, a group of nutritionists through research had found that a medium-sized box of butter popcorn, the kind that we would eat sitting in a movie, had 37 grams of saturated fat. Now that is a pretty abstract statement if you are not a nutritionist. If you are a nutritionist, you know that 37 grams is a ludicrous amount of saturated fat. It is about a two day recommended allotment. But, how do you get that idea across to a public that does not follow the nutrition news? These folks are in the same position as we are – trying to get across ideas to others who don’t share our level of knowledge and understanding. It’s a pretty abstract piece of information. How do you make it more tangible and also more believable at the same time?
What they ended up doing is they translated the 37 grams into very concrete images. They said, “A medium-sized box of popcorn has the saturated fat equivalent of: A bacon and egg for breakfast, and a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings! Now, all of a sudden, the habits of moviegoers changed and people stopped eating movie popcorn until theaters stop popping it in coconut oil, which was the source of a lot of the saturated fat. Notice that this is an incredible success in the area of nutrition, given we hear facts about nutrition all the time. We vaguely understand that people are telling us we should eat healthier, but we really do not believe that we should change our activity. What I love about this example is that by coming up with the right concrete unexpected example, a group of nutritionists actually made us believe that there was a particular food product that we should stop eating and that changed behavior. That should be the aspiration of all of our messages.
In the book, we talk a lot about putting statistics on a human scale and the difficulty that we have is that we all deal with numbers; we all deal with factual information. The stuff is very intangible, and what this group did was they took a fairly abstract intangible number and they put it on a human scale. Now, all of a sudden, I can really decide. Would I rather have the medium popcorn, or a full day’s worth of fatty foods, and I know what I would choose in that situation.
KE: How do we help people care about our messages?
CH: The next principle that we want to talk about is emotion and when we talk about emotion, we are not talking about how you bring a tear to somebody’s eye, or scare people (like in the kidney theft urban legend). What we are really talking about is how do we get people to care and engage and change their behavior? One of my favorite examples in the book is about the design firm called IDEO that is located out here in Silicon Valley. They helped design the original Apple mouse, they have done a lot of brilliant work with technology, but they have also gotten involved in helping organizations re-engineer their processes.
In one case, they were working with a hospital and they were trying to convey to people in the hospital, and especially administrators, just how confusing and scary it can be for patients going into the emergency room. What they ended up doing to convey that message and evoke people’s emotions in support of change was they shot a video from the viewpoint of a patient. In this video, you see people walking up to the patient, talking in incomprehensible medical jargon, giving them some instructions to wait over in this part of the room and it’s not clear what part of the room they were in. They had to follow some signs and in the video you see the signs and you see them looking back and forth at the signs, trying to find the place the person had told them to be.
At one point, the patient gets put on a gurney so all of a sudden the video shifts to the patient’s viewpoint, which is looking at the ceiling. You can hear disembodied voices talking in the background. Every so often somebody pokes their head into the patient's field of view and says something and there is basically no dialogue other than what the patient hears. But, every once in a while you get these subtitles on the screen where the patient is thinking, “Who was that?” Or the patient is thinking, “What did they say?” You sit there for 35 minutes and you watch what happens in your emergency room from the standpoint of the patient.
It started with an abstract idea – we have to re-engineer our emergency room processes. Now, it has been made incredibly concrete and tangible, and people have been put in a position where they can have some empathy for this poor patient’s experience. If you are a doctor or nurse or an administrator and you are running around constantly from patient to patient, your life has a continuity and a fluidity and a connection that your patients are not experiencing. What they are experiencing is a very disconnected series of interactions and this video suddenly allows everybody at the hospital to see that.
KE: I see such a wonderful opportunity for companies to borrow that idea and use it for new hires, for instance. Hopefully their new hires wouldn’t receive that same stack of 3-inch binders that I did. Moving on to your next principal, Chip, we have all heard that stories are powerful ways to communicate ideas. What is it about stories that make them so powerful, and are there certain types of stories best suited to certain circumstances?
CH: Good stories have a lot of the properties that we have talked about earlier. Typically, stories are simple, they often have an unexpected ending, and provide some concreteness. One thing I want to highlight about stories is that there are, like you say, types of stories that we should be looking for. Let me start with an example that probably all of you will recognize.
Jared Fogle was a University of Indiana Junior who dieted down from 425 pounds to 190 pounds by eating Subway® brand sandwiches. That was an incredibly successful advertising campaign for Subway, and if you think about the ad campaign that ran right before the story of Jared, it illustrates the contrast that we see in a lot of organizations. The campaign previous to Jared was “seven sandwiches under six grams of fat.” Now, that’s on the same message. The message is that we have healthy fast food, we have seven sandwiches under six grams of fat. But, it certainly didn’t catch people’s attention like the story of Jared.
The reason is that when Jared holds up his pants, he provides a very concrete image. It’s an incredibly credible story and makes you believe. The guy that used to be 425 pounds is all of a sudden telling us that this fast food is healthy. But, also what's amazing about the story is that it talks about somebody accepting a challenge. In the book we talk about a handful of plots that are really capable of inspiring people, and one of the major plots that we see is this challenge plot that exists in Jared’s story. You can see classic examples of it: in the Bible, there is the story about David and Goliath, this young boy that confronts this gigantic warrior and overcomes him, that’s a challenge plot story.
