Shaun Abram

Technology and Leadership Blog

Book summary: Made to Stick, Chip & Dan Heath

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is a book by brothers Chip & Dan Heath. It tries to explain what makes some ideas memorable or interesting. The book has a somewhat similar style to Malcom Gladwell and explicitly references him:

We adopted the “what sticks” terminology from one of our favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, which examined the forces that cause social phenomena to “tip,” or make the leap from small groups to big groups.

I liked this book. The SUCCES framework (a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story) is useful enough, but I think I actually liked these 3 topics from early sections the most:

The Curse of Knowledge: Once we know something, it is hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind. Since we can’t unlearn what you already know, the suggests using the SUCCES framework to transform your ideas to beat the Curse of Knowledge.
Don’t bury the lead: The first “lead” sentence of a story contains the most essential elements. Don’t allow writing to become so steeped in the details that you lose the core message — what readers will find important or interesting.
The inverted pyramid: After the lead, information is presented in decreasing order of importance. Journalists call this the “inverted pyramid” structure — the most important info (the widest part of the pyramid) is at the top. The inverted pyramid is great for readers. No matter what their attention span, the inverted pyramid maximizes the information.

Finding the core and writing the lead both involve forced prioritization. The SUCCES framework can help you structure and communicate the points for best effect.

See below for summary notes on each chapter.

Introduction

The book starts with the “kidney heist” urban legend, “a story that sticks”, and poses the question, “are ideas born interesting or made interesting?” It’s the nature versus nurture debate applied to ideas. This is a nurture book. How do we nurture our ideas so they’ll succeed in the world?

An example is given about communicating the health issues associated with movie popcorn. The typical bag of popcorn had 37 grams was communicated as “contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings —combined!”, complete with visuals. The idea stuck. Moviegoers, repulsed by these findings, avoided popcorn in droves and sales plunged.

By “stick,” the book means that ideas are understood, remembered, and have a lasting impact by changing the audience’s opinions or behavior.

Six Principles of Sticky Ideas

The same themes and attributes are reflected in a wide range of successful ideas; sticky ideas share certain key traits and principles:

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY

A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.”
To strip an idea down to its core, be masters of exclusion by relentlessly prioritizing. Saying something short is not the mission. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. Like proverbs. The Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have
them do unto you”) is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS

We need to violate people’s expectations and be counterintuitive. A bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whole day’s worth of fatty foods! We can use surprise — an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus — to grab people’s attention. But surprise doesn’t last so we must generate interest and curiosity too. “Open gaps” in people’s knowledge, and then fill those gaps.

PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS

We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions and sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, strategies, visions are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images (e.g., ice-filled bathtubs) because our brains are wired to remember concrete data.

PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY

Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves — a “try before you buy” philosophy for the world of ideas. When we’re trying to build a case for something, most of us instinctively grasp for hard numbers. But this can be the wrong approach. e.g., Reagan saying “Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago.”

PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS

How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. In the case of movie popcorn, we make them feel disgusted by its unhealthiness. The statistic “37 grams of fat” doesn’t really elicit any emotions. Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness. For instance, it’s difficult to get teenagers to quit smoking by instilling in them a fear of the consequences, but it’s easier to get them to quit by tapping into their resentment of the duplicity of Big Tobacco.

PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES

How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations.
Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment.
Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.

To summarize, our checklist for creating a successful idea is:

a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story

SUCCESs

But if these principles are easy, why aren’t we deluged with brilliantly designed sticky ideas?
A: The Curse of Knowledge.

Tappers and Listeners

A study assigned people to one of two roles: “tappers” or “listeners.”
Tappers received a list of twenty-five well-known songs, such as “Happy Birthday to You” and “The Star Spangled Banner.” Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a listener (by knocking on a table).
The listener’s job was to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped, which is quite difficult. Listeners guessed less than 3% of the songs.

The interesting part is that before the listeners guessed the name of the song, the tappers were asked to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted that the odds were 50 percent.
The tappers got their message across 1 time in 40, but they thought they were getting their message across 1 time in 2. Why?

When a tapper taps, she is hearing the song in her head.
But the listeners can’t hear that tune — all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a kind of bizarre Morse Code.
Tappers are flabbergasted at how hard the listeners seem to be working to pick up the tune. Isn’t the song obvious?
Tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. They can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.

You can’t unlearn what you already know. This book will teach you how to transform your ideas to beat the Curse of Knowledge. The six principles presented earlier are your best weapons. They can be used as a kind of checklist.

Examples:
A CEO announces staff must strive to “maximize shareholder value.”

Simple? Yes, in the sense that it’s short, but it lacks the useful simplicity of a proverb.
Unexpected? No.
Concrete? Not at all.
Credible? Only in the sense that it’s coming from the mouth of the CEO.
Emotional? No.
Story? No.

