Heath and Heath do a nice job of laying the groundwork for understanding and generating “sticky” ideas in Made to Stick. The first step to success (or SUCCESS, as they use it) is seemingly straightforward: keep it simple. Of course, keeping something simple is ironically complicated (thus the entire chapter devoted to it in H&H’s book). Simplicity, when it comes to making a concept stick, is all about finding the core - finding the single idea at the very heart of the matter (27) – and then “making it compact” (46). One of the examples the authors offer is Southwest Airlines’ motto and goal, at least as far as its employees are concerned: Southwest wants to be “THE low-fare airline.” This extremely compact statement packs a punch when one actually considers what being THE low-fare airline actually means and how it affects corporate/employee decision-making. Absolutely everything that this company does should allow it and/or enable it to be the airline with the lowest prices. This doesn’t mean that pilots, technicians, and stewards can begin ignoring safety to reduce labor and time costs. Maintaining safety standards is part of being an airline, period. However, when making daily decisions about how the airline should function as a business (i.e. what kind of extra services customers receive, the kind of freedom staff members can enjoy in performing their duties, etc.), employees of Southwest can recall their motto and adjust their behaviors and choices accordingly.
However, Heath and Heath do draw an important distinction between simplicity and oversimplification. According to our authors, simplicity is “elegance and prioritization, not dumbing down” (30), meaning that the simple ideas we use have to be useful for our purposes. They need to be core concepts, they need to be compacted down, and they need to be effective. Heath and Heath suggest that a simple but effective idea will generate complexity over time. Like Southwest’s motto, a simple statement can have a wide-ranging impact and hold implications for a variety of scenarios. In fact, Southwest’s employee motto is an entire paradigm packed into four words. The idea contained by those four words is straightforward, but it defines exactly what Southwest is as a company, as an airline, as a service provider, etc.
Of course, a part of keeping things simple is not letting things become overly complicated. It’s a painfully obvious concept, but one which H&H find valuable. Believe it or not, explaining something simply is not always intuitive. This is why schema, or “a collection of generic properties of a concept or category” (54), prove hugely important. The example offered in Made to Stick is the pomelo. The pomelo is basically a grapefruit with a few distinctive characteristics of its own. The grapefruit is essentially a schema which makes describing a pomelo much more effective. According to Heath and Heath, “schemas enable profound simplicity” (55) because they allow the audience or the receiver of an idea to bring what they already know to the table. When Twitter hit the internet the Facebook status schema was used to describe it. This made a brand new social networking tool not only easy to understand, but also easy to use immediately. People came to Twitter with a lot of Facebook experience, experience which bridged a knowledge gap which might have otherwise slowed Twitter’s growth and rise in popularity.
Ultimately, ignoring what a person already knows or finds familiar leads to over-complication – or perhaps just ineffectual communication. Imagine trying to describe Twitter to a new user without a schema to put it into context. It would be a nightmare. This is not to say that Twitter is Facebook. Its creators, I’m sure, would strongly deny and rebuke any such claim. Still, Facebook is a useful comparison, one which is not worth overlooking. Now, I may want to describe a citrus fruit (or social network) very specifically and, as a result, choose to rely simply on that fruit’s characteristics to paint the most accurate picture possible for my audience. However, if the audience still can’t see the picture I’m painting all of my work is wasted. This is what I mean about intuition. I think it’s possible that, in an attempt to be precise, we intuitively avoid schema when communicating our ideas. However, schema can give an audience immediate access to a concept, and they can provide a foundation upon which greater accuracy and more complexity might be built. In other words, employing schema can make ideas stick in precisely the ways H&H suggest: by making ideas simple and effective.
For those of us that are still concerned simplicity is too close to over-simplification, Heath and Heath have a tip: make your ideas unexpected. Ideas can be simple but still create surprise, and it is these kinds of ideas that gain and maintain a person’s attention. Interestingly enough, we still get to employ schema when making our ideas unexpected. This time, however, we are undermining schema to create surprise and then lasting interest. As H&H describe this process, we make ideas more interesting if we break and then fix a person’s “guessing machine.” This extends beyond employing gimmicks, not that gimmicks aren’t useful. What manipulating a person’s guessing machine really means is showing that person something counterintuitive and then offering an explanation. The second half of this process is particularly important because, without context and the knowledge to make an idea make sense, people will stop caring (or, at best, become extremely frustrated). According to H&H, using surprise or mystery relies on the gap-theory of curiosity. People are not only naturally curious, but they are also naturally annoyed by confusion and knowledge gaps. This means that, when people have their guessing machine broken (when our expectations are undermined), they are willing to stick around to see it fixed and to experience the catharsis that come along with that. I can’t count how many (often dumb) YouTube videos I have sat through because something in the caption or title (or the absurd number of views) made me curious, challenged my expectations, and pushed me to care enough to complete the video. I find videos with titles like, “How did she do that?!” or “How did he survive this?!” particularly effective. These questions make me curious and make me care. It’s worth noting that these are clearly gimmicks, but the same concept applies: simple ideas stick, but they stick better if they’re not boring.
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