The 1980 US Olympic hockey team that won the gold medal against the Soviet Union team was another magical Cinderella challenge plot story. Sea Biscuit is a story that inspires us all, even though it’s about a horse. What all of these stories have in common is that somebody is tackling a challenge, they are overcoming barriers. They may be physical barriers, social barriers, or financial barriers, and they are achieving success in the end. It turns out that if we tell the right kind of story, we are going to inspire other people to tackle their own challenges.
KE: It reminds me of The Hero’s Journey work of Joseph Campbell and others.
CH: Exactly, yes, The Hero’s Journey is a combination of a couple of the plots that we talk about; one part is the challenge. Very often on The Hero’s Journey, there is also a connection plot that exists. Connection plots happen when people manage to make connections with other people across social or economic barriers. So, in the movie Titanic, the number one movie of all time, when the two main characters manage to make this connection across these barriers of class and status, that’s an incredibly powerful moment. In the number one Super Bowl commercial of all time, the Mean Joe Green Coca Cola commercial, you have a towering famous athlete that makes a connection with a young boy over a bottle of Coke. That’s another connection plot.
Our organizations are filled with challenge plots and connection plots. Any time we have a team, we are bringing together a diverse set of talents to do a project. That’s a potential connection plot that can be told. Any time we are doing something for our organization, any time we are tackling a big issue for our organization, that’s a challenge plot. And, we need to bottle these stories and tell them to inspire other people.
KE: Are there other types of plots that you would recommend we find and use in our business communications?
CH: The one final plot that we talk about in the book is a creativity plot. If you are doing something regarding innovation, you have got to have a creativity plot. In the McGyver television series, McGyver always manages to put together pliers and string and a gallon milk container to escape from the situation. That’s a creativity plot. Older examples, Isaac Newton supposedly discovered the theory of gravity when an apple fell on his head. So any story where somebody makes a tremendous mental breakthrough, or is able to see the world in a different way, those are inspiring stories. If you are a company that exists because you are pushing the boundaries of technology or pushing the boundaries of what services are offered, you are in a position to tell creativity plots.
Challenge, connection and creativity plots - these are the three big ones that we highlight in the book.
KE: Back to Jared for just a moment. In your book you tell the story behind the story and explain that it was initially very difficult to get the decision makers at Subway to agree to the campaign. What’s that about?
CH: The irony is that the national marketing organization of Subway turned down the Jared story twice. They thought they had already done ‘healthy fast food.’ They had run the ‘seven sandwiches under six grams of fat’ campaign. In the end, the advertising agency and the advertising director said, “This is the only time in my life I have ever done this and I never expect to do it again,” but the advertising agency paid to film the first Jared commercial out of its own pocket they were so convinced it was a winner. After the advertising agency bootlegged the first commercial by paying for it and some Subway franchisees in the mid west put up the money to actually run it in their region, it caught on like wildfire.
Within three days, Oprah was calling and saying, “We want Jared on our show.” That’s a big win! But lots of things had to happen in order for that story to get actually out to the public. They had to get past the ‘curse of knowledge’ that we talked about earlier. They had been thinking about healthy fast food and that Subway was healthy for years. They had run a campaign about it, but what they didn’t have was a notion that any time we have a story that we can tell, where we can give a concrete example, as opposed to talking about abstractions, we need to go with a concrete example.
I think that just points out that even though all of the principles that we have talked about today are easy, they are absolutely unnatural, even for smart marketing people in a national organization that is good at marketing. I think that’s why the checklist is really handy. There are some messages that are important enough that it’s worth sitting down with the checklist and asking, “What great stories and examples can we use to make our ideas stick?”
KE: Although our organizations have stories that occur daily, it seems difficult to access them when we most need them. What's your recommendation?
CH: My recommendation is that if you want to take this seriously, then start setting up a routine within your group to collect the stories. They come in at all points in your organization and what typically happens with great stories is somebody will get a raving fan letter from a client or customer saying, “You all really helped out,” and they will sit there in front of the computer monitor with the moment of quiet joyful contemplation, and then move on to the next email. Forward-looking leaders will actually forward that email to the members of their group, but what typically doesn’t happen in very many organizations is to take that letter, put it in a database of stories, and make it available so that when leaders or managers are talking about the things that we are doing in this company, they have access to a set of 20 stories they could tell to illustrate their points.
There are few organizations that do that. Non-profit organizations are actually ahead of for-profit organizations on this basis.
KE: Chip, how might an organization determine whether they need to re-work their corporate messages?
CH: I think the main diagnostic is basically to ask, “Can somebody on the front line of the organization make an important decision after reading our mission statement?” Dan and I had the opportunity to talk to a mental health hospital. It’s actually a great organization. They were one of the top 10 hospitals in the country, according to US News, in their area of mental health. And they wanted to do better. We started talking to them about their mission statement and immediately stumbled on the fact that they had eight core values. Now how are you going to make an important decision if you are trying to weigh eight core values against each other?
