Made to Stick

Springboard. Denning defines a springboard story as a story that lets
people see how an existing problem might change. Springboard sto-
ries tell people about possibilities.
One major advantage of springboard stories is that they combat
skepticism and create buy-in. Denning says that the idea of telling
stories initially violated his intuition. He had always believed in the
value of being direct, and he worried that stories were too ambiguous,
too peripheral, too anecdotal. He thought, “Why not spell out the
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message directly? Why go to the trouble and difficulty of trying to
elicit the listener’s thinking indirectly, when it would be so much sim-
pler if I come straight out in an abstract directive? Why not hit the lis-
teners between the eyes?”
The problem is that when you hit listeners between the eyes they
respond by fighting back. The way you deliver a message to them is a
cue to how they should react. If you make an argument, you’re im-
plicitly asking them to evaluate your argument—judge it, debate it,
criticize it—and then argue back, at least in their minds. But with a
story, Denning argues, you engage the audience—you are involving
people with the idea, asking them to participate with you.
Denning talks about engaging the “little voice inside the head,”
the voice that would normally debate the speaker’s points. “The con-
ventional view of communication is to ignore the little voice inside
the head and hope it stays quiet and that the message will somehow
get through,” Denning says. But he has a different recommendation:
“Don’t ignore the little voice. . . . Instead, work in harmony with it.
Engage it by giving it something to do. Tell a story in a way that elic-
its a second story from the little voice.”
In addition to creating buy-in, springboard stories mobilize people
to act. Stories focus people on potential solutions. Telling stories with
visible goals and barriers shifts the audience into a problem-solving
mode. Clearly, the amount of “problem-solving” we do varies across
stories. We don’t watch Titanic and start brainstorming about im-
proved iceberg-spotting systems. But we do empathize with the main
characters and start cheering them on when they confront their prob-
lems: “Look out behind you!” “Tell him off now!” “Don’t open that
door!”
But springboard stories go beyond having us problem-solve for the
main character. A springboard story helps us problem-solve for our-
selves. A springboard story is an exercise in mass customization—
each audience member uses the story as a springboard to slightly
different destinations.
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After Denning told the Zambia story, one of the executives at the
meeting took the idea of knowledge management to the president of
the World Bank, arguing that it was the future of the organization.
Denning was invited to present his ideas to the bank’s top leaders, in-
cluding the president. By the end of the year, the president had an-
nounced that knowledge management was one of the bank’s top
priorities.
T h e   C o n f e r e n c e   S t o r y b o o k
We started the chapter with the nurse story, which comes from the re-
searcher Gary Klein. Klein tells another story that provides a good
summary of the ground we’ve covered.
The organizer of a conference once asked Klein’s firm to sum up
the results of a conference. The organizer wanted a useful summary
of the conference—more compact than a transcript and more coher-
ent than an idiosyncratic collection of the presenters’ PowerPoint
slides.
Klein’s firm assigned one person to monitor each of the confer-
ence’s five parallel tracks. The monitors attended each panel, and
each time someone told a story they jotted it down. At the end of the
conference, the monitors compared notes and found that, as Klein
said, they had compiled a set of stories that were “funny, and tragic,
and exciting.” The group structured and organized the stories and
sent the packet to the conference organizer.
She was ecstatic. She found the packet much more vivid and use-
ful than the typical conference takeaway: a set of dry, jargon-filled ab-
stracts. She even requested funds from her organization to convert
the notes into a book. Meanwhile, as a courtesy, she sent the sum-
mary notes to all of the conference presenters.
They were furious. They were insulted to have the stories scooped
out of their overall structure—they didn’t want to be remembered as
people who told a bunch of stories and anecdotes. They felt that
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they’d invested countless hours into distilling their experiences into a
series of recommendations. Indeed, their abstracts—which had been
submitted to the conference organizers—were filled with tidbits of
wisdom, such as “Keep the lines of communication open” and
“Don’t wait too long when problems are building up.”
Klein said, “We want to explain to them how meaningless these
slogans are in contrast to stories, such as the one that showed how
they had kept the lines of communication open during a difficult in-
cident in which a plant was shut down.” But the presenters were
adamant, and the project was abandoned.
This story is one of our favorites in the book, because the dynam-
ics are so clear. We’re not trying to portray the presenters as bad, idea-
hating people. Put yourself in their shoes. You’ve created this
amazing presentation, summarizing years of your work, and your
goal is to help people master a complex structure that you’ve spent
years constructing. You’ve erected an amazing intellectual edifice!
Then Klein’s crew approaches your edifice, plucks a few bricks out of
the wall, and tries to pass them off as the sum of all your labors. The
nerve!
The problem, of course, is that it’s impossible to transfer an edifice
in a ninety-minute presentation. The best you can do is convey some
building blocks. But you can’t pluck building blocks from the roof,
which is exactly what you’re doing with a recommendation like
“Keep the lines of communication open.”
Suppose you’re a manager at Nordstrom, addressing a conference
of your peers. The final slide in your presentation might read,
“Lessons from Nordstrom: In retail, outstanding customer service is a
key source of competitive advantage.” While discussing your fourth
slide you might have mentioned, as a humorous aside, the Nordie
who gift-wrapped a present bought at Macy’s. These jokers from
Klein’s firm want to keep your gift-wrapping story but drop your
punch line. And they’re absolutely right.
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In the “Simple” and “Unexpected” chapters, we said that good
messages must move from common sense to uncommon sense. In
contrast, there’s nothing but common sense in recommendations
such as “Keep the lines of communication open” and “Don’t wait too
long when problems are building up.” (Klein comments that these
lessons are presumably designed for people who would rather close
lines of communication and sit around when they’re facing a daunt-
ing problem.)
Once again, the Curse of Knowledge has bewitched these presen-
ters. When they share their lessons—“Keep the lines of communica-
tion open”—they’re hearing a song, filled with passion and emotion,
inside their heads. They’re remembering the experiences that taught
them those lessons—the struggles, the political battles, the missteps,
the pain. They are tapping. But they forget that the audience can’t
hear the same tune they hear.
Stories can almost single-handedly defeat the Curse of Knowl-
edge. In fact, they naturally embody most of the SUCCESs frame-
work. Stories are almost always Concrete. Most of them have
Emotional and Unexpected elements. The hardest part of using sto-
ries effectively is making sure that they’re Simple—that they reflect
your core message. It’s not enough to tell a great story; the story has to
reflect your agenda. You don’t want a general lining up his troops be-
fore battle to tell a Connection plot story.
Stories have the amazing dual power to simulate and to inspire.
And most of the time we don’t even have to use much creativity to
harness these powers—we just need to be ready to spot the good ones
that life generates every day.
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E P I L O G U E
W H AT   S T I C K S
S
ometimes ideas stick despite our best efforts to stop them. In
1946, Leo Durocher was the coach of the Dodgers. His club
was leading the National League, while the team’s traditional
archrival, the New York Giants, was languishing in the bottom of the
standings.
During a game between the Dodgers and the Giants, Durocher
was mocking the Giants in front of a group of sportswriters. One of
the sportswriters teased Durocher, “Why don’t you be a nice guy for a
change?” Durocher pointed at the Giants’ dugout and said, “Nice
guys! Look over there. Do you know a nicer guy than [Giants’ man-
ager] Mel Ott? Or any of the other Giants? Why, they’re the nicest
guys in the world! And where are they? In seventh place!”
As recounted by Ralph Keyes in his book on misquotations, Nice