Coffee with my friend Lesley Moffatt is always stimulating. Last year she recommended this excellent book: Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. I have been suggesting it to anyone who asks about audience engagement.
Made to Stick
The authors are brothers. Chip is a Stanford professor who researched and taught what made ideas stick. Dan worked in the field of educational publishing and thus need to find out what makes great teachers great. They realised they had both been focused on the same question: Why do some ideas succeed while others fail?
The result of their work is their book ‘Made to Stick’ and the ideas are enormously useful for presenting as well as many other fields. They have a blog at: Heath Brothers
They pin down six key principles of ’stickability’ and every single one is relevant to making your presentation engaging:
- Simplicity: We need ideas that are simple but also profound – this is why the Tui ‘Yeah Right’ ads caught on so well.
- Unexpectedness: We need to generate interest and curiosity: The Air New Zealand body paint ads are a case in point!
- Concreteness:Ideas need to be conveyed in very concrete terms so they mean the same thing to everyone. The concreteness gives us a hook to hang the ideas on. Years ago I was very thrilled that my son’s general knowledge when I discovered he knew the capitals of nearly all the states in the US. It was only later I realised that actually he knew all the ones that had good basketball teams, but none of the others! The concrete fact of basketball enabled him to easily memorise the city names.
- Credibility: People must believe the idea. Sticky ideas are credible, but people don’t like lots of facts. Something that appeals to our idea of common sense seems to work well, even if it is wrong! Fears about the risks of vaccination fall into this category.
- Emotions: We must get people to care about our ideas.Obama’s presidential nomination speech tapped into an emotional surge of hope with the famous lines: ‘Yes we can!’
- Stories: We need to get people to act on our ideas. Stories get us prepared to respond quickly and effectively. Stories are a major source of motivation for people in every walk of life. Stories can do 1-5 above as well as #6!
By the way, if you are on a school board, Lesley Moffatt provides excellent training and consultation for people working on school and other community boards. She has a blog at: Onboard with Lesley Moffatt
