Making your messages `stickier`

Managing organizational change is a crucial skill for behavioral healthcare executives. Organizations have to turn on a dime to keep pace with new demands. Yet attempts at change often stall because of executives' inability to build a sense of urgency and the necessary commitment.

Michael A. Roberto and Lynne C. Levesque have described the four most important processes that must occur for an organization to make a strategic initiative “stick”:

• Charting: The organization defines the initiative's purpose and scope, setting boundaries and defining team members' roles and responsibilities.

• Learning: This is the process of piloting the initiative and entails experimenting and refining ideas before full-scale implementation.

• Mobilizing: Symbols, metaphors, and stories are used to engage participants' hearts and minds to build commitment.

• Realigning: Change is institutionalized through the establishment of a formal structure (measurement, monitoring, and compensation systems).1

All these steps are essential, but mobilizing often presents the most difficulty because it requires a skill set not usually formally taught. As a behavioral healthcare executive, much of your time is spent attempting to influence the behavior of other people—a classic definition of leadership. You have to influence and motivate not only employees, but also consumers, board members, politicians, bureaucrats, and members of the public.

In an ideal world, mobilizing would be a straightforward, collaborative process. Having been presented with the facts, everyone simply and easily would agree to behave in certain ways. Follow-through could be taken for granted. The reality, of course, is quite different. Just getting everyone to attend to the issue is problematic enough. Retaining the information and actually acting upon it are even further downstream.

For example, despite repeated trainings staff may not remember what procedures to follow. Even with intensive education, board members may not be able to discriminate critical issues from trivial ones. And despite your best advocacy and marketing efforts, government officials and the public may not see the importance of your organization's services.

What, then, are the best ways to get your messages to “stick”?

Stickiness

My memory isn't all that it used to be. Out of all the speeches I've heard in my life, I can consciously dredge up only a few isolated quotes from JFK, FDR, and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as the image of Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe on the table at the United Nations and saying, “We will bury you!” However, with little effort I can recite entire commercial messages from the past (“Where's the beef?” or “A little dab'll do ya”), and a 45-year-old Ricky Nelson song can easily reverberate in my head all day long.

So why do some messages survive the marketplace of ideas and “stick” solidly, while others are as ephemeral as the morning dew? In The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, journalist Malcolm Gladwell discusses the “stickiness factor,” the way that information can be structured so that it is contagious, memorable, or just plain “sticky.”2 Unfortunately, it is not the quality or veracity of an idea, concept, or product that makes it sticky, but rather its presentation. Packaged in the right way, within the right context, some information can be virtually irresistible.

In their 2007 book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, brothers Chip and Dan Heath flesh out the concept of “stickiness” and investigate why some ideas thrive while others just bounce off our consciousness.3 Chip Heath is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford, and Dan Heath is an educational consultant at Duke Corporate Education. From different perspectives they have concluded that “sticky” messages are the real drivers of such behaviors as following procedures, purchasing products, supporting issues, or even donating to causes.

The Heaths explain that humans have developed sophisticated mental filters that allow only certain types of information to penetrate and stick. Since we constantly are bombarded with stimulation, we easily could become overwhelmed without this adaptive capacity. The Heaths carefully studied urban legends and other examples of naturally occurring “stickiness,” as well as the manufactured stickiness from successful advertising and political campaigns, to arrive at those features that allow certain ideas to defeat our internal censors. From this they formulated six basic principles that govern the stickiness of an idea.

Simplicity. First, ideas need to be simple enough to be communicated easily. The Heaths say that a convoluted message generally leads to confusion and the activation of our filters. Many leaders, especially those with an intellectual bent, fall short on this score and present much too nuanced messages. Compare Adlai Stevenson's speeches with Ronald Reagan's or George W. Bush's with John Kerry's. The so-called “curse of knowledge” figures prominently here.4 The Heaths note that too much knowledge about a subject can impair a person's ability to present it in a clear and concise manner.

Behavioral healthcare leaders who know all the subtle intricacies of an issue often are unable to restrain themselves from overcomplicating their messages with unnecessary elaborations. At some point the message dissolves into background noise. With too much marginal content, there can be no strong figure or ground effect, so nothing is ever prominent enough to stick. Although many behavioral healthcare issues are highly complex, to communicate effectively we still must keep it simple. As Mark Twain reputedly said, “If I had more time, I would have written less.” Consider the following mission statements:

• Less sticky: Our mission is to improve the quality of life for residents of our community by providing a comprehensive and effective continuum of behavioral healthcare and substance abuse treatment and prevention.

• More sticky: We're here to help!

Unexpectedness. The Heaths point out that sticky messages tend to be unpredictable. Such messages can be shocking or humorous—both features that enhance overall stickiness. This principle is related to the way many people have learned to study since childhood. When trying to remember a large body of information, most people ignore the familiar and focus on the surprisingly novel—things they don't know or couldn't easily conclude. From the psychology of learning, the classic Von Restorff Effect predicts that people recall, with little effort, unique aspects of information, while disregarding the rest. Figure 1 illustrates the unexpectedness principle by presenting an image that does not conform with our standard stereotypes about people who drink.

