Dan Heath - Made to Stick

Dan has just delivered the best presentation at the conference so far. Short lightshighs below:

Urban Legends

Many urban legend stick in our minds and can be almost impossible to remove from conscience. Examples; The Great Wall of China is visible from the moon, humans only use 10% of their brain cells, and that MacDonald for many years fought an urban legend in Brazil that they put earthworms in the big mac to save money. Even though MacDonalds publicly proclaimed that making a burger with earth worms would cost more money and therefore not economically viable. The urban legends are a sticky idea which Dan scanned many of and discovered a pattern that touches on a few overall terms: simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and urban legends are often told as a story.

The mayor of Bogota

The mayor of Bogota, a newly elected math and philosophy professor, had no previous political experience but therefore did things a little differently. Bogota had a water shortage so the mayor created an infomercial with me self showering and turning off the water then applying soap. After 2 months the city of Bogota had reduced the water consumption by 15 %. Another problem the new mayor solved in untraditional ways was the fact that many women felt scared to go out at night. The mayor’s solution was a women night out only, so 700.000 women utilized this opportunity to go out with no men in sight and felt safe. The insight from Bogota is that new ideas come from the edges of glue because once it becomes sticky changes is almost impossible.

Concrete, not abstract

Communication is about being concrete and Dan had the courage to present snippets from attendee’s website where he found most to be painted with the same corporate rhetoric of abstract language that says nothing about the company and their services. And its language like improved value creation, strategic foresights decision marking models, user-driven experience interactions. Dan pushed the idea of a language that is concrete and to the point. His example was Flemish Science Center Technopolis: "Have you always wanted to put an airplane on the ground, sleep on a bed of nails, stand in the middle of a soap bubble or ride a bike 5 meters above the ground?"

link