Instead, compare JFK’s famous 1961 call to “put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade.”

Simple? Yes.
Unexpected? Yes.
Concrete? Amazingly so.
Credible? The goal seemed like science fiction, but the source was credible.
Emotional? Yes.
Story? In miniature.

Had JFK been a CEO, he would have said, “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives.” Fortunately, JFK was more intuitive than a modern-day CEO; he knew that opaque, abstract missions don’t captivate and inspire people. The moon mission was a classic case of a communicator’s dodging the Curse of Knowledge. It was a brilliant and beautiful idea — a single idea that motivated the actions of millions of people for a decade.

We will give you suggestions for tailoring your ideas in a way that makes them more creative and more effective with your audience.

Chapter 1: SIMPLE

Commander’s Intent

Every move an Army soldier makes is preceded by a staggering amount of planning. Over time, the army came to understand more and more about what makes people successful in complex operations. Plans are useful, in the sense that they are proof that planning has taken place. The planning process forces people to think through the right issues. But as for the plans themselves, “they just don’t work on the battlefield.” So, in the 1980s the Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander’s Intent (CI).

CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plan’s goal, the desired end-state of an operation. At high levels of the Army, the CI may be relatively abstract. At the tactical
level, for colonels and captains, it is much more concrete. The CI never specifies so much detail that it risks being rendered obsolete by unpredictable events.

Commander’s Intent manages to align the behavior of soldiers at all levels without requiring play-by-play instructions from their leaders. When people know the desired destination, they’re free to improvise, as needed, in arriving there.

It’s hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. If we’re to succeed, the first step is this: Be simple. Not simple in terms of “dumbing down” or “sound bites.” You don’t have to speak in monosyllables to be simple. What we mean by “simple” is finding the core of the idea.

Finding the core

“Finding the core” means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence; weed out superfluous and tangential elements. The Army’s Commander’s Intent forces its officers to highlight the most important goal of an operation. The value of the Intent comes from its singularity. You can’t have five North Stars.

At it’s core, this book has two steps to making your ideas sticky:

Find the core, and
Translate the core using the SUCCESs checklist.

That’s it.

Finding the Core at Southwest Airlines

Perhaps the single greatest factor of Southwest’s success is its dogged focus on reducing costs. For this effort to succeed, the company must coordinate thousands of employees.

Southwest has a Commander’s Intent, a core, that helps to guide this coordination.
“We are THE low-fare airline.”

For example, someone suggests service a nice chicken Caesar salad would be popular.
If that doesn’t help become the unchallenged low-fare airline, they are not serving chicken salad.
“We are THE low-fare airline” is a simple idea, but it is sufficiently useful that it has guided the actions of Southwest’s employees for more than thirty years.

Burying the Lead

News reporters are taught to start their stories with the most important information. The first sentence, called the lead, contains the most essential elements of the story. A good lead can convey a lot of information. For example:

A healthy 17-year-old heart pumped the gift of life through 34-year-old Bruce Murray Friday, following a four-hour transplant operation that doctors said went without a hitch.

A right-wing Jewish extremist shot and killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin tonight as he departed a peace rally attended by more than 100,000 in Tel Aviv, throwing Israel’s government and the Middle East peace process into turmoil.

After the lead, information is presented in decreasing order of importance. Journalists call this the “inverted pyramid” structure — the most important info (the widest part of the pyramid) is at the top.

The inverted pyramid is great for readers. No matter what the reader’s attention span, the inverted pyramid maximizes the information she gleans.
The inverted pyramid also allows newspapers to easily trim paragraphs from the bottom of the other articles to make space for late breaking news.

If finding a good lead is so important, why would a journalist ever fail to come up with one? A common mistake reporters make is that they get so steeped in the details that they fail to see the message’s core — what readers will find important or interesting. This problem of losing direction, of missing the central story, is so common that journalists have given it its own name: Burying the lead.

The process of writing a lead —and avoiding the temptation to bury it—is a helpful metaphor for the process of finding the core. Finding the core and writing the lead both involve forced prioritization.

It’s the economy, stupid.

Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign had many complexities. But one phrase emerged from many: “It’s the economy, stupid”. This became the lead of the Clinton story—and it was a good one, because in 1992 the U.S. economy was mired in a recession.

Simple = Core + Compact

Simple messages are core and compact.
Compactness alone isn’t enough.
Like proverbs, such as “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”, a warning against giving up a sure thing for something speculative, which has survived for more than 2,500 years across continents, cultures, and languages.
Or the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.
Great simple ideas have an elegance and a utility that make them function a lot like proverbs. One definition of “proverbs” echoes our definition of Simple ideas: short sentences (compact) drawn from long experience (core).

