What Led to Made to Stick

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
by Chip Heath, Ph.D., Dan Heath

(Page 3 of 7)

The broad question, then, is how do you design an idea that sticks?

A few years ago the two of us-brothers Chip and Dan-realized that both of us had been studying how ideas stick for about ten years. Our expertise came from very different fields, but we had zeroed in on the same question: Why do some ideas succeed while others fail?

Dan had developed a passion for education. He co-founded a start-up publishing company called Thinkwell that asked a somewhat heretical question: If you were going to build a textbook from scratch, using video and technology instead of text, how would you do it? As the editor in chief of Thinkwell, Dan had to work with his team to determine the best ways to teach subjects like economics, biology, calculus, and physics. He had an opportunity to work with some of the most effective and best-loved professors in the country: the calculus teacher who was also a stand-up comic; the biology teacher who was named national Teacher of the Year; the economics teacher who was also a chaplain and a playwright. Essentially, Dan enjoyed a crash course in what makes great teachers great. And he found that, while each teacher had a unique style, collectively their instructional methodologies were almost identical.

Chip, as a professor at Stanford University, had spent about ten years asking why bad ideas sometimes won out in the social marketplace of ideas. How could a false idea displace a true one? And what made some ideas more viral than others? As an entry point into these topics, he dove into the realm of "naturally sticky" ideas such as urban legends and conspiracy theories. Over the years, he's become uncomfortably familiar with some of the most repulsive and absurd tales in the annals of ideas. He's heard them all. Here's a very small sampler:

• The Kentucky Fried Rat. Really, any tale that involves rats and fast food is on fertile ground.
• Coca-Cola rots your bones. This fear is big in Japan, but so far the country hasn't experienced an epidemic of gelatinous teenagers.
• If you flash your brights at a car whose headlights are off, you will be shot by a gang member.
• The Great Wall of China is the only man-made object that is visible from space. (The Wall is really long but not very wide. Think about it: If the Wall were visible, then any interstate highway would also be visible, and maybe a few Wal-Mart superstores as well.)
• You use only 10 percent of your brain. (If this were true, it would certainly make brain damage a lot less worrisome.)

Chip, along with his students, has spent hundreds of hours collecting, coding, and analyzing naturally sticky ideas: urban legends, wartime rumors, proverbs, conspiracy theories, and jokes. Urban legends are false, but many naturally sticky ideas are true. In fact, perhaps the oldest class of naturally sticky ideas is the proverb-a nugget of wisdom that often endures over centuries and across cultures. As an example, versions of the proverb "Where there's smoke there's fire" have appeared in more than fifty-five different languages. In studying naturally sticky ideas, both trivial and profound, Chip has conducted more than forty experiments with more than 1,700 participants on topics such as:

• Why Nostradamus's prophecies are still read after 400 years
• Why Chicken Soup for the Soul stories are inspirational
• Why ineffective folk remedies persist

A few years ago, he started teaching a course at Stanford called "How to Make Ideas Stick." The premise of the course was that if we understood what made ideas naturally sticky we might be better at making our own messages stick. During the past few years he has taught this topic to a few hundred students bound for careers as managers, public-policy analysts, journalists, designers, and film directors.

To complete the story of the Brothers Heath, in 2004 it dawned on us that we had been approaching the same problem from different angles. Chip had researched and taught what made ideas stick. Dan had tried to figure out pragmatic ways to make ideas stick. Chip had compared the success of different urban legends and stories. Dan had compared the success of different math and government lessons. Chip was the researcher and the teacher. Dan was the practitioner and the writer. (And we knew that we could make our parents happy by spending more quality time together.)

We wanted to take apart sticky ideas-both natural and created- and figure out what made them stick. What makes urban legends so compelling? Why do some chemistry lessons work better than others? Why does virtually every society circulate a set of proverbs? Why do some political ideas circulate widely while others fall short? In short, we were looking to understand what sticks.We adopted the "what sticks" terminology from one of our favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell. In 2000, Gladwell wrote a brilliant book called The Tipping Point, which examined the forces that cause social phenomena to "tip," or make the leap from small groups to big groups, the way contagious diseases spread rapidly once they infect a certain critical mass of people. Why did Hush Puppies experience a rebirth? Why did crime rates abruptly plummet in New York City? Why did the book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood catch on?

The Tipping Point has three sections. The first addresses the need to get the right people, and the third addresses the need for the right context. The middle section of the book, "The Stickiness Factor," argues that innovations are more likely to tip when they're sticky. When The Tipping Point was published, Chip realized that "stickiness" was the perfect word for the attribute that he was chasing with his research into the marketplace of ideas.

This book is a complement to The Tipping Point in the sense that we will identify the traits that make ideas sticky, a subject that was beyond the scope of Gladwell's book. Gladwell was interested in what makes social epidemics epidemic. Our interest is in how effective ideas are constructed-what makes some ideas stick and others disappear. So, while our focus will veer away from The Tipping Point's turf, we want to pay tribute to Gladwell for the word "stickiness." It stuck.

Copyright © 2007 by Chip Heath & Dan Heath.

About the Author

Chip Heath is a Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He has taught courses on organizational behavior, negotiation, strategy and international strategy at the University of Chicago School of Business and The Fuqua School of Business at Duke. His research examines why certain ideas-ranging from urban legends to folk medical cures, from Chicken Soup for the Soul stories to business strategy myths, survive and prosper in the social marketplace of ideas. Chip designed a course at Stanford that examines the principles of naturally sticky ideas to design messages that would be more effective. Chip is the co-author of a book titled What Sticks - Why Some Ideas Work in the World and Others Don't. The book will be published by Random House in 2007. Chip has taught and consulted on the topic of making ideas stick at such companies as Nissan, Chronicle Books, Ideo, as well as West Point.

Dan Heath is a consultant at Duke Corporate Education. A former researcher at Harvard Business School, he is a co-founder of Thinkwell, an innovative new-media textbook company. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.