Made To Stick

Leaders avoid the Curse of Knowledge.
The Curse of Knowledge is the tendency for leaders to think that having a great idea is enough. Leaders cursed by knowledge think that the communication part of that idea will come naturally. They don’t see the difficultly of getting a thought out of their own heads and into the heads of others.

As Chip and Dan Heath argue in their book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and 0thers Die, that the great cruelty of the Curse of Knowledge is this:

The better we get at generating great ideas—new insights and novel solutions—in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly.

Successful leaders of movements overcome this natural tendency to encode vision, values, and strategy in language that is sweeping, high-level, and abstract. They consciously see think about the “communication part” — choosing language that works in the streets, is at a level that everyone can reach. A movement leader’s language is storied and concrete.

But first, I’ve found the following explanation helpful. I reproduced the experiment during a recent training session with some key leaders and teachers. It worked like a charm. You might find the exercise helpful as well as you develop movement leaders.

The “Curse of Knowledge” is best illustrated by a psychology experiment conducted in 1990 by a Ph.D. candidate named Elizabeth Newton. She designed a simple game in which she assigned her subjects to one of two roles: “tappers” or “listeners.”1 Tappers received a list of 25 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.

The listener’s job in this game is quite difficult. During the course of the experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only 3 songs correctly out of 120, a success ratio of 2.5%.

But here’s what made the result worthy of a dissertation in psychology.

Before the listeners guessed the name of the song, the tappers were asked to make a prediction: What’s the probability that the listeners will guess the right song? The tappers predicted that the probability was 50%. The tappers communicated successfully 1 time in 40, but they thought they were communicating successfully 1 time in 2.

Why?

When a tapper taps, she is hearing the song in her head. It is impossible for the tappers to avoid hearing the tune playing along to their taps. Meanwhile, the listeners can’t hear that tune—all they can hear are a bunch of disconnected taps. In the experiment, tappers are flabbergasted at how hard the listeners seem to be working to pick up the tune. Isn’t the song obvious? The tappers’ expressions, when a listener guesses “Happy Birthday to You” for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” are priceless. How could you be so stupid?

It’s hard to be a tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it is like to lack that knowledge. When they are tapping, they can’t imagine what it is 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 the state of mind of our listeners.

Again, movement leaders–unfettered by the Curse of Knowledge–consistently get their message across to the mind of their listeners. How?

How do leaders avoid the Curse of Knowledge–that inability of experts to communicate their great ideas clearly?

They can’t unlearn what they know. According to Chip and Dan Heath (see: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and 0thers Die), there are only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge reliably. The first is not to learn anything. (Obviously, unacceptable.) The second is to take your ideas and transform them so those ideas become “sticky.” (The preferred way.)

Ideas are “sticky” the Heath brothers argue, when the ideas are communicated in ways that are “understandable, memorable, and effective in changing thought and behavior.”

The six principles of “stickiness” are:

1. Simple: The idea is stripped to its core without turning it into a silly sound bite.

2. Unexpected: The idea captures people’s attention and holds it. Leaders–unfettered by the Curse of Knowledge–say things that aren’t necessarily natural or intuitive or rooted in “common sense.”

3. Concrete: The idea is communicated in concrete language–language about people and actions and things that can be discovered via the senses. Concrete language helps everyone understands it in a similar way.

4. Credible: The idea is believable, supported by convincing details, ready examples and accessible statistics.

5. Emotional: The idea is communicated in a way that you get people to care about it–emotionally and viscerally. Sticky ideas connect to people’s “better” self-interests, are related to their identity as people, and are associated with things they care about.

6. Stories: The idea that is “storied” gets people to remember and to act. Leaders–unfettered by the Curse of Knowledge–tell stories. They know that you can reconstruct the moral from the story, but you can’t reconstruct the story from the moral.

Movement leaders use language that sticks, language that is Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories.