An Introduction to Making Ideas Stick!

Why do some ideas seem to thrive while others die hard? How can we get the ideas we communicate to “stick” with our audience members? According to Chip Heath and Dan Heath, the term “stick” means one’s “ideas are understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact—they change your audience’s opinions or behaviors” (8). In the museum profession, surely one of our most important goals is to create life-long learners; we seek not only to have the ideas, facts, and concepts influence the lives of our visitors but also to cultivate from these different means a lifestyle that upholds the importance of education and serves to motivate the visitor to continue education relentlessly. To accomplish this goal, the influence we have on our visitors must be real; it must exist. Coming to an understanding of what “sticks” for our visitors is the primarily exercise we must activate to achieve this goal.

Many times, it seems as if what hinders museum educators from effectively communicating major ideas to their audiences is not that they do not know how to give context to a certain set of information—to have eye contact, to practice communication methods, etc. The major hindrance is their inability to shape the content of their message into one that stands the test of time, that doesn’t get lost in the mix of other thoughts and concerns, and that creates behavioral changes within the learner. So, how do we shape the content of our ideas to make them incredibly sticky? The premise here is “that if we understood what made ideas naturally sticky we might be better at making our own messages stick” (12).

A key thing to remember throughout this discussion of sticky ideas is that despite the specific qualities that every sticky idea embodies there does not exist one magic formula for creating sticky ideas (12). However, these common traits together form an environment in which stickiness thrives, and they enable the existence of a systematic way to produce creative ideas (aka, they can be learned) (24). The Heath brothers have narrowed these traits to the following six principles (16-19):

Principle 1: Simplicity
How do we find the essential core of our ideas?

Principle 2: Unexpectedness
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?

Principle 3: Concreteness
How do we make our ideas clear?

Principle 4: Credibility
How do we make people believe our ideas?

Principle 5: Emotions
How do we get people to care about our ideas?

Principle 6: Stories
How do we get people to act on our ideas?

Together, these six principles spell out SUCCESs. Read over these questions again. Don’t they mirror exactly what we museum educators have been trying to do for some time now? Don’t we search for the main message we want to convey, strive to understand how to grab and hold on to the attention of our audience, communicate clearly and effectively, impart within our visitors a sense of authenticity, cultivate within our visitors a personal investment in the idea we are selling, and—ULTIMATELY—enable our visitors to act upon the knowledge they have been given? If so, these guidelines set by the Heaths prove immeasurably valuable in the successful development of the stickiness factor within our ideas in order that we may achieve our end goal of creating life-long learners amid our museum visitors.