Industrial Designers are in the business of bringing ideas into reality. The single biggest hurdle regularly faced by designers in order to bring their idea into the world is convincing others that their idea is good enough to take a chance on. In order to convince someone, be it an individual, a board of directors or an entire organization, you need to be good at one thing. Communication. Effective communication is what will make your world changing idea stick in peoples minds and allow you to bring your idea into reality.
Thus I am very surprised that Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath
Dan and Chip Heath are brothers. Dan “co-founded a start-up publishing company called Thinkwell” which publishes education books, such as biology textbooks, meaning Dan and his team had to figure out “what make teachers great”. While Chip is a professor at Stanford University, where he has “spent about ten years asking why bad ideas sometimes won out in the social marketplace of ideas. How could a false idea displace a true one? And what made some ideas more viral than others?”
Utilising their cumulative 20 years of experience figuring out how and why some idea’s stick and others don’t, Dan & Chip have created a book that is not only entertaining to read (it is full of fantastic stories the illustrate their points effectively – such as the gruesome urban legend about a man who succumbs to a bar room flirtation only to wake up in a tub of ice, victim of an organ-harvesting ring), but explores case studies of sticky ideas (why some stick, but others don’t) and provides a basic six principle (SUCESs) guide to making your own ideas sticky.
Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and Stories. Using these six principles you can make your idea “understandable, memorable, and effective in changing thought or behaviour”.
Of course Dan and Chip do make one thing clear and that is that – some ideas a never going to stick. But if your idea is fundamentally a good one then utilising their six step process you can help make it sticky.
Made to Stick by Dan and Chip Heath
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