Complexity from Simplicity

Schemas help us create complex messages from simple materials. In school, lots of science courses are taught by clever uses of schemas. Introductory physics deals with simple, idealized situations: pulleys, inclines, objects moving at constant rates along frictionless paths.

Another nice use of a schema is the solar system model of the atom, which many of us were taught as kids. This model posits that electrons orbit the nucleus, much as planets orbit the sun. This analogy gives students a quick, compact insight into how the atom works.

The use of schemas can sometimes involve a somewhat slower route to the “real truth.”
The choice may seem to be a difficult one:

accuracy first, at the expense of accessibility; or
accessibility first, at the expense of accuracy.

But in many circumstances this is a false choice for one compelling reason: If a message can’t be used to make predictions or decisions, it is without value, no matter how accurate or comprehensive it is.

Southwest could tell flight attendants to “maximize shareholder value.”
In some sense, this statement is more accurate and complete than that the goal is to be “THE low-fare airline.” After all, the proverb “THE low-fare airline” is clearly incomplete. What about safety? The problem with “maximize shareholder value,” despite its accuracy, is that it doesn’t help the flight attendant decide whether to serve chicken salad. An accurate but useless idea is still useless.

We discussed the Curse of Knowledge in the introduction — the difficulty of remembering what it was like not to know something.
Accuracy to the point of uselessness is a symptom of the Curse of Knowledge. To a CEO, “maximizing shareholder value” may be an immensely useful rule of behavior. To a flight attendant, it’s not. To a physicist, how atoms really operate is fascinating. To a child, incomprehensible.

People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.

Schemas in Hollywood: High-concept Pitches

A great way to avoid useless accuracy, and to dodge the Curse of Knowledge, is to use analogies. Analogies derive their power from schemas:
A good news story is structured like an inverted pyramid.
Analogies make it possible to understand a compact message because they invoke concepts that you already know.
A good analogy can wield a lot of power. In fact, in Hollywood million dollar movies can be green-lighted based largely on the strength of a one-sentence analogy.

Speed was “Die Hard on a bus.”
Alien was “Jaws on a spaceship.”
E.T. was simply “Lost alien befriends lonely boy to get home.”

But a lot of pitches do invoke past movies because a compact, five-word phrase “Die Hard on a bus” pours a breathtaking amount of meaning into the previously nonexistent concept of Speed.
To see this, think of all the important decisions you could make, just on the strength of those five words.

Do you hire an action director or an indie director? Action.
Do you budget $10 million for the movie or $100 million? $100 million.
Big star or ensemble cast? Big star.
Target a summer release or a Christmas release? Summer.

Alien as “Jaws on a spaceship” tells you the Alien set should be old, rickety, claustrophobic, underdeveloped, dingy, and oppressive. Jaws was not cool or immaculate.

Obviously, a good pitch is not synonymous with a good movie.
But a bad pitch — a bad proverb — is plenty to ruin a movie. No director could save “Terms of Endearment on a spaceship.”

Generative Analogies

Good metaphors are “generative”; they generate “new perceptions, explanations, and inventions.” Many simple sticky ideas are actually generative metaphors in disguise.
Disney calls its employees “cast members”. You can predict how cast members should behave in situations e.g., you can probably guess that employees are not allowed to be on break while in costume and in a public area.
Contrast that with Subway’s “sandwich artists”, a metaphot that is utterly useless as a guide to how the employee should act, since these “artists” have little individual expression.

The Power of Simplicity

Generative metaphors and proverbs both derive their power from a clever substitution: They substitute something easy to think about for something difficult. Coming up with a profound compact phrase is incredibly difficult. But the effort is worth it — that “finding the core,” and expressing it in the form of a compact idea, can be enduringly powerful.

Chapter 2: UNEXPECTED

The FAA mandates safety announcements but for the most part, no one cares about what’s being communicated. How can you make people to listen them? One flight attendant solved this with creativity:

“If you haven’t been in an automobile since 1965, the proper way to fasten your seat belt is…”
“As the song goes, there might be fifty ways to leave your lover, but there are only six ways to leave this aircraft…”

This chapter focuses on two essential questions: How do I get people’s attention? And, just as crucially, How do I keep it?

To understand the answers to these two questions, we have to understand two essential emotions—surprise and interest — that are commonly provoked by naturally sticky ideas.
Surprise gets our attention.
Interest keeps our attention.

GETTING PEOPLE’S ATTENTION

A television ad with a minivan that ends in a terrifying collision violates our schema for car commercials and our schema of real-life neighborhood trips.

Our schemas are like guessing machines. If our guessing machines fail to predict correctly, we are surprised. Surprise jolts us to attention. Surprise is triggered when our schemas fail, and it prepares us to understand why the failure occurred. Unexpected ideas are more likely to stick because surprise makes us pay attention and think. That extra attention and thinking sears unexpected events into our memories.

