I went to a panel discussion last night. A professor — with vast public-speaking experience — gave a long boring introduction. “If only he had read Made to Stick!” I thought. The panelists were better but I wished they too had read Made to Stick.
MTS, by Chip Heath, a Stanford business professor, and Dan Heath, a corporate education consultant, tries to say what makes messages more or less memorable. They boil it down to six qualities. To be remembered, your message should be: 1. Simple. 2. Unexpected. 3. Concrete. 4. Credible. 5. Emotional. 6. Told with stories.
They complain that speakers and writers often “bury the lede” — fail to start with the most important compelling stuff. Well, their best story is buried in the middle of the book. Early in his class, Chip Heath has several students give brief talks. The class grades them. Ten minutes later everyone is asked what they remember from the talks. Hardly anything is remembered. The graded quality of the talk doesn’t matter: The “better” talks are remembered just as poorly as the “worse” talks. What is remembered are stories. But hardly anyone tells a story.
In other words, Stanford business students — and by extension the rest of us — don’t know how to give a good talk and don’t recognize a good talk when we hear one. We don’t know — and don’t know we don’t know. I agree. Our collective ignorance is enshrined in bad advice: Start your talk with a joke, for instance. MTS never says anything like that. It says: Start with a story.
Addendum: Seth Godin demonstrates.