This is part of a multi-article series on the book Made to Stick.

Herb Kelleher, the longest-serving CEO of Southwest, once told someone, “I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are THE low-fare airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can.”¹

Getting people to understand your ideas

When you share an idea, you’re really trying to get people to do five things:

1. Pay attention
2. Understand
3. Agree
4. Care
5. Take action

Ideas that stick - ideas that people understand - are simple.

Imagine you worked at Southwest Airlines. Would you remember what your corporate mission was? Can you say the same thing about your organization’s mission?

It’s not about dumbing down your message. It’s about finding the core.

Decision Paralysis

Imagine for a moment that you’re in college. It’s a Thursday night, and you have two choices for how to spend your night:

1. Attend a lecture by an author you admire who is visiting just for the evening, or…
2. Go the library to study.

Not a hard choice, right? When this choice was given to actual college students, only 21 percent chose to study.²

Now imagine that you’re instead offered three choices:

1. Attend the lecture.
2. Go to the library and study.
3. Watch a movie that you’ve been wanting to see.

Does your answer change? When a different group of students were given the three choices, 40 percent chose to study - double the number who did before!

Giving people two good alternatives instead of one actually increases the likelihood they’ll stay home and study! This is a condition known as “decision paralysis.”

This is why finding a core message is so important. It helps people avoid bad choices by reminding them of what’s important.

Finding Your Core

The core of your idea should be both compact and meaningful.

A good core helps people remember what’s important. “We are THE low-fare airline,” is compact and meaningful. “Goats like sprouts,” is compact, but it has no meaning.

A bird in hand…

Think of the core of your idea as a proverb.

You may be familiar with the expression, “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” This proverb is a warning against giving up a sure thing for something uncertain. This expression isn’t unique to the English language.

In Sweden they say, “Rather one bird in hand than ten in the woods. In Spain they say, “a bird in the hand is better than a hundred flying birds. In Poland, it’s, ” A sparrow in your hand is better than a pigeon on the roof. In Russia, they say, “Better a mouse in the hand than a crane in the sky.”

Remarkably, this expression has been around in one form or another for over 2,500 years. That’s a sticky idea!³

What has made this proverb so enduring? It’s simple and meaningful.

How do you use this idea?

Of all the ideas in Made to Stick, I think simplicity may be the easiest to start implementing today.

Before you go to write a corporate email, or create a presentation, or tell a new employee about the organizational mission, identify the core.

Find the one thing you want people to remember. Help them remember what’s important. Find your proverb.

To learn more about Made to Stick, check out the introduction article. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be talking about two more principles from the book: Unexpectedness and Concreteness.

Buy Made to Stick

Photos by Chelsea Oakes and Matt Reinbold. Affiliate links contained in this post.

Footnotes

1. Made to Stick, p. 29, as told by James Carville and Paul Begala ?
2. Made to Stick, p. 36 ?
3. Made to Stick, p. 47 ?