Making your message stick

By Robin Crumby, Managing Director, Melcrum

How do you make your message stick?

The answer it seems is to: keep it simple, credible, unexpected and, perhaps most importantly, tap into the schema (or frame of reference) of the intended recipient.

Or so says the book that everyone's talking about: Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. After a succession of speakers at both the SCM Summit in Chicago and London referenced it, and an extended stay at Heathrow terminal 4 scouring the best-seller list, I thought it was high time I found out what all the fuss was about.

The killer passage for me (so far, I’m only half-way) is actually taken from Stephen Covey's 'The 8th Habit' and describes a poll of 23,000 employees drawn from a number of companies and industries, that should resonate with communicators:

• Only 37 percent said that they have a clear understanding of what their organization is trying to achieve and why
• Only one in five was enthusiastic about their team's and their organization's goals
• Only one in five said they had a clear 'line of sight' between their tasks and their team's and organization's goals
• Only 15 percent felt that their organization fully enables them to execute key goals
• Only 20 percent fully trusted the organization they work for

As Chip and Dan go on to say: ‘pretty sobering stuff’ and enough to make most executive teams sit up and listen. But what takes these already powerful statistics to the next level is Covey translating them into a context more familiar to the average global exec namely soccer (that’s football to me and you). Just imagine:

‘If, say a soccer team had these same scores, only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 of the 11 would care. Only 2 of the 11 would know what position they play and know exactly what they are supposed to do. And all but 2 players would, in some way, be competing against their own team members rather than the opponent.’

Suddenly those rather dry stats have been transformed into a powerful message: Corporations should operate like teams, but they don’t.

Just imagine: new star executives drafted in from Brazil on fabulous salaries, the new Spanish CEO sacked after ten weeks of poor results, the injuries, the egos, fifty thousand customers lining up each week to cheer your business on, the highs, the lows, the ensuing riots…Nah, it would never work.

Corporations should stick to doing what they do best: corporate speak, jargon and unfathomable statistics. The tried-and-tested building blocks of 'employee engagement' eh?

Made to Stick is rich with anecdotes such as these that illustrate time and again that your message can be made ‘sticky’ in a few oh-so easy steps.

As Mandy Thatcher points out in her review of the same book in the latest issue of SCM, it’s the ‘born or made’, ‘nature or nurture’ argument applied to the effective communication of ideas with a well-earned tip-of-the-hat to Malcolm Gladwell’s equally hyped ‘The Tipping Point’.

Is it worth all the hype? Well, unlike other best-selling business books that take a simple idea and repeat it dozens of times in dozens of different ways, it’s kept my interest for 140-odd pages so far... It's even provided some useful insight into what makes a message truly sticky.

More reviews are available of Made to Stick and other good books for communicators at The Communicators Network.

Enjoy.