Walk out of your average PowerPoint presentation, and an hour later you probably won’t recall the main idea of the talk. It’s frustrating to waste time listening to ideas that quickly slip away, but it’s even more frustrating to try and fail to make an idea stick. Luckily, the McKinsey Quarterly has an interview with Chip Heath that offers three keys for making sure your message sticks around for awhile. Heath’s formula is so simple, you’re bound to remember it. Your message should be:
- Simple
- Surprising
- Concrete
And what better way to bring this formula for effective communication to life than an with an example:
John F. Kennedy, in 1961, proposed to put an American on the moon in a decade. That idea stuck. It motivated thousands of people across dozens of organizations, public and private. It was an unexpected idea: it got people’s attention because it was so surprising—the moon is a long way up. It appealed to our emotions: we were in the Cold War and the Russians had launched the Sputnik space satellite four years earlier. It was concrete: everybody could picture what success would look like in the same way. How many goals in your organization are pictured in exactly the same way by everyone involved?
Of course your daily status report doesn’t need to couched in the rousing tones of a presidential address, but when it comes to conveying your organization’s strategy to your team, or your product’s advantages to your customers, it’s important to make your ideas stick.
For more detailed information, check out the interview or Heath’s book, “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.”
(Image of moon landing by pingnews.com, CC 2.0)