If you want your ideas to be stickier, you’ve got to break someone’s guessing machine and then fix it.

A good process for making your ideas stickier is:

Identify the central message you need to communicate—find the core;
Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message —i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally?
Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.

It’s your job, as a communicator, to expose the parts of your message that are uncommon sense.

Journalism 101

Imagine being a new journalist, tasked with writing the lead of a newspaper story where the facts are:

Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.

You may come up with a lead such as “Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento”

The real lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday’.

Journalism is not about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It is not enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you have to understand what it means. And why it matters.

KEEPING PEOPLE’S ATTENTION

The Mystery of the Rings

Sometimes, messages are complex. How do we get people to stick with us through a complex message? How do we keep people’s attention?

Much successful science writing share a common trait: they began with a mystery.
The authors described a state of affairs that seemed to make no sense and then invited the reader into the material as a way of solving the mystery.
One example was written by an astronomer, who began with a puzzle:
How can we account for what is perhaps the most spectacular planetary feature in our solar system, the rings of Saturn? There’s nothing else like them. What are the rings of Saturn made of anyway?
And how could three internationally acclaimed groups of scientists come to wholly different conclusions on the answer?

One, at Cambridge University, proclaimed they were gas;
another group, at MIT, was convinced they were made up of dust particles;
while the third, at Cal Tech, insisted they were comprised of ice crystals.

How could this be, after all, each group was looking at the same thing, right?
The answer unfolded like the plot of a mystery. The answer at the end of twenty pages was dust. Actually, ice-covered dust, which accounts for some of the confusion.
Now, the makeup of the rings of Saturn may be entirely irrelevant to your life. But a good writer can have you turning pages like a speed-reader, on any topic.

Mysteries are powerful because they create a need for closure. An Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is
preceded by the Huh? experience.

Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.

The “Gap Theory” of Curiosity

This theory says curiosity happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge. Gaps cause pain. When we want to know something but don’t, it’s like having an itch that we need to scratch.
One important implication of the gap theory is that we need to open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts.
Movies, and local news programs running teaser ads, both use this approach. “There’s a new drug sweeping the teenage community—and it may be in your own medicine cabinet!”

Gaps Start with Knowledge

One idea is that to engage students in a new topic you should start by highlighting some things they already know.
Yes, knowledge gaps create interest. But to prove that the knowledge gaps exist, it may be necessary to highlight some knowledge first.
“Here’s what you know. Now here’s what you’re missing.”
Alternatively, you can set context so people care what comes next. It’s no accident that mystery novelists and crossword-puzzle writers give us clues. When we feel that we’re close to the solution of a puzzle, curiosity takes over and propels us to the finish.

There is value in sequencing information — not dumping a stack of information on someone at once but dropping a clue, then another clue, then another. This method of communication resembles flirting more than lecturing.

Unexpected ideas, by opening a knowledge gap, tease and flirt. They mark a big red X on something that needs to be discovered but don’t necessarily tell you how to get there.

Radios in Pockets

A technologist at Sony craved a “substantial” project to motivate his team of fifty scientists and engineers, and he saw tremendous promise in transistors. He had a vision for a radio that would be based on transistors, which many didn’t think was possible. The idea he proposed was a “pocketable radio.”

It’s hard, in retrospect, to comprehend the hubris of that idea — how utterly unexpected, how preposterous, it must have seemed the first time a Sony engineer heard it. Radios were not things you put into your pocket; they were pieces of furniture. At the time, radio factories employed full-time cabinetmakers.
The idea was both a brilliant product idea, and a brilliant “sticky idea”. The first transistor radios were nowhere near pocket-sized, and without Ibuka’s unexpected idea his engineers might have stopped pursuing the technology long before it became small enough to be useful. Ibuka inspired years of effort because he came up with an unexpected idea that challenged hundreds of engineers to do their best work.

Chapter 3: CONCRETE

The fablist Aesop authored some of the stickiest stories in history including “The Tortoise and the Hare,” “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” “The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing,” and many more.
His fables illustrated universal human shortcomings but were especially sticky because of they way it was encoded. The concrete images allowed the message to persist.

Life is not abstract. Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in very different ways. Concreteness helps us avoid these problems. This is perhaps the most important lesson that Aesop can teach us.

The Nature Conservancy

The Challenge: Moving Past “Bucks and Acres”

For 50 years, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) protected land by buying it outright — a strategy called “bucks and acres.” Donors and employees loved this approach because the results were highly tangible; you could literally walk on the land you saved.