Figure 1. An example of unexpectedness

Credibility. The Heaths note that enduring messages come from highly credible sources. The source of a sticky message must be seen as authoritative and truthful. Such credibility may stem from a variety of sources including charisma, education, standing, or experience. People also may enhance the credibility of their messages by identifying them with some high-status institution, such as a university or government agency, or celebrity. Most of the dubious e-mail offers I receive try to boost their believability by referring to important-sounding government or corporate entities such as the “Nigerian Ministry of Oil” or the “Royal Bank of England.”

The Heaths also suggest that a single powerful example can prove a point and thus establish credibility. They call this the “Sinatra Test,” named in honor of Frank Sinatra's assertion that “If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.”

Consider how the second message below seems to give the provider organization more credibility:

• Less sticky: The Johnson Center is one of the premier rehabilitation facilities in the United States. With outcome effectiveness in the 95% range, it is the center of choice for professional athletes with behavioral health or addiction problems.

• More sticky: Over the past five years the Johnson Center has provided quality behavioral health rehabilitation services to players from the Cleveland Cavaliers, Indians, and Browns.

Concreteness. The Heaths say an idea is stickier when associated with something concrete, especially strong visual images such as Khrushchev's shoe pounding. Emory University researchers recently developed what they call “neuro-marketing” techniques, employing MRI scanners to determine which advertising images best activate or “light up” areas of the brain related to arousal.

The Heaths' principles overlap, in that the inclusion of concrete details greatly increases a message's credibility. Conventional wisdom holds that “They wouldn't have remembered that specific of a fact if it weren't true.” Storytellers and novelists often sprinkle in brand names, historical figures, and familiar places to add realism to their fictional creations. Exploiting a powerful concrete image of a frying egg, The Partnership for a Drug-Free America captured the nation's imagination in 1987 with their controversial advertising campaign (“This is your brain on drugs”) to discourage substance abuse. Figure 2 shows the use of a concrete image to help demonstrate the feasibility of implementing new performance standards.

Figure 2. An example of concreteness

Emotionally evocative. The Heaths say that being able to elicit strong emotion is another factor closely associated with message resiliency. Does the message evoke significant fear, anger, sympathy, disgust, or self-interest? Those that do have a greater impact and significantly better shelf life.

Figure 3 shows a creative Ad Council advertisement used to communicate the ongoing problems of hurricane survivors by evoking an emotional response. It also evokes the successful Keep America Beautiful Campaign of 1971, which showed actor Iron Eyes Cody portraying a Native American standing in a littered area with a tear in his eye.

Figure 3. An example of emotionally evocative

Storytelling. The Heaths point out that the most robust messages generally can be easily summarized in a story. People are hardwired to learn from narratives. From Jesus' parables to Chicken Soup for the Soul, narratives are among the most effective teaching and communication tools. Their power in transmitting information and their long-lasting effects are amazing.

Unfortunately, a negative sticky story can persist for decades. Many years ago a county sheriff complained to me about a minor but “sticky” incident involving transporting a patient. I later found out that this event took place more than 15 years ago, but the story lived on. I heard it repeated many times, as if it had happened yesterday.

Below you can see how a narrative makes a message stickier:

• Less sticky: The vast majority of people with schizophrenia can now be treated successfully outside of the hospital setting. They can be very good workers and lead productive lives.

• More sticky: David is diagnosed with schizophrenia. He works three days a week at a local bookstore waiting on customers and inventorying books. David has his own apartment, an active social life, and is proud of his job and his ability to take charge of his own recovery. He performs like all the other employees and came to this job through a collaboration between the business and a supported employment program.

Final Thoughts

Consider applying the Heaths' six principles to make your communications “stickier.” It just might help you become a more effective leader. And I suggest that you try to incorporate artwork and graphics wherever possible to make your messages stand out—and be stickier—in our message-saturated world.

Terry L. Stawar, EdD, is President and CEO of LifeSpring, Inc., a community mental health center serving six counties in southern Indiana. He has been active in community mental health for more than 30 years. Dr. Stawar is the author of How to Be a Responsible Father: A Workbook for Offenders, published by the American Correctional Association. He also writes a weekly column for the Jeffersonville Evening News and New Albany Tribune. Dr. Stawar can be reached at tstawar@lifespr.com.

References

1. Roberto MA, Levesque LC. The art of making change initiatives stick. MIT Sloan Management Review 2005; 46 (4): 53–60.
2. Gladwell M. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Boston:Little, Brown and Company; 2000.
3. Heath C, Heath D. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. New York:Random House; 2007.
4. Heath C, Heath D. The curse of knowledge. Harvard Business Review 2006;(Dec).
5. Based on data from Krug EG, Kresnow M, Peddicord JP, et al. Suicide after natural disasters. N Engl J Med 1998; 338 (6): 373–8.