Book Summary: Made to Stick

If you're in the persuasion business, Chip Heath and Dan Heath have done you a great service.

Come to think of it, that includes just about anyone reading this post. As a pastor, most of my job involves persuasion: in the pulpit, in counseling, in staff meetings, issuing a vision/challenge, and so on. But if you're a parent shaping the child(ren) God has given you, or an manager raising the morale of your office, or a teacher in front of a class, or a lawyer in front of a jury, you're in the persuasion business, too.

In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, the Heath brothers explain why persuasion is hard--and how to make it work:

Getting a message across has two stages: the Answer Stage and the Telling Others Stage. In the Answer Stage, you use your expertise to arrive at the idea you want to share. Doctors study for a decade to be capable of giving the Answer. Business managers may deliberate for months to arrive at the Answer.

Here’s the rub: The same factors that worked to your advantage in the Answer Stage will backfire on you during the Telling Others Stage. To get the Answer, you need expertise, but you can’t dissociate expertise from the Curse of Knowledge. You know things that others don’t know, and you can’t remember what it was like not to know those things. So when you get around to sharing the Answer, you’ll tend to communicate as if your audience were you.

They suggest six ways to improve the "stickiness" of your ideas. Turn your idea into a

Simple
Unexpected
Concrete
Credible
Emotional
Story

A nice recap of the book here.