However 40% of California’s environmentally precious land needed protection. Buying this much land was financially impossible. TNC had to pivot to more abstract strategies, like buying conservation easements and changing government policies. While effective, these new methods lacked the concrete appeal needed to motivate donors and boost employee morale.

The Solution: Creating “Eco-Celebrities”

To fix this messaging problem, TNC avoided using impossibly large, abstract numbers (like trying to save “2 million acres” or “9% of California”). Instead, they grouped land into tangible “landscapes” and set a concrete goal to preserve 50 of them over ten years.

To make these landscapes even more concrete, they gave them names, e.g. The “Mount Hamilton Wilderness.”
By giving an abstract plot of land a distinct name and personality—treating it like a defined neighborhood, TNC made the cause tangible again.

The Core Takeaway: Even if your strategies and solutions have to become complex or abstract, your messaging must remain concrete for your ideas to stick.

Concrete Is Memorable

Concrete ideas are easier to remember. Take individual words, for instance. Experiments in human memory have shown that people are better at remembering concrete, easily visualized nouns (“bicycle” or “avocado”) than abstract ones (“justice” or “personality”).

The Velcro Theory of Memory

What is it about concreteness that makes ideas stick? The answer lies with the nature of our memories.
Many of us have a sense that remembering something is a bit like putting it in storage. To remember a story is to file it away in our cerebral filing cabinets. There’s nothing wrong with that analogy. But the
surprising thing is that there may be completely different filing cabinets for different kinds of memories.

e.g. the questions:

Remember the first line of “Hey Jude”

Remember the Mona Lisa.

may trigger a different mental activity.

Memory, then, is not like a single filing cabinet. It is more like Velcro. If you look at the two sides of Velcro material, you’ll see that one is covered with thousands of tiny hooks and the other is covered with thousands of tiny loops. When you press the two sides together, a huge number of hooks get snagged inside the loops, and that’s what causes Velcro to seal.
Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory. Your childhood home has a gazillion hooks in your brain. A new credit card number has one, if it’s lucky.
Great teachers have a knack for multiplying the hooks in a particular idea.

e.g. the Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes racism experiment made prejudice concrete and memorable.

Making Ideas Concrete

How do we move toward concrete ideas for our own messages? We might find our own decisions easier to make if they are guided by the needs of specific people: our readers, our students, our customers.

Chapter 4. CREDIBLE

To illustrate how hard it can be to get people to believe a new idea, the authors share the story of medical researchers who discovered that ulcers were not caused by stress or excess stomach acid, but by a bacteria. Despite discovering a simple antibiotic cure for a disease affecting 10% of the world, the medical community rejected their findings. Their idea lacked credibility for three reasons:

Common sense: It was widely believed that no bacteria could survive the harsh, nail-dissolving acid of the stomach.
The source: Marshall was just an internist in training, not an established Ph.D. from a world-class research center.
The location: They were operating out of Perth, Australia, rather than a prestigious medical hub.

If you do not have a built-in advantage like family ties, or undeniable personal experience, you have to borrow credibility from external sources to make your ideas stick.
The text outlines two main types of sources you can tap into:

Authorities: People whose status, credentials, or fame naturally command respect or aspiration.
Antiauthorities: Ordinary people whose credibility comes from their intense, firsthand, authentic experience rather than their societal status.

The Power of Details

We don’t always have an external authority who can vouch for our message; most of the time our messages have to vouch for themselves. There are some general principles for establishing internal credibility.
Urban legends gain credibilty from having details, often localk details.
A person’s knowledge of details is often a good proxy for her expertise. By making a claim tangible and concrete, details make it seem more real, more believable.

Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. You should almost never use numbers in a vacuum; instead, use statistics to illustrate a relationship. It is far more important for your audience to remember the relationship and the scale than the exact number.

The Sinatra Test

Another way to develop internal credibility is to use a particular type of example, an example that passes what we call the Sinatra Test. In New York, New York, Sinatra sings about starting a new life in New York City, and the chorus declares, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” An example passes the Sinatra Test when one example alone is enough to establish credibility in a given domain. For instance, if you’ve got the security contract for Fort Knox, you’re in the running for any security contract.

An example was given of a security company wanting to distinguish itself from the competition. They could have used statistics such as “98.84 percent of our deliveries arrive on time”, or have drawn on an external source of credibility, such as a testimonial from the CEO of a multinational company. Instead they shared that they had handled the release of the fifth Harry Potter book, where every book in every bookstore in India had been delivered by 8 A.M. on the morning of the release.

That passes the Sinatra test.

Testable Credentials: “See for Yourself”

A testable credential is a form of internal credibility that doesn’t ask the audience to “trust the messenger,” but rather invites them to “try it for yourself.” By providing a challenge or an observation the audience can perform, the speaker allows the listener to become their own witness. This technique shifts the burden of proof. Instead of a politician or a brand reciting a list of facts, they point to a tangible experience in the listener’s own life.

