by Rick Baker
On Sep 16, 2010
When you speak to another person a number of things can happen:
- The message is heard, listened to, understood, remembered, and influences that person’s future action
- The message is heard, listened to, understood, remembered, and ignored
- The message is heard, listened to, understood, and forgotten
- The message is heard, not fully listened to, and not understood
- The message is heard but not listened to
- The message is not heard
I suppose there could be other things but the short list above captures most of things that can happen when you speak to another person [or a group of people].
Of course, you can perform tests to understand where your message ‘sits’ with the other person…but that’s a topic for another day.
When the message is important to you it makes sense to aim for the first result: your message is heard, listened to, understood, remembered, and influences future action by the person or people whom received your message.
How might you increase the likelihood your messages will receive #1 treatment?
According to brothers Chip and Dan Heath, the answer is: you need to make your messages
more sticky.
Here is a summary of how the Heath brothers say you can go about making your ideas stick…
A Process for Making Your Ideas Stickier
- Identify the central message you need to communicate - find the core
- Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message, ie, what are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn't it already happening naturally?
- Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience's guessing machines along the critical counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines. Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. It's your job to help them understand uncommon sense.
I have given quite a bit of thought to item #1. Finding the core – finding the essence - is a common starting point taught by creative-thinking experts. But, again, that’s a topic for another day.
In business,
Making Your Ideas Stickieris something that should be high on your list of priorities because success in communication impacts in all areas of business:
- Employee supervision, management, and relations
- Project team success
- Marketing & Sales
- R&D
- Every other aspect of business
More about Sticky Ideas and Messages in future thought posts…