I’ve been spending some time with what I think is a pretty important book. It’s important if you teach or preach or do fund raising or blog or do anything else that depends on the communication of a message.
The book is Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
The Heath brothers have put together an entertaining, informative, and persuasive handbook about how to make our ideas sticky. If you’ve read The Tipping Point, then you recognize the stickiness lingo from Gladwell.
A lot of what they say is common sense, but it’s not common practice. In fact, it can be quite a challenge to make our messages sticky. Why is that? Because of what they call “The Curse of Knowledge.”
Here’s how they define it: Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.
The Curse of Knowledge is real a challenge to anyone who loves an idea or field of study so deeply that they’ve immersed themselves in it. Their love for the idea and the knowledge that comes from that love will make it very difficult to communicate it to other people.
Ever noticed how difficult it is for scholars with multiple degrees to clearly communicate their ideas to people outside their field of study? They can’t help but give too much background information and too many qualifications to what they’re about to say. Their presentation is usually too nuanced. They may cover all the bases and they may cover their rears, but they don’t communicate anything that sticks with the audience. They haven’t been able to bridge the gap between what they know and what we don’t know. The most important part of their message gets lost in the chasm between us. That’s the curse of knowledge.
You see this all the time in preachers and Bible teachers who have gone to seminary and graduate school. I pity the church that calls a pastor just out of seminary to come and preach to them. He or she has been cursed with knowledge and that makes for some pretty incomprehensible sermons. I know because I’ve preached plenty of them.
The Heath’s description of the Curse of Knowledge made me shudder as I thought back to all the times I had tried to communicate too much information in language too technical to ever be heard and retained by anyone other than myself and my old college professors. I’m not sure I even understand all the stuff I’ve tried to teach others, but I liked how smart it made me look.
Most of the book is about the six keys to making our ideas sticky. I’ll outline those in the next post.
Technorati Tags: made to stick
Telling Stories, Asking Questions, Learning Lessons
In his Introductory to “Reflections on the Psalms,” C.S. Lewis writes:
“…I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself… It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can. When you took the problem to the master, as we all remember, he was very likely to explain what you understood already, to add a great deal of information which you didn’t want, and say nothing at all about the thing that was puzzling you… the fellow pupil can help more than the master, because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met is so long ago that he has forgotten. He sees the whole subject, by now, in such a different light that he cannot conceive what is really troubling the pupil; he sees a dozen other difficulties which ought to be troubling him but aren’t.”
I re-read this recently, and in light of your post thought it was fitting…
Like Lewis and so many others, I have struggled with both sides of this – when I have played the part of the student and the part of the teacher.
Thanks,
J
Thanks for the recommendation. I think I read Tipping Point on your recommendation and it was excellent.
I enjoyed the book also. Found it on Kem Meyer’s page http://www.kemmeyer.typepad.com
I think people’s needs drive what people pay attention to and what they block out.
We notice what will benefit us and we really like people who are interested in meeting out needs…
It’s pretty amazing how quickly we make judgments about information coming toward us and the messenger. It’s also amazing how quickly we tune out what we think we’ve already heard and already made a judgment about.
For instance – if Jeff Jenkins has ever commented on this page and you read something you didn’t agree with – then you have to regear your mind to hear anything else I have to say because your first judgment was “he’s aloof!”
However – if you didn’t need to hear anything about this subject – AND didn’t want to read what Jeff Jenkins had to say, then you’re no longer reading what I’m writing anyway.
The “Curse of Knowledge” is so true. One of my first lessons to the high schoolers in my new youth group at my first youth ministry job was almost laughable. A detailed study of grace, using Paul’s diatribe (yes I tried to explain diatribe) in Romans.
I lost them so thoroughly that I ended up tossing the whole lesson and acting out a story to explain grace instead.
I tell a lot of stories now.