The Political Classic: Ronald Reagan’s 1980 debate question, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” He didn’t need to cite inflation statistics; he knew people would check their own wallets and reach his intended conclusion.

Coaching: Rather than lecturing coaches on being nicer, coaches are asked to insult a peer (easy/loud) and then to praise a peer after a mistake (difficult/quiet). The Result is that coaches feel the disparity in their own behavior, making the lesson unarguable.

Rookie Orientation

Imagine that it’s your job to educate incoming NBA rookies about the danger of AIDS. The challenge is to make the threat of HIV feel “real” to young, wealthy, and seemingly “invincible” athletes who had likely tuned out standard health lectures. The NBA didn’t just provide information; they provided a mirror. Players were allowed to act on their natural impulses in a “safe” but realistic environment. When the women identified as HIV-positive the next morning, the “credential” wasn’t a doctor’s note—it was the players’ own memories of flirting and making plans.
“If I was fooled last night by these women, I can be fooled by anyone.”

The Credibility Hierarchy

External Authority: Doctors, celebrities, or “anti-authorities” (like a smoker with a tracheotomy).
Vivid Details: Concrete descriptions that make a claim feel “real.”
Statistics: Numbers that are placed on a “human scale” to show relationships.
The Sinatra Test: One extreme example that proves you can handle anything.
Testable Credentials: Allowing the audience to “see for themselves” or experience the truth firsthand.

Chapter 5: EMOTIONAL

The previous chapter focused on believe (credibility), but this section suggetss that belief is not enough for action. To move people, you must make them care.

The Mother Teresa Effect

Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”
This highlights a fundamental quirk of human psychology: our hearts are wired for individuals, not abstractions.

The Carnegie Mellon study revealed that when we look at the world through a lens of data, our emotional response and our generosity shuts down.

When the pitch was statistical (millions in need) the average donation was $1.14
When the pitch was for an individual child, the average donation was $2.38
And when the pitch used both approaches, the average donation was in between, at $1.43

The researchers theorized that thinking about statistics shifts people into a more analytical frame of mind. When people think analytically, they’re less likely to think emotionally.

Charities have long since figured out the Mother Teresa effect – they know that donors respond better to individuals than to abstract causes. You don’t give to “African poverty,” you sponsor a specific child.

Appealing to Self-interest

We make people care by appealing to the things that matter to them. And people matter to themselves. One reliable way of making people care is by invoking self-interest.

In 1925, John Caples was assigned to write a headline for an ad promoting a correspondence music course. Caples created the most famous headline in print-advertising history:

“They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano . .. But When I Started to Play!”

This is a classic underdog story in fifteen words. People laughed at him! And he shut them up through his playing! (The headline is enthralling enough that it makes us overlook commonsense reactions such as why would anyone laugh at someone sitting down at a piano?)

Don’t emphasize features, emphasize benefits. e.g. instead of “the world’s best seed!”, say “the world’s best lawn!”

People don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures.

Think WIIFY “what’s in it for you,” pronounced whiffy.

Maslow

Self-interest isn’t the whole story, of course—especially if we define “self-interest” narrowly, as we often do, in terms of wealth and security. If it were the whole story, no one would ever serve in the armed forces.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs was incredibly insightful, but it is not necessarily a “hierarchy.”
Subsequent research suggests that people pursue all of these needs pretty much simultaneously.

The result of spending too much time in Maslow’s basement is that we may overlook lots of opportunities to motivate people. It’s not that the “bottom floors” of physical needs aren’t motivational. But to focus on these needs exclusively robs us of the chance to tap more profound motivations.

Dining in Iraq

Lee, the man in charge of a US Army food hall in Baghdad, was clear about his leadership mission: “I am not just in charge of food service; I am in charge of morale.” In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy, Lee is going for Transcendence.

The hall has a reputation for great food but works with exactly the same raw materials that all other food halls do. But…

A chef sorts through the daily fruit, culling the bad.
The desserttable features five kinds of pie and three kinds of cake.
The Sunday prime rib is marinated for two full days.

And his vision manifests itself in hundreds of small actions taken by Lee’s staff on a daily basis:

The white walls of the typical mess hall are covered with sports banners.
There are green tablecloths with tassels.
The harsh fluorescent lights have been replaced by ceiling fans with soft bulbs.
The servers wear tall white chefs hats.

Lee realizes that serving food is a job, but improving morale is a mission. Improving morale involves creativity and experimentation and mastery. Lee is tapping into Maslow’s forgotten categories—the Aesthetic, Learning, and Transcendence needs. In redefining the mission of his mess hall, he has inspired his co-workers to create an oasis in the desert.