We were actually making fun of them a little bit for that and they kind of grinned and they said, “Well, actually what you don’t know is that we have 11 core values and we were sufficiently embarrassed by our 11 core values that we collapsed three of them into some other ones and so we came up with a list that looks like it has eight, but what we really know is that we have embedded in there 11 different things that we are considering.” Now if you contrast that situation, I don’t think any employee at that organization is going to be able to make a good call about a new program that they are considering about tricky treatment issues for a patient when they are trying to balance eight different things.
Southwest Airlines for a long time has been an extraordinary performer in the airline industry and we all hear a lot about Southwest but what you don’t realize is that in the entire history of the airline industry, it is not clear that investors have made any money. So, if you look at Southwest, which has been profitable every year for about 30 years, that makes Southwest’s success an extraordinary accomplishment. And, one of the things that Herb Kelleher would go around telling people, is, “I can teach you to be CEO of Southwest Airlines in 30 seconds.”
He says that Tracey from marketing comes in and has done some market research and has found that customers on the Houston to Las Vegas flight are a little sad, they are a little frustrated because it is a long flight and they are just serving them soda and peanuts. Tracey has done some market research and says customers would like some food on that flight and in fact, the perfect entrée according to market research, is a chicken Caesar salad. And he turns to you and says, “What do you say to Tracey?” He says, “You say, ‘Tracey, would serving that chicken Caesar salad help Southwest become the low fare airline? Because if it’s not, we are not serving any chicken Caesar salad.’ ”
Now, what is amazing about that to me is that Herb Kelleher and the leadership team at Southwest is a group of leaders that has set priorities for their organization so every employee at Southwest airlines is thinking of two really important goals: one is low price and one is customer service. Every employee in that organization knows which order those two goals go in, low price first, customer service second. Now if you are running Singapore Airlines, that is the wrong order for you, but it is perfectly consistent with Southwest strategy to say price always comes before service. What that allows everyone in Southwest airlines to do is to make thousands of decisions that happen on the front lines of that organization on a daily basis with perfect confidence that they are doing the right thing.
Southwest pilots are known by air traffic controllers as the requesters, because of all the pilots the air traffic controllers deal with on a day-to-day basis, Southwest pilots are the only ones that are requesting a different bearing or a different altitude to save on fuel cost. Now that is a sign of a message that has permeated the organization so that everyone on the front line from pilots to flight attendants to baggage handlers are doing the right things to push the organization forward and that is a pretty challenging test for all of us in our organizations. Can the front line pilot, the front line flight attendant, the front line mechanic and the front line baggage handler prioritize and do things in exactly the order that you as a leadership team would like them to?
KE: That is a powerful example and what it demonstrates to me is absolute clarity – starting at the top; something that is often missing.
CH: That is right. Of all the things in the SUCCESs acronym, simplicity is the hardest thing to do because it requires you as a leader to achieve that clarity. If you can't be clear in your own mind and as a leadership team, how are thousands of people in your organization going to be clear in making those choices?
Audience Question: As a comment, these stories are great. Tying them back to your own industry requires a certain level of creativity. Do you have any recommendations on how to get people to think more creatively about their business and its impact?
CH: I am not a creativity expert but my overwhelming impression after working with lots of companies and lots of industries is that the answers already exist within the leadership team. You sit people down and ask them about their strategy. Can you give me an example of that? Can you give me an application? How do you know where to make this trade-off in your organization? Do you do price first or customer service first? And just by asking a series of questions first, what ends up happening, and it doesn’t happen in the first five minutes but then almost inevitably happens within the first half an hour is you start getting back these great examples of successes that they have had, very concrete stories of where their organization has done something that nobody else could do in their industry.
So is that a creative process? I would suggest that the creativity is already happened in your organization, but there is this archaeological process of getting past the expert abstraction and jargon and summaries and back down to the concrete tangible stories and details that illustrate what your organization has already done that has been creative. Locking people in a room with a group of outsiders who would play the role that I play sometimes as just really interested informed question askers of why did you do that, what makes you different from all the other organizations is going to give you the answers and they are going to surprise you with how beautiful and creative they are.
Audience Question: What is a good rule of thumb for less tenured individuals to bear in mind when communicating ideas?
CH: If you are a less tenured person, one of the things that you are going to worry about is credibility. I think most of us tend to respond to these situations where credibility might be in question by trotting out lots of facts and statistics and that is exactly the wrong tendency to have. You are back in the Subway sandwich territory of doing seven sandwiches under six grams of fat, or the nutritionists that are talking about 37grams, so exactly the tendency that we have to shore up our credibility by quoting lots of facts and statistics can backfire.
Do your homework, include some facts and statistics, but start with a story or start with an example. Then, if you need to present lots of facts and statistics, put those later on in the presentation or even better; boil down all those facts and statistics to one statistic that you can put into a human scale (like the 37g equaling the breakfast, lunch and dinner). I think that you are going to look like a magician for getting your message across, because so much of the organization is devoted to this “blah blah blah” stuff.
If you are interested in knowing more about how to make your ideas sticky, we encourage you to read Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath.
