Posted on 18/06/2020
Made To Stick
When I was just starting my career as Data Scientist, I thought that if I was bright enough, my ideas would stand on their own merit. So I devoted all my efforts to learn as much as I could about the technical aspect of Data Science: Linear Algebra and Deep Learning, Spark Query Optimization, Bayesian Machine Learning, Causal Inference, Lifetime Values Estimation… In my head, I could do entirely without any communication or interpersonal skills, so long as I could do what was technically “right”. It didn’t took long to see how mistaken I was.
I struggled to make my work integrate with that of the engineers and analyst. Even among other Data Scientist, it was hard to explain why my ideas made sense. Not to mention that no man is an island entire of itself and I couldn’t do everything alone. When I needed help, it was hard to get buy in. That’s essentially how I’ve learned I needed to invest in communication skills.
One afternoon, at the coffee machine, I’ve bumped into the CEO and asked him if he had any recommendation. He suggested that I read Made to Stick. The idea of the book is to go through some basic principle that make a message stick into people’s head. But not only that, it also gives a good mental framework to think about when communicating technical stuff to a broad audience. Is short, this book helps those who want to be well understood and remembered.
The Curse of Knowledge
The greatest challenge in communicating something you know is that you forget that others don’t. As a result, you talk as though others knew what you do, which of course, they don’t. Since one of the main reasons you have to communicate an idea is to share your knowledge with others that don’t yet possess it, it seems tragicomic that we fall into this trap. But that’s precisely what happened. Once we know something, it’s very hard to recreate the state of mind of the listeners that don’t.
To get a sense of how pervasive this phenomena is, try the following experience. Tap on you legs the rhythm to “Happy Birthday to You” and challenge a friend to guess what song are you tapping. You will feel the excruciating pain of singing along in your head while your friend fails miserably at guessing the right song.
This is what the books refers to as The Curse of Knowledge. Everything that comes next is a framework to overcome it. I find that if you could only be mindful of The Curse of Knowledge, you will already improve your communications by a ton. A word of caution here is that this problem is not solved by simply dumbing it down the message. The great challenge is conveying complexity in simple words, not pretending the message is not complex.
Simple or Core
The first and probably most important thing you need to do to make an idea remembered is to make it simple. This does not mean dumbing it down, but rather finding the core of the idea and sticking to it. This is easy to understand, but incredibly challenging to do. First, you get to strip the message down, removing all superfluous elements. But that’s not enough. You also have to remove things that ARE important, but are not THE fundamental part of the idea. Failing this principal is so common that journalist gave it a name: burying the lead. This happens when you let the most essential part of a story appear too late in the text. To fix this, you need to forcly prioritize just what is most important.
As the creator of an idea, you probably know it very well. You appreciate the nuances and the complexity of it, so there is a tendency to gravitate there instead of focusing on the core. You think that you have to trade-off accessibility and accuracy, and as a faithful defender of the truth, you opt for the latter. However, this is a false choice. If your message can’t reach anyone, it just doesn’t matter how accurate it is.
Making a complex idea simple is more of an art than a science, so I can’t actually give you a good example, but I’ll try. I remember when I was trying to convince my parents on the importance of investing. As any good Brazilian, they are worried about inflation, so I was hoping I could use that to present some nice investment strategies. However, I failed miserable, burying the lead and making the message incomprehensible:
“If you are worried about inflation, the best thing you can do is a mixed allocation of bonds and total market index funds, or ETFs. In essence, what you are doing with the ETFs is buying real companies that actively respond to price change. So if the price increases, the value of the companie does too. The bonds, on the other wand, serves as a cushion in case of any market volatility, like a crisis. This prevents you from drawing down your stock when the market is down and realising a loss. Overall, with a very simple allocation, you could expect 3 to 4% annual return after taxes and inflation!”
Trying to correct this message, I think I would go with something like this:
“With very simple investing technique you can avoid inflation and still have your money grow 4% per year after taxes. This means that not only will you keep your money safe from inflation, but investing makes it increase in value. You can think of investments as a way to buy extra income: for every R$ 3000,00 you invest, you will get an extra R$ 10 every month. How cool is that! If you are interested, I can teach you a very simple way on how to do it.” *
Look how in the second statement I brought the lead up to the beginning and removed unnecessary details. I didn’t said why I’m assuming 4% ROI. Nor did I said how to invest. But that’s ok. The purpose here is to first get them excited and to take the first step towards investing. If they do, I can fill in the details latter.
Unexpected
Our brain has evolved over centuries to tune out stuff that don’t change. Think of the hum of a fan that you turned on. It doesn’t take long before you don’t hear it anymore. On the flip side, we are very aware of changes. So the most basic way to have someone’s attention is to break a pattern. But to manage attention correctly, we need to master two components of it. The first is surprise, which grabs people attention. But in order to keep it, we must develop interesting messages. Let’s look at surprise first.