“Don’t Mess with Texas”

The “Don’t Mess with Texas” campaign is the ultimate example of using Identity to solve a problem that logic, self-interest, and authority could not. It worked by shifting the conversation from “litter is bad for the environment” to “littering is not what a Texan does.”

The campaign succeeded because it bypassed the “Analytical Hat” (self-interest) and the “Guilt Hat” (empathy) and went straight for the Identity Hat.

Summary of the “Emotional” Chapter

We have explored four ways to make people care:

The Individual: Use a single face (Rokia) to trigger empathy.
Association: Piggyback on existing feelings (The Truth campaign/Tobacco).
Self-Interest: Highlight the “Benefit of the Benefit” (John Caples/Piano).
Identity: Appeal to who people are and the groups they belong to (Don’t Mess with Texas).

Chapter 6: STORIES

The chapter starts with a story in a neonatal ICU. A baby’s color suddenly turned “blue-black.” While the medical team assumed a collapsed lung, a nurse believed it was a heart issue. despite the heart monitor showing a steady 130 BPM. The nurse insisted on silence, used a stethoscope, confirmed there was no heartbeat and directed the doctor to insert a syringe into the heart sac to release trapped air. The baby survived. The heart monitor had been monitoring electrical activity (the “order” to beat), not the actual physical pumping of blood.

Stories like these are told and retold because they contain wisdom. Stories are effective teaching tools. They show how context can mislead people to make the wrong decisions. Stories illustrate causal relationships that people hadn’t recognized before and highlight unexpected, resourceful ways in which people have solved problems.

While this specific medical lesson is not particularly useful to people who don’t work in health care, the story is inspiring to everyone. It’s a story about a woman who stuck to her guns, despite implicit pressure to conform to the group’s opinion. It’s an underdog story—in the hierarchical hospital environment, it was the nurse who told the chief neonatologist the right diagnosis. A life hinged on her willingness to step out of her “proper place.”

The story’s power, then, is twofold:

It provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and
inspiration (motivation to act).

Shop Talk in the Xerox Lunchroom

The story about photocopier repair highlights the sociological and practical value of “shop talk”. It argues that casual storytelling is actually a sophisticated form of peer-to-peer training, and is far more effective than a simple memo saying, “Watch out for problem X”.

Stories provide

mental simulation where colleagues are playing along
context that is necessary to update schemas (mental maps)
entertainment as Engagement

Whether it’s a nurse in the ICU or a repairman in a lunchroom, stories act as low-stakes practice. They allow professionals to learn from others’ mistakes without the cost of the original struggle.

The Un-passive Audience

This section argues that stories are not just passive entertainment; they are mental flight simulators. When we hear a story, our brains don’t just process words—they physically and spatially simulate the events.

A UCLA study on stressed students compared three ways of thinking about problems:

Control Group: Just told to “solve the problem.”
Outcome Simulation: Visualized the relief and success of the problem being over (The “Positive Thinking” approach).
Event Simulation: Visualized the process—how the problem started, what they said, and what actions they took.

The Result: The Event Simulators performed significantly better. They were more likely to take action, seek advice, and actually solve the problem. Visualizing the process acts like a rehearsal; visualizing the result is just a daydream.

A story isn’t a lecture—it’s a rehearsal for life.

Stories as Inspiration: The Tale of Jared

This section highlights the legendary “Jared” campaign from Subway as the ultimate case study in how a story can outperform a statistic, even when they are delivering the exact same message.

Before Jared, Subway used the “7 Under 6” campaign (seven sandwiches under six grams of fat). While accurate and alliterative, it lacked the “stickiness” of a human story.

Why Jared Worked (The SUCCESs Checklist)
The Jared story is a perfect 6-for-6 on the SUCCESs framework:

Simple: Eat subs, lose weight.
Unexpected: Fast food—usually the “villain” of weight gain—becomes the hero of weight loss.
Concrete: We can visualize the 60-inch-waist pants and the XXXXXXL shirts.
Credible: Jared is an “anti-authority.” He isn’t a paid doctor; he’s a guy who actually lived the experience.
Emotional: We empathize with his struggle (not being able to fit into classroom seats) and celebrate his triumph.
Story: It follows a classic “Challenge” plot—a protagonist overcomes a massive obstacle.

The Art of Spotting

While we often obsess over generating new ideas, the most impactful ideas—like the Jared Fogle story or the success of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series—are usually spotted rather than invented.

To become a better “spotter,” you need to recognize the templates that make stories resonate. The authors identified three “Master Plots” that account for the vast majority of inspirational narratives.

1. The Challenge Plot

This is the classic “David vs. Goliath” or “Underdog” story.

The Structure: A protagonist overcomes a formidable obstacle and succeeds.

