Sticky Ideas

We have been working on thinking through and shaping our core values.  As I have written before, so many organizations with which I have been involved have worked on long and hard on defining the mission, purpose and values of the organization only to hang it in the hall or post it to the website and promptly forget about them.  Whatever you call these statements, they must be truly those principles which you constantly use to guide and define the path of the organization.  Obviously, (I hope) in a church setting these should have a foundation in scriptural truth.  But even the most “spiritual” mission means nothing if it does not truly grab you and constantly remind you of why the church was started in the first place.

One of the reasons that many well intentioned efforts get sidelined or forgotten is that they are just too complex and lack any “stickiness.”   The concept of stickiness has been popularized by many writers but I like this recent digest, written by Baldwin Cheng, a co-worker of my son at Publicis & Hal Riney.  It is an abstract of an article from the November 2007 McKinsey Quarterly called “Crafting a message that sticks: An Interview with Chip Heath” by Lenny T. Mendonca and Matt Miller.  Baldwin Cheng’s writes that, ”Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Chip Heath’s research suggests that sticky ideas share six basic traits:

1. Simplicity. Messages are most memorable if they are short and deep. Glib sound bites are short, but they don’t last. Proverbs such as the golden rule are short but also deep enough to guide the behavior of people over generations.

2.  Unexpectedness. Something that sounds like common sense won’t stick. Look for the parts of your message that are uncommon sense. Such messages generate interest and curiosity.

3. Concreteness. Abstract language and ideas don’t leave sensory impressions; concrete images do. Compare “get an American on the moon in this decade” with “seize leadership in the space race through targeted technology initiatives and enhanced team-based routines.”

4. Credibility. Will the audience buy the message? Can a case be made for the message or is it a confabulation of spin? Very often, a person trying to convey a message cites outside experts when the most credible source is the person listening to the message.  Questions—“Have you experienced this?”—are often more credible than outside experts.

5. Emotions. Case studies that involve people also move them. “We are wired,” Heath writes, “to feel things for people, not abstractions.”

6. Stories. We all tell stories every day. Why? “Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation,” Heath writes. “Stories act as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.”