Successful Communication Skills: Made To Stick

Made To Stick is a guide that provides you with the tools for successful communication. Chip and Dan Heath use their Principles of SUCCESs as a guide to teach users the principles. Make the audience: Pay attention, Understand and remember it, Agree/Believe, Care and Be able to act on it. In the creative style in which this piece was written I will attempt to summarize its principles while trying to avoiding the dreaded “Curse of Knowledge”. Make the audience pay attention! According to “The Essential 20: Twenty Components of an Excellent Health Care Team” the attention span may be as short as 8 seconds. Imagine losing focus during the time it takes to tie one of your shoes. When you are trying to train your staff, communicate a
point with a co-worker or speak to an audience you must make the audience pay attention. You must know your core and relate to your audience in an unexpected way. Make your audience understand and remember. Chip and Dan describes this as the easiest to embrace. I feel understand their feelings, but I think this was one of the hardest yet simplest principles. It takes work to make your audience understand, not everyone the time to conduct the Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes experiment to get our point across. However, when trying to get our audiences to understand and remember.
The third and fourth principles go hand and hand, Agree/Believe and Care. The idea must be believable and emotionally appealing. Keeping in mind the emotions can be positive, negative, or anything that arouses a person’s psyche. Lastly, the audience must be able to act on the idea. Getting an audience intrigued is nothing without a cause. It can be for a charitable cause, advertisement for sales, or informational warnings.