Made to Stick

Here's a book every designer should read. It helps you to go past aesthetics to make your (or your client's) message stick. By “stick,” the authors mean that your ideas are understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact — they change your audience’s opinions or behavior. This is not to say that every communication should be 'sticky'. As Chip and Dan Heath say: “At this point, it’s worth asking why you’d need to make your ideas stick. After all, the vast majority of our daily communication doesn’t require stickiness. “Pass the gravy” doesn’t have to be memorable.”

After reading ‘The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference‘ by Malcolm Gladwell two brothers Chip Heath (a Stanford Business school professor) and Dan Heath (a corporate education consultant at Duke) were inspired by Gladwell’s top selling book. After extensive research they found that the ideas that ’stick’ all share the following six principles (with a chapter dedicated to each principle):

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY - Find the core of your idea.
This is done by finding what is the essential part of your message to the target audience. Think what their stakes are. Ask yourself what motivates them, ask yourself what part of your message will capture their attention. A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.” To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize.

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS - Stand out of the noise.
How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? Get peoples attention. Attract it. Hold it. How? Through surprise. Break people’s ‘guessing machine’ and then repair it. We need to be counterintuitive. Here's an example from the US FDA: "A bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whole day’s worth of MacDonald's" It makes you wonder why, doesn't it? Well, both have the same amount of hydrogenated fat!
But surprise doesn’t last. For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. “The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern. Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns. Figure out what are the unexpected implications of your core message.

PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS - Make your ideas actionable.
Make your idea like Velcro. Hook them through concreteness. We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions — they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images — ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors — because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience. “Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in very different ways. Concreteness helps us avoid these problems.” Make sure that your message contains a concrete call to action. And make the action as easy as possible with opening times, maps, everything.

PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY - Help people believe.
Honesty and trustworthiness should be glorified. Use authorities and anti-authorities. Vivid details boost credibility. If possible, use statistics that generate a human context. “How do we get people to believe our ideas? We’ve got to find a source of credibility to draw on. A person’s knowledge of details is often a good proxy for her expertise. Think of how a history buff can quickly establish her credibility by telling an interesting Civil War anecdote. But concrete details don’t just lend credibility to the authorities who provide them; they lend credibility to the idea itself.”

PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS - Make people care.
Associate ideas with emotions that already exist in others. Bridge the emotional gap between your idea (that they don’t care about - yet) with something they already are emotional or care about. Place emphasis on benefits! Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness. For instance, it’s difficult to get teenagers to quit smoking by instilling in them a fear of the consequences, but it’s easier to get them to quit by tapping into their resentment of the duplicity of Big Tobacco. “How can we make people care about our ideas? We get them to take off their Analytical Hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities-not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be.”

PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES - Build the shared mythology.
Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively. Get people to act. Use stories as stimulation (tell people how to act). Use stories as inspiration (give people energy to act). “A story is powerful because it provides the context missing from abstract prose. This is the role that stories play-putting knowledge into a framework that is more lifelike, more true to our day-to-day existence. Stories are almost always CONCRETE. Most of them have EMOTIONAL and UNEXPECTED elements. The hardest part of using stories effectively is make sure they’re SIMPLE-that they reflect your core message. It’s not enough to tell a great story; the story has to reflect your agenda.”

If this gets you interested, I really suggest you read book. It's many examples help you make the book's ideas stick. My conclusion: making an idea stick is an essential part of creating critical mass for change, so I'll work on using the principles in my design practice.

Correction vs. evaluation

My Tai Chi teacher says: "Don't correct your foot once you put it down. It's the only way to learn to put down your foot correctly at once."
My sketching teacher used to say: "Don't correct wrong lines, sketch lightly and clarify with color. In the end you will learn to put down a line correctly at once."
My saxophone teacher used to say: "Don't stop playing when you go wrong. The band is not waiting for you."
Benjamin Zander says: "Don't wince when you make a mistake. Smile! And say: How interesting!"

Would there be a larger truth here about learning and creativity? It's better to evaluate afterwards than correct all the time...

