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by Tim Wilson
April 2008
 Everyone comes up with a great idea from time to time. Whether it’s politics, medicine or corporate citizenship, there’s no shortage of people who believe they have an absolutely brilliant idea. The trick is convincing someone else of the brilliance and making the idea persist to the point it can change behavior.
In other words, how do you make ideas stick?
That’s the challenge Chip Heath addressed in his keynote speech at the Boston College Center’s 2008 conference. Heath, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, is co-author with his brother Dan of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.
Heath pointed out that some commonly accepted ideas have stuck for years despite being completely bogus. Among these are the notions that humans use only 10 percent of their brains and that the Great Wall of China can be seen from outer space. He said the idea about people using just 10 percent of their brains can be traced as far back as the 1924 World’s Fair in London.
Urban legends are examples of totally fabricated stories persisting because they are “sticky” ideas. Health told the tale of a man who, after accepting a drink from a stranger in a bar, wakes up in a bathtub full of ice and learns he’s the victim of an organ theft ring.
“Talk about something that would change your behavior,’’ said Heath, who speculated most people would only have to hear the tale once to be turned off on the idea of accepting drinks from strangers. “Now that’s a sticky idea.”
Heath noted that urban legends stick despite lacking the blogs, ad budgets, newsletters, podcasts and PR campaigns that are employed by those trying to get their ideas to stick. He listed President Kennedy’s 1961 notion of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade as an idea that took hold and became reality.
According to Heath, if you reverse engineer a sticky idea you’ll find it possesses six key elements:
SIMPLE
Heath said jurors in court cases don’t remember complicated arguments and recalled a trial lawyer’s contention that if you say 10 things to a jury you’ve said nothing. “Simplicity is the discipline of getting across the first idea before you start talking about a second one.”
UNEXPECTED
To get an idea across you can’t bury the unexpected elements. City Year aimed to change the conversation about American youths and its program with an unexpected message: the idea that one day the most common question asked of a 17-year-old would be “Where are you going to do your year of service?” To make an idea stick, the role of a communicator is to move beyond common sense to uncommon sense.
CONCRETE
To make an idea stick you have to move from the abstract to the concrete. A concrete vision has the power to elicit an emotional response.
The bathtub of ice story has a concrete message. Take a drink from a stranger and you might lose your liver. Heath stressed that the jargon of business and alphabet soup of acronyms associated with corporate citizenship are decidedly not concrete. “No wonder messages don’t stick,” he said.
As an example of an abstract message, Heath talked about a company announcing a commitment to the environment. It becomes a concrete message if the company powers a truck by French fry grease. But the degree of the message makes a difference in what idea sticks. One truck may be seen as a green-washing diversion, but powering a fleet of trucks on grease encourages an image of the company as an environmental pioneer.
CREDIBLE
What makes people believe ideas? People often choose to believe based on personal learning experiences or social relationships, Heath explains in his book. But since there is no way to control how those forces affect people, it’s necessary to look for other sources of credibility.
Authorities, such as experts or celebrities, can lend a measure of credibility to an idea because of their status. But others who may lack star power can be even more credible. An average person seen as honest and trustworthy can have more influence than the authority who wields status.
Heath also notes that details can help lend credibility to an idea that might flounder when communicated with generalities.
EMOTIONAL
Heath emphasized that it’s important to get people to care about an idea. “How do we motivate them to do something when we are not in the room,’’ he asked. He cited as an example the state of Texas’ campaign to cut down on highway litter.
Texas officials identified the most frequent litter bugs as 18-to-30-year-old truck driving males and created the persona of “Bubba” as the target for the anti-litter campaign.
Initially officials considered hitting Bubba with a $500 fine for littering. But they soon realized that might only serve to egg on guys like Bubba who were always ready to challenge authority, not to mention the difficulty of catching Bubba in the act.
Officials then turned from a campaign with a message that focused on consequences to one that connected littering to an identity Bubba cared about. The message: Don’t mess with Texas.
The appeal to Bubba’s pride in Texas worked and succeeded in reducing litter. The idea worked so well, in fact, that “Don’t mess with Texas” started popping up not only on Bubba’s pickup but on minivans of soccer moms who were just as proud of the Lone Star State. Rather than changing the consequences of actions, Heath said, Texas made its anti-litter idea stick because it connected with people on the level of identity.
Heath said that “identity relates well to corporate citizenship” when it’s connected to how a company sees itself. He related the experience of National Instruments, which wanted to work toward increasing the number of kids going into science and engineering careers. When National Instruments became involved with robotics competitions for school kids it was important for executives to see that the software in the LEGO Mindstorms products used by the kids is based on the same software used by National Instruments engineers and scientists. It made clear the connection between this corporate citizenship effort and the business goal of generating more scientists and engineers.
STORY
A final piece in the puzzle of a sticky idea is having the ability to tell a springboard story of how change might happen. Heath told of how in 1996 an employee convinced the World Bank that knowledge management, as much as the money it loaned, was vital to saving lives in the developing world. The worker explained to senior management how a health care worker in Zambia managed to get onto the Internet and access the Centers for Disease Control Web site to find information on how to fight malaria. He pointed out that the World Bank could just as easily make itself a resource for getting that kind of information to the people who need it. Immediately after the man’s presentation, executives leaped on the idea. His story was the springboard that put the idea into action.
Although Heath cited six key elements, he reassured the audience that you don’t have to score six of out six, four will work. He said making an idea stick involves “taking an idea in your head and making a light go on in somebody else’s.”
While many of the concepts to make ideas sticky sound simple, Health addressed why there are sometimes no brilliantly designed ideas coming from brilliant people. He put the blame on “the curse of knowledge.”
“It gets harder to imagine what it’s like not to have that knowledge,” Heath said, and thus difficult to relate to those who don’t. He said it’s particularly difficult for experts whose thinking runs counter to the sticky approach. Rather than simplicity, experts are looking for complexity and nuance while thinking in the abstract instead of dealing with concrete ideas. The expert replaces a story that could launch an idea with definitions and requirements.
“The challenge,” Heath stressed, “is to take good ideas and make them charismatic ideas.”
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