I recently finished Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. I would recommend it for both the abundance of well storied examples and for its overall applications.
Bottom line is tell a story, identify stories, and share stories in order to your message to 'stick'. There is definitely a lot more in there than just that, which is precisely why you should read the book.
However, I do have an issue.
Both Dan and Chip (I assume) are familiar with the social science and economic meaning of something that is 'sticky'.
"Sticky, in the social sciences and particularly economics, describes a situation in which a variable is resistant to change."
-Wikipedia
Yet they use the word 'stick' and all its derivations, including 'sticky' to describe allowing someone else to remember the ideas/messages you wish to convey to them. I realize there are similarities in the two definitions, but they are fundamentally two different concepts. The first (economics version) is referring to something that resists change, because it wont go away, like a habit. The second (Heath version) refers to getting something to stick to someone, live velcro.
You would think as economists and social scientists themselves, the Heaths would have chosen a different word in order to bypass confusion.
But I digress.
As I was reading the book I had a bit of an insight into problems and actions to solve those problems.
In the book, the authors use a case from UCLA that shows that simulating past events that resulted in the problem is more helpful than simulating future outcomes that would occur once the problem is solved.
The insight alone is fairly interesting.
And so I tried to graph it, as you can see on the bottom of the left page. On the X- axis is time, with the start being when the problem occurred. The Y-axis is the amount of time/energy put into dreaming about future outcomes and reflecting on past experiences. The dotted line is the reflection on past, while the solid line is dreaming about the future. Where these two lines meet, is the point of action. Before this point more energy is spend dreaming about possibilites rather than solving the problem. Past this point more energy is spent on reflecting on the past.
I presume that the point of action is not actually one point but is rather the starting point for a series of actions that leads to a solution to the problem. I also doubt that these factors are linear, but the general inverse relationship is the idea that I'm trying to get across.
As a dreamer myself, this is an important realization. If there is a problem that needs to be fixed, actively reflecting on the past would be more productive in finding a solution, then dreaming of the future.
Not to say dreaming would be useless. You have to dream.