Design quotes

I heard some nice one-liners on the last conference I went to.

"Mass Communications has become so expensive that design is a much better priced alternative." - If design is used as a tool to communicate, and not as a sauce. Design in this sentence means design thinking. Unusually simple solutions with talk value.

"It's faulty if a door handle needs to have a push or pull label. [It should be self explanatory]" - Oscar Peña, head of Philips Design. Mr. Peña called great designers 'translators' since they translate an idea into shape and material. They express the product identity in material qualities. And the best translators, translate ideas so powerful, they change society.

"I know I've designed an icon when I don't get the discussion about marketing etc. when launching the product," said Erik Tjepkema. I guess all designers wish they'd design icons all the time... Erik went on to compare design to Jazz (it's a similarity I've seen before). He didn't go into details but I think there are comparable concepts.
song theme = brand&identity
improvising = assocaiation, creating new outings
groove = ambiance
scales/chords = input, brainstorm methods, aesthetic rules of thumb

Erwin van Lun said "Brands love to build relations with people, but if you ask them people don't want relations with brands!" Still he demonstrated that relation building is an automatic process whether we want it or not. People build relations wih aibo dogs, electrical dinosaurs, tamagochis and their iphone. The core of a relation is relevant responses. If you have to explain your name address and occupation time and time again: no relation. If you are recognised, treated as a person and get relevant reactions, responses in your own language, a relation starts to build. With all the emotions that go with it. This is a double edged sword since those relevant answers should be accompanied by enough trust or you get the Orwellian Big Brother feeling.
His presentation is online for download...

Jean-Pierre Raes started off with a small statistic in the room: "Where did you have your latest brilliant idea?" Nobody mentioned the office. :D He went on talking about the creation of new new business going from Insight to Idea to Plan to Business. The hard part is getting relevant insights, you can do research for that or talk a lot to your friends about what they run into. I believe the best insights come from people solving their own problems like the people at 37signals or someone with a Seth Godin-style otaku. If you need to do research, qualitative and observative is best in my opinion. Statistics aren't usually very inspiring. Although a friend of mine who recently discovered pivot tables and used that to ask questions to a huge dataset said the opposite was true.
Jean-Pierre's own personal insight was that many people have a lot of ideas, but they fail at writing and implementing a healthy business plan. He set up his own company to help them.

Erik Kessels showed some work with a lot of humor and great communication power. I should book a night at citizen M at Schiphol, the pictures look great. He collects peculiar photo albums from flea markets. They contain really funny stories and some great amateur photography. He explained how he looked for funny details, authenticity and the man in the street for inspiration. To illustrate that he showed for years of ad campaigns for the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel and some really funny videos. My favorites are these: Goal! and Rugby.

H&M had a pretty monotonous presentation about their history, way of working and all the great names they worked with. To find out what they are experimenting with, check out their concept stores at Collection of Style.

All in all this was some good inspiration again.

If everything seems under control...

"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough." Although Andretti was a successful Formula 1 and Indycar pilot, the same holds true for organizing a design practice and playing jazz music.

Purple Cow

Many of my friends were talking about it, I had noticed many of them as successful innovation, and now I finally read it: the Purple Cow by Seth Godin.
The book hammers down one key point: just good doesn't cut it anymore. A product can't be sold by advertising. It should sell itself by being remarkable. Or as Mr. Schurman of Herman Miller says: "The best design solves complex problems but if you can weld that to the cool factor you have a home run."
Simply put: Safe is Risky and Very good is boring. I you design something that appeals to the general public you won't be able to sell it, since they are very good at ignoring you. You have to target the lead user, the niche, the people craving for the new, the better and the remarkable. The sneezers who start spreading the virus, who can create critical mass.
The good thing is that not many people will try to launch purple cows, so the playing field is all open. In good times, they say: "Safe is good enough." In bad times: "Let's play it safe in these bad times." We should take a break to produce a classic. Sit there don't just do anything. Marketing departments want to justify themselves.

