Made to Stick

"Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it."

— Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Chip Heath is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's business school and has helped more than 450 startups refine their strategy and their messages. Dan Heath is a senior fellow at Duke University's CASE center, which supports social entrepreneurs, and before that cofounded a digital textbook publisher. In this book the brothers brought together what one had studied about why urban legends survive and what the other had learned designing teaching materials.

An absurd urban legend, like the traveler who wakes up in a bathtub full of ice missing a kidney, is remembered for years. Meanwhile, a company's strategy, its value proposition or a founder's pitch are forgotten by the next day. The authors argue the difference lies not in the quality of the idea, but in how it is presented.

The main villain is the curse of knowledge, and the case that explains it is an experiment by Elizabeth Newton at Stanford. She asked one group to tap out the rhythm of very well-known songs with their fingers, and another to guess which songs they were. Out of 120 songs, the listeners got 3 right, 2.5 percent. The tappers had predicted they'd get half. They heard the melody in their heads; the listeners heard only taps on the table. The same happens to the founder who explains his business with the jargon and context only he has.

To beat that curse, the Heaths propose six principles that form the acronym SUCCESs:

• Simple. Find the core of the idea and strip away everything else. Herb Kelleher summed up Southwest's strategy as "we are THE low-fare airline," and with that sentence any employee could decide whether adding a chicken salad to the in-flight menu helped or not.
• Unexpected. Break a pattern to capture attention, and open a curiosity gap to keep it.
• Concrete. Use images and examples that can be seen and touched, instead of abstractions. Aesop's fables have stayed relevant for 2,500 years for that reason.
• Credible. Support the idea with verifiable details and with proof the audience can check for themselves, not just figures or authority.
• Emotional. Make people care. One concrete person moves more than a statistic about millions.
• Stories. A good story works like a simulator: it teaches whoever hears it what to do and how to act.

The authors clarify that you don't need to meet all six principles at once. The challenge is rarely to invent a new idea, but to translate the one you already have into a language others can understand and repeat.

The common mistake is burying the main idea under data, nuance and background, because to the expert everything seems important. The result is a precise message that nobody remembers or can repeat.

How to apply it? Take the most important message you have to communicate this month, whether your pitch, your value proposition or a priority for the team. Write it in one sentence and run it through the six principles: what's extraneous, what makes it unexpected, what concrete example illustrates it, what proof backs it, who cares and what story tells it. Then explain it to someone outside your industry and ask them to repeat it back to you the next day; whatever they can't repeat is what you have to change.

As a founder it will help your pitch be remembered after the meeting, help your team make decisions with the strategy in their heads and help your customers tell your value proposition in their own words.