Chapter 7: What Sticks

Here are some important ideas to think about in relation to the 6 principles of sticky ideas described in previous posts:

1) Your audience gets a vote: Remember that when creating sticky ideas your audience always has a say. What you intend might not come to fruition. Your audience might alter your message. One thing to always keep in your mind is whether or not your audience’s alterations to your message are still core. As the Heaths say, “Ultimately, the test of our success as idea creators isn’t whether people mimic our exact words; it’s whether we achieve our goals” (240).

2) Spot creative ideas: “If you’re a great spotter, you’ll always trump a great creator. Why? Because the world will always produce more great ideas than any single individual, even the most creative one” (242).

3) In order to make your ideas stick in a useful and long-term fashion, you need to make your audience:

a. Pay Attention (Unexpected)
b. Understand and Remember It (Concrete)
c. Agree/Believe (Credible)
d. Care (Emotional)
e. Be Able to Do It (Stories)

This framework perfectly lines up with the SUCCESs framework described throughout this blog. Notice the absence of Simple; it is necessary throughout the entire process (relating to core message).

To conclude my comments on Made to Stick, I want to briefly summarize the importance of the ideas presented here in terms of what we do in museum education.

1) Simple: Ultimately, our messages need to be tied to our institution’s mission statement, as well as departmental goals. Everything that we communicate needs to have purpose on both a large and small scale. Activities shouldn’t be done just to fill space, but, rather, they should be crafted so that our visitors experience a reinforcement of the ideas presented within our institutions.

2) Unexpected: We cannot expect our visitors to enjoy themselves if we do not challenge them in some capacity; boredom breeds indifference. One way of achieving this is to surprise our visitors with unexpected content, activities, and ways to participate in the creation of meaning within their experience.

3) Concrete: We need to provide hooks from which people can latch themselves onto the content we are presenting. The more entrances we provide by clearing away abstraction (museum/academic jargon, etc.) the more our information will be made accessible to our audiences.

4) Credible: Out of all of the principles, I feel this one in particular should be the easiest for us as museum professionals to implement. We need to be accurate in our presentation of information so as to maintain our reputation as places of authority and truth.

5) Emotional: We have the responsibility of making our audience care for the things we are teaching. We simply cannot know that emotional connections have the power to transform the learning patterns of our visitors. We seek out that which we care for, and because of this museum staff must capitalize on their ability to stir the emotional core of their audience.

6) Stories: More expansive than just stories, we must present a logical sequence of information to our visitors that gives them a sense of excitement and adventure. The number of opportunities to motivate individuals to action is incalculable. Motivation breeds action, which in the end I would say is one of the biggest goals of museum education—to get people to act (continue to learn, be advocates, conquer an obstacle, explore new terrain, etc.)

All of these principles mentioned above are highly valuable to us as museum professionals, but it must be remembered that the ability to find these traits in existing ideas is just as important as creating sticky ideas themselves. Sometimes creativity is really a form of investigation.