Summer Leadership Strategies from the Harris Leadership Program

If you are looking for a book to keep you entertained while boosting your ability to entertain, Made to Stick is for you. It begins with the urban legend of the Kidney Heist as the perfect example of a story that sticks, and goes on to provide the reader with other memorable stories and a framework for communicating ideas. Best of all, the language is clear, the lessons are useful, and it’s a funny and fast read. The book has been on all the bestseller lists since its release in 2007. 

The villain in Made to Stick is one we are well acquainted with at the Harris School of Public Policy: the Heath brothers call it the “Curse of Knowledge.” When we become an expert at something, it’s hard for us to imagine someone not knowing what we know. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. At that point it becomes difficult for us to share our idea because we have a deep and nuanced understanding and have already created a frame for viewing the issue. We become bad communicators because we can’t put ourselves in our audiences’ shoes.

The Heath brothers tell us that we can avoid the Curse of Knowledge by using six principles when we communicate. Understandable and memorable ideas are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, and emotional – and many are communicated in the form of stories.

Here are three ways that you can develop your communication skills this summer based on the book’s principles:

Summer Strategies to make your ideas “sticky”:

Easy: Of the six “stickiness” factors the easiest idea to embrace and implement is the notion that strong communications are concrete. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images because our brains are wired to remember concrete data (think of the ice-filled bathtub in the kidney heist tale). Proverbs are a great example of expressing abstract ideas concretely: “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

If you can examine something with your senses, it’s concrete.  A V8 engine is concrete. “High performance” is abstract. Concrete language helps people understand new concepts. Concreteness makes targets transparent: “Let’s put a man on the moon.”

Summer strategy:

Practice speaking using concrete language.  Change how you express your ideas by being concrete.  Pick a goal for yourself or your team, and express it in concrete language.  “I will read two top-rated leadership books this summer.”  “Our team will make three site visits this summer.” 

Hard:  Chip Heath said in an interview that “probably the single biggest insight in the book — and it sounds so trivial, but it’s actually not — is that effective messages are very simple.” The goal is to distill an idea to its most critical essence being careful not to “bury the lead” or turn it into a trite sound bite. This requires the communicator to prioritize, a challenging task when faced with nuanced ideas and multiple perspectives.

The tendency to gravitate toward complexity is perpetually at war with the need to prioritize. However, if you want others to choose your idea, you must communicate the core message in a way that implies its worth. In other words, it needs to be both compact and profound.

When Bill Clinton was running for president in 1992, his political advisor created the campaign’s core message: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Schemas help us create complex messages from simple materials. Analogies, which derive their power from schemas, are a great communication tool for leaders. They make it possible to understand a complex message because they invoke concepts that we already know.

Hollywood movie pitches provide the perfect example: The movie Speed was pitched as “Die Hard on a bus.”

Some analogies are so useful that they become platforms for novel thinking. The Heath brothers refer to these “sticky ideas” as “generative metaphors.” Best example:  Disney calls its employees “cast members” and the customers are referred to as “guests.” 

Summer strategy:

Practice distilling your ideas using the “inverted pyramid” of journalism to help you find the core by presenting information in decreasing order of importance. Then take the core idea and practice creating analogies and metaphors to express your ideas. This is especially important when you are communicating statistics. Numbers alone aren’t sticky; it’s not about the data, but the meaning of data.

Fun: The sixth principle of making an idea sticky is to tell it as a story. Stories produce a “mental simulation” in the listener that causes the listener to mentally reenact the experience, producing a stronger imprint of the idea.

Nick Morgan, author of Power Cues and president and founder of Public Words, a communications consulting firm, says “leaders won’t be heard unless they’re telling stories.”

According to Morgan, “Facts and figures and all the rational things we think are important…actually don’t stick in our minds at all.”

Stories create “sticky” memories by attaching emotions to events; we process and remember information by telling stories – it’s how our brains work. Stories can almost single-handedly defeat the Curse of Knowledge. They naturally embody most of the six principles of generating sticky ideas:  they are almost always concrete, and they are often emotional and contain unexpected elements.  The hardest part of using stories effectively is making sure they are simple enough.

Summer strategy: 

Good storytelling isn’t easy. The best way to become a good storyteller is to look for and collect stories. Stephen Denning did just that when he was “demoted” from his position at the World Bank and put in charge of knowledge management, which he says was the equivalent of being sent to corporate Siberia. He began to speak with World Bank employees and collected stories related to managing knowledge. He used one powerful story to win back the support of his bosses, then went on to write a series of insightful books on the power of storytelling. 

Get a fun notebook and use it to start a story collection. Think about situations in your career and at Harris where you could use a story to persuade someone to adopt your idea. Look for storytelling venues in your city and attend a storytelling session: in Chicago we have Story Lab, Do Not Submit, This Much is True, and The Moth to name a few.