SUCCESS Model

From SandboxWiki

SUCCESS Model - for making ideas stick. Six principles outlined by Chip and Dan Heath in their book Made To Stick.

For an idea to stick, for it to be useful and lasting, it's got to make the audience:

1. Pay attention (needs to be unexpected)
2. Understand and remember it (needs to be concrete)
3. Agree/Believe (needs to be credible)
4. Care (needs to be emotional)
5. Be able to act on it (needs to tell a story)

Source: Made To Stick

• S - Simplicity
• U - Unexpectedness
• C - Concreteness
• C - Credibility
• E - Emotions
• S - Stories

1. Simplicity

Finding the core and expressing it in the form of a compact idea, can be enduringly powerful.

The essential core of our ideas. Saying something short is not the mission - sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: A one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.

Simple ideas = short sentences (compact) drawn from long experience (core). We are right to be skeptical of sound bites, because lots are empty and misleading - they're compact without being core. But the Simple we're chasing isn't a sound bite, it's a proverb: compact and core.

There are two steps in making your ideas sticky - Step 1 is to find the core, and Step 2 is to translate the core using the SUCCESs checklist. That's it.

Find the Core What is the "Commander's Intent (CI)? The crisp, plain talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plans' goal, the desired end-stated of an operation.

CI manages to align behavior at all levels without requiring play-by-play instruction. When people know the desired destination, they're free to improvise as needed, in arriving there.

Two questions...

• If we do nothing else (during tomorrow's mission) we must...
• The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is...

To get to the core

Inverted Pyramid After the lead, information is presented in decreasing order of importance. The inverted pyramid is great for readers. No matter what the reader's attention span... the inverted pyramid maximizes the information gleaned.

Prioritization Suppose you can telegraph only one thing, what would it be? There's only one lead, and there's only one core. You must choose.

Prioritization rescues people from the quicksand of decision angst, and that's why finding the core is so valuable.

Finding the core isn't the same as communicating the core. Top management can know what the priorities are but be completely ineffective in sharing and achieving those priorities.

2. Unexpectedness

Unexpectedness, in the service of core principles, can have surprising longevity.

Violate people's expectations. Be counterintuitive. Generate interest and curiosity. We can engage people's curiosity over a long period of time by systematically "opening gaps" in their knowledge - and filling those gaps.

Curiosity comes from gaps in our knowledge - Curiosity happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge... We need to open gaps before we close them. We can post a question or puzzle that confronts people with a gap in their knowledge.

What information do I need to convey? What questions do I want my audience to ask?

The way to get people to care is to provide context - Give people enough context... so they'd start to care. But then they've got more of an abyss than a gap. In that case, you have to fill enough knowledge to make the abyss into a gap.

Set the context and give people enough backstory that they start to care about the gaps in their knowledge.

Here's what you know. Now here's what you're missing.

This method of communication resembles flirting more than lecturing.

3.Concrete

to be continued...