Getting your ideas to stick.

• Author: Kavanagh, Shayne
• Position: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die - Book review

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Random House

2007, 291 pages

Chip Heath and Dan Heath are the authors of a series of New York Times Best Selling Books on business psychology, communication, and transformation. (See "The Rider and the Elephant" in the February 2014 issue of Government Finance Review for a review of Switch, another book in this series.) Made to Stick, the first of these books, is about communicating ideas in a memorable way This topic is of paramount importance to finance officers, who must regularly communicate new ideas to non-experts and convince them that these ideas have merit.

THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE

The authors begin Made to Stick by introducing a villain, the Curse of Knowledge. A 1990 Stanford psychological experiment demonstrates the Curse of Knowledge beautifully. A group of people are asked to play a game in which people are assigned one of two roles: "tapper" or "listener." The job of the tapper is to tap out the rhythm of a well-known song to the listener (such as "happy birthday" or "the star spangled banner") by knocking on a table, while the listener's job was to guess the song. Out of the 120 trials, the listeners were only able to guess 3 songs correctly--2.5 percent. The truly astonishing finding was that when asked to project what the success rate of the listeners would be, the tappers estimated 50 percent! In other words, because the tappers knew the song and could hear it in their heads, they assumed the listeners would have a reasonable chance of guessing the song, while all listeners really heard was a series of knocks. The lesson from this experiment is that it is often difficult for people who have ideas to communicate them because they can't appreciate how the audience's lack of knowledge impedes their ability to understand. For finance officers, the "song" might be any number of financial management best practices--financial policies, long-term financial planning, or many others. Frustration ensues when finance officers attempt to "tap out" these ideas to an audience that doesn't have the same level of knowledge.

FINDING SUCCESS

Against this background, the authors introduce us to their six-part communications framework, which they call "SUCCESs": simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional stories.

Simple. According to Leonardo da Vinci, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." Hence, the SUCCESs framework starts by finding what the authors refer to as the "core" of the idea. This does not mean finding a way to express the idea using words of only one...