So what I will implement in my design practice is this:
- I will devise a process or service to help clients find lead users
- I will use purple cow examples to convince clients to divert money from advertising budgets to the design budget, because it will be the better investment.
- Purple Cow questions are nice triggers in brainstorms: "How do we make this idea so remarkable it gets on the news? On leading blogs? How do we make this idea collectible? What would happen if we told the truth, like McDonalds France?"
- In my design practice we also have ambassadors, people who love our work. I'll invite them for brief sessions in strategic meetings and give them my home number if they're on to some business...
- Since remarkable products come from otaku's (some kind of deep fascination) I will be more alert on them and the people who have them, so I can call them for advice. I'll start with finding out all about the otakus of my collegues.
- I'll invite a couple of marketeer guest speakers to introduce our designers to the marketing practice.
- I'll set up a product or service teaching our clients 'design thinking' or visual thinking. It should help them identify better opportunities and it will help them to work creatively with the identities and websites we design.
- We also need a smart way to do research, since focus groups are a waste. How can we release prototypes to the interested public? How can we find them? How can we create an incentive to talk back to us? A point saving system?

Working at Warp Speed

I remembered Barry Flicker’s ‘Working at Warp speed’. Sadly only +after+ the deadline of the last stressful project. I have to stick his four core ideas on the wall again.
- “We’re in this together.” Stress in the team leads to adversarial positions. Before I slip into the uncreative defensive mode, I have to remind myself of this. Some ‘Aikido in everyday life’ can help me with this. It helps me to keep centered and creative even under repetitive verbal attacks from stressed out colleagues.
- “Slow down before you turn.” I have to make sure to be inclusive when taking the project trough a major curb into a different direction. Turning to fast leads to a lot of confusion. Also in review meetings I need to stay better focused, take time to take a step back. Otherwise things get sloppy. Would it help to change the music from hard rock to relaxing, to influence my state of mind? It is what Norman suggests in ‘Emotional Design’…
- “Am -I- the best one to do this?” I got pretty good at delegating the right stuff, but I have to coach the others.
- “Take time to plan.” I really appreciate those short daily kick-off meetings! Much better than diving right in. But again we didn’t plan in user and consumer feedback. This can be so powerful, but always gets crushed in the rush of tight deadlines.

Barry Flicker didn’t give any ideas on how to break away from old solutions and doing something really sexy when working at warp speed. I have to find a way get this in the process…

Large group interventions

Barbara Bunker & Billie Alban propose a method for organizational change involving at least half the organization in the analysis and planning process. The underlying idea is that this kind of change is more sustainable than the traditional vision, cascaded down trough the organization, because the vision will be created and endorsed by the whole. This usually is a 2 to 3 day event where the whole large group gets together and works in subteams on creating a new future. Since today organizations are very dependent on their environment, it is highly recommended to invite also core suppliers and clients to this kind of events. Work is done in small groups with rotating timekeepers, recorders, facilitator and reporters.

Typical parts of such conferences are:
- Scan/analysis of the environment
- Overview of the history. This creates a common basis.
- Analysis of the current process/situation (value stream mapping). A dump of most common tasks then ordered chronologically.
- Discuss prouds&sorries or glads, sads & mads.
- Defining a most desirable system/discovering common futures
- Action planning, where people can choose to work towards the goals/on issues that interest them most.


As formula for effective change Gleicher uses C = D x V x F > R. The will to change (C) is influenced by the dissatisfaction (D), a clear shared vision (V), and clear (F)irst steps to be taken. It should be larger than the (R)esitance to change.

Overall one should consider the fact that in large groups the speaking time per person is the length of the meeting divided by the number of participants. It’s usually not much so you need creative ways to work around this. Also the amount of structure to workshop is a careful balance. Too little structure creates anxiety and unfocused work, and too much structure can be limiting creativity and working on unexpected priorities.

In a way it reminds me a bit of Gladwell’s tipping point: these tools allow you to create a tipping point for organizational change.

Finance on 5 business cards

I got myself a copy of "Beleggen voor dummies" (Investment for Dummies). Good book. But it's main points can also be read on this website. They are not connected - I guess it's general financial wisdom. Why didn't anybody tell us that at school or something?