6 Traits to Make Your Ideas Thrive: Made to Stick

If you care about raising mediation’s profile in the public, then “stickiness” and a new book on the topic are right up your alley.

You’ve seen sticky ideas, well illustrated by urban legends like these: The infamous kidney-theft hoax. The bear virus email, which a number of well-intentioned friends and colleagues have sent me. Or the one I was asked about far too many times in my years as a college dean: The automatic 4.0.

Now, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die explores the idea of “stickiness” in depth and offers an informative, humorous and compelling journey through six key traits that make an idea sticky. Brothers Chip and Dan Heath make the case that ideas that thrive have these in common:

1. Simplicity: Focusing on the true core of your idea.
2. Unexpectedness: Creating surprise, violating people’s expectations.
3. Concreteness: Explaining your idea in sensory terms.
4. Credibility: Finding ways to build believability into your idea or the way you talk about it.
5. Emotional: Making our audience feel something.
6. Stories: Telling stories that get people to act on your idea.

This list alone, while interesting, doesn’t begin to tap the richness of examples and information in the book. I sat down to start the book on the morning of our last Nor’easter of the winter (hopefully), and couldn’t put it down. I was entertained, made to think, and finished with pages of notes to put into action.

Now that’s a good read in my book and I highly recommend Made to Stick if ADR practice-building, marketing, or growing the mediation field is on your mind. For a bit more on the book, listen to this HBR IdeaCast audio of an interview with author Chip Heath.

Copyright © 2007 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.