Examples: Jared Fogle losing 245 pounds; Rose Blumkin building a furniture empire starting with $500; the nurse in the ICU saving the baby against the medical hierarchy.

The Payoff: It inspires us to take action. It makes us want to work harder, take on new challenges, and persevere.

2. The Connection Plot

This is a story about people who develop a relationship that bridges a gap—racial, class, ethnic, religious, or even just social.

The Structure: It’s an “Appleseed” story about a small act of kindness or a “Good Samaritan” story about reaching across boundaries.
Examples: A story about a high-school football player befriending a lonely student with a disability; a white supremacist and a Black activist becoming friends.
The Payoff: It makes us want to be better, kinder, and more tolerant people. It focuses on our social relationships and our humanity.

3. The Creativity Plot

This is the “MacGyver” or “Eureka” story.

The Structure: Someone makes a mental breakthrough, solving a long-standing puzzle or tackling a problem in an innovative way.
Examples: The Xerox repairman realizing the error code was a red herring; an engineer using a common household item to fix a complex machine.
The Payoff: It makes us want to do something different, be creative, and experiment with new perspectives.

Spotting vs. Inventing

The authors emphasize that you don’t need to be a professional writer to use these. Most “Chicken Soup” stories weren’t written by the editors—they were collected.

Stories at the World Bank

This final case study explores how Stephen Denning used a “Springboard Story” to transform the World Bank from a traditional lending institution into a “knowledge bank.”

Denning was tasked with knowledge management—an abstract, buzzword-heavy concept that the World Bank’s leadership largely ignored. The Bank was great at lending money but terrible at sharing the expertise of its workers across different countries.

The “Zambia Story”

Instead of using charts or academic definitions to explain “knowledge management,” Denning told a simple story:

The Scene: A health worker in a tiny town in Zambia (360 miles from the capital) was struggling to treat malaria.
The Action: The worker logged onto the internet and found the life-saving information he needed on the CDC website in Atlanta.
The “Springboard”: Denning pointed out that while it was great the worker found the info, he shouldn’t have had to go to the CDC. He should have been able to tap into the World Bank’s own collective expertise.

With the Springboard Story, the listener becomes a partner and starts imagining how the story applies to their own work.

By telling the story, Denning didn’t just explain a concept—he invited the executives to “steal” the idea. They stopped judging his presentation and started brainstorming how to implement the solution. This is what Denning calls mass customization: every listener takes the story and applies it to their specific department or problem.

The Conference Storybook

The “Conference Storybook” incident perfectly captures the central tension of effective communication: the battle between dry expertise and vivid experience.

The Edifice vs. The Brick

When experts present at a conference, they often try to deliver an “intellectual edifice”—a massive, complex structure representing years of study. They summarize their wisdom into slogans like:

“Keep the lines of communication open.”

“Don’t wait too long when problems are building up.”

The Problem: To an audience, these slogans are “common sense.” They are empty vessels. As Gary Klein noted, nobody actually wants to close communication or ignore problems; they just don’t know how to handle the specific, messy reality of a crisis.

Why the Stories Were Better

While the presenters were insulted that Klein’s team “scooped out” their anecdotes, the conference organizer found those stories infinitely more useful than the PowerPoint slides.

The Presenter’s View: The story is just a “humorous aside” or a “brick” in the wall. The slogan is the goal.

The Audience’s View: The slogan is boring and forgettable. The story (like the “Nordie” who gift-wrapped a rival store’s product) is the “flight simulator” that teaches them what “outstanding service” actually looks like in practice.

Defeating the “Curse of Knowledge”

The presenters fell victim to the Curse of Knowledge. When they say “keep lines open,” they hear a “symphony” in their heads—memories of the specific plant shutdown, the late-night phone calls, and the stress. But the audience only hears the “taps” (the dry words).

Stories bridge this gap because they naturally embody the SUCCESs framework:

Concrete: You can see the gift-wrap, the hospital room, or the Xerox board.

Emotional: You feel the nurse’s panic or the technician’s frustration.

Unexpected: They often involve a twist or a violation of a schema.

Credible: They provide “anti-authority” proof through lived experience.

Stories can almost single-handedly defeat the Curse of Knowledge. In fact, they naturally embody most of the SUCCESs framework. Stories are almost always Concrete. Most of them have Emotional and Unexpected elements. The hardest part of using stories effectively is making sure that they’re Simple—that they reflect your core message. It’s not enough to tell a great story; the story has to reflect your agenda. You don’t want a general lining up his troops before battle to tell a Connection plot story.

Stories have the amazing dual power to simulate and to inspire. And most of the time we don’t even have to use much creativity to harness these powers—we just need to be ready to spot the good ones that life generates every day.

Tags: 2026, bookreviews, books, reading

14 Mar 26 | Uncategorized