We can argue that surprise was biologically built into us. It serves an evolutionary purpose. Surprise is triggered when our mental schemas of how the world work fails. It prepare us to understand why this happens. It grabs our attention and force us to think, so that we can correct our mental schemas. That’s why unexpected idea can grab attention. They propel us into this thinking mode. It makes us want to solve the question of why we are surprised and it calls for an answer. However, surprise by itself is not enough.
If you’ve ever watched a movie or a TV series with a horrible plot twist you will know what I mean. For example, the last season of Game of Thrones is definitely surprising, but not in a good way. When a surprise breaks your guessing machine it could be two things. Either your mental model is not matched with reality, in which case you respond with attention to fix this, or the surprising message doesn’t make any sense. In this case, you quickly move from a state of surprise to a mixed of disinterest and even anger.
The catch is that surprise have to be post-predictable. It has to make sense once you know the fact. You have to be able to think “Ah, how did I not see that coming! It was obvious!”. In other words, a good surprise is like the plot twist on Sixth Sense Movie. A bad one is like the plot twists on the 7th season of Game of Thrones.
Now that we know how to use surprise to catch people’s attention, let’s see how to keep people’s interest using curiosity. Curiosity arises when there is a gap between what we know and what we don’t know. This is more subtle than it looks. To spark curiosity, we first need to show our listener that they lack the knowledge we can give. Also, it won’t work if we just start throwing unknown facts. Curiosity doesn’t happen if we don’t care about the subject we don’t know. It happens when we know a lot about a subject but there are some pieces we are missing. Detective novels do this brilliantly. It is also why gossip is so popular. We know enough about a person to care, but we still have some pieces missing.
Putting it all together, a good process to make ideas stiker is to 1) find the core of the idea; 2) find what is counterintuitive about it. Why isn’t it happening naturally? Why has no one thought of this before? 3) Communicate it in a way that breaks people guessing machine’s. 4) Once broken, help them fix their their mental schemas by showing why you idea makes sense. There is also a lot of value in sequencing information and not just dumping in all the facts. Present the information in a story like manner that create curiosity to know what comes next.
Concrete
Before talking about concrete ideas, lets go the other way and look at how abstraction can hurt us. Have you ever looked at a job description or career ladder full of corporate lingo and could not understand one bit what was expected of you? Here is what I mean: “We are looking for high performing Data Scientist to join our team. We value a solid track record of accomplishments, a keen sense of ownership and the ability to work in a fast paced and unstructured work environment”.
If you are a recruiter, you feel that the above sentence is fine. That’s because experts in a subject matter deal with higher level abstraction. They see the general principle that manifest itself in the world through a myriad of concrete phenomena. The non expert, on the other hand, crave for concreteness and examples. Here is the same job posting as above, but a little bit more understandable:
“We are looking for Data Scientists to join our team. We want to hear all the impressive work that you’ve done in the past. Even better if you have a portfolio, send it to us. We are growing super fast, so expect working on one thing one month and something completely different in the next. There won’t be a boss to tell you what to do, so you’ll have to figure out problems and solve them on your own”.
Abstraction not only is harder to understand, it can also be confusing. Different people can understand “ownership” differently. In this sense, making a message concrete is not dumbing it down. It’s finding a common language that everyone can use. While finding the core of a message is painful and making it unexpected can require a lot of creativity, making a message concrete is surprisingly easy. The only problem is that we often forget about it.
Credible
In order for people to remember our ideas, they have to believe in them. They have to trust that they are true. Some credibility aspect of the idea has more to do with who conveys it that with the message itself. For example, we trust in experts about a subject. It’s one thing to have Mr. NextCubicle DebtyPants telling you to invest in exotic investment tied to water. It’s another if Michael Burry is the one making the recommendation. We also trust celebrities, or people that we want to be like. Finally, more than anything, we trust our friends. Despite the expertise, you don’t tend to believe the dermatologist trying to sell you some soap in a commercial. However, if your friend tells you that this soap is really good, there is a good chance you will buy it. Unfortunately, rarely is the case where we are some of those credibility bearing figures. More often than not, our ideas have to stand on their own merits. So, how can we find credibility? besides, telling the truth, of course.
One effective way is to use concrete details. For example, which one of those stories is more credible? “It wasn’t me, officer. I couldn’t be at home at that time because I got a flat tire on my way.” “It wasn’t me, officer. I’ve left the office at 18 sharp, but in the way home, I got a flat tire somewhere around Park Avenue.”
Concrete details makes and ideas tangible. They feel more real and believable. Another way of getting credibility is by using statistics. Although not impossible, it much harder to lie with statistics that without them. Data enforces some boundaries and verifiability, so it’s natural that they provide credibility. But statistics tend to move us in the abstract direction. So, to make statistics engaging, we can use some of the same principals that make an idea concrete. Statistics by themselves are not very meaningful. It’s much better to make a relationship claim with them. For example, which one of the following sentence is more impressive? “Imagine throwing a rock from the sun to the earth and and hitting the target with one third of a mile from the dead center. This is how accurate we are.” “Imagine throwing a rock from New York to Los Angeles and hitting the target with two thirds of an inch from the dead center. This is how accurate we are.”
Both accuracy are the same, but the second seems much more impressive. That’s because we can’t reason much about the distance of the earth to the sun. The distance from LA to New York is much more tangible. Also, one third of a mile is not that impressive. Statistics always have to be put in perspective and in a perspective that we can grasp.
Emotional
When we think analytically, we hinder our ability to feel and slow down our response and willingness to act. Charities figured this out long ago. You are much more likely to donate for a single hungry child than to alleviate African Poverty. In this sense, making your message emotional compels people to act in response of it.
The good news is that your ideas don’t have to bring people to tears. Ir order to make people care about your message, you have to associate it with something that they already care. Of course, this brings challenges of its own. For example, what do people care about? One simple answer is to appeal to self interest. People care about themselves. This is surprisingly obvious, but it’s also forgotten all the time. That’s why self-help book sell by the tons. Theys title evoke self-interest by the thousands: “How to Make Friends and Influence People”, “Lead the Field”, “Pitch Anything”. When you have self interest on your side, use it.
Of course that self-interest is a little bit more subtle than that. When we talk about self interest, we usually think in terms of money, influence and security, but that is a little too narrow. Of course people want to feel safe and want to have their financial need met, but, besides that, here are some other stuff that people care about: Belonging: Love, friendship and affection. A sense of community. Learning: a sense of growth and mental engagement. A desire to fulfill one’s potential. Transcendence: helping others realise their potential. Aesthetic: symmetry, order and beauty. Philosophy of life: Sorting out one’s existential questions. Having a clear spiritual path.
In short, to make people care “we get them to take off their Analytical Hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities—not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be”
Stories
If credibility makes us believe and emotions make us care, a story make us act. When we hear a story, we put ourselves in place of those living it. It’s not as good as actually living the fact, but is the next best thing. A story is also powerful because it provides a visible and concrete example of our message. They put knowledge into a framework that its more lifelike and more relatable. They can also build on emotion.
For example, it’s one thing to know the math behind investment and retirement. You know that if you save 5% of your income it will take about 60 years for you to retire and if you save 15%, about 40 years. It’s a complete different thing to read the story of Jeremy and Winnie, from Go Curry Cracker!. How they managed to go to work without a car, make their own food, live in a small apartment for ten years and then retire to a life of international traveling. Somehow this is more appealing than saying you should save 70% of your income.
But what are the elements of a great story to convey your message? Well, in a sense, they are what we’ve already seen. The story is easy to understand. It has a core line of though: save 70% of your income for 10 years and retire to a fulfilling and adventurous life. Don’t go trying to James Joyce the cr@p out of your story, or you will lose the audience. A good story is also unexpected: so are you saying I only have to work 10 years?!. It’s concrete. Go Curry Cracker! doesn’t just say you should be frugal. They give specific actionable tips: live close to work, don’t eat outside. They have a bread recipe that will cut your bread costs by 1/4. A good story is credible: math show that you can retire early by not being a endless consumer and Jeremy and Winnie actually did it and write about how they’ve done it. It’s also emotional: you can feel the jolt of energy that hits you when you read someone biked and walked to work for 10 years to finally get the life of their dreams.
Now, I recognize that it’s hard to make a good story, but, as a storyteller, your job is much more to spot them than to create them out of thin air. To find a good story, look for some common plots that appear everywhere. The first is the Challenger Plot, where the protagonist overcomes a great challenge. This is the classic David and Goliath story. It also has variations like the Underdog Story, the Rags-to-Riches Stories and the Triumph of Willpower Storie. Challenger plot don’t have to be grandiose and dramatic to be inspiring. Someone’s perseverance to lose weight, a thriving in a new culture or a long distance relationship that finally ends in marriage will do. Challenger plot are so powerful because they make us work harder, take new challenges and overcome obstacles. They jolt us to action.
Another common theme in stories is the Connection Plot. It tells a story of people who develop a relationship that bridges a gap. It’s the Romeo and Juliet, the Pocahontas or the Titanic stories. They inspire us in a social way. While Challenger Plot make us want to kick-start a new, challenging project, Connection plot make us want to help others. Finally, there is the Creativity Plot. They are the Sherlock Holmes style stories that involves a mental breakthrough. They show how the solving of a problem in a creative and innovative way. This stories make us want to to thing different, to create and experiment with new approaches.
Reference
All ideas here are from the book Made to Stick, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
* Now, a little disclaimer. I’m not qualified to give anyone investment advice, so you shouldn’t take it from me. But if you do want some advice, please go check J. L. Collins Stock Series: https://jlcollinsnh.com/stock-series/.
