Made to Stick

Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Chip Heath & Dan Heath

How exactly does this book tie to the veterinary field, you may ask? I’ll ask you a question in return: How frustrating is it when you spend a very long time discussing and educating a client on an aspect of their pet’s care, only to have to repeat that entire conversation the next time you see them? Or how hard is it to implement a change in your hospital and get the staff on board and following through with the change? Not because they are intentionally resisting, but because it just slips their mind in the moment. 

This book is an excellent guide to hone your communication skills in delivering new concepts more efficiently and effectively. The applications are greatly widespread! Giving a lecture at your local member association? Educating clients? Working with interns, residents, staff? Trying to get your kids to put their backpacks away? There’s useful information in this book for all those applications!  

Let me make this a bit more specific and aggravate us all. Why the h.e. double hockey sticks has the idea spread far and wide that grain free diets are “better” for pets? We sure as h.e. double hockey sticks didn’t spread that idea! And why won’t the idea that it may actually be harmful spread as robustly and permanently?! I’ll use this very specific, very frustrating example to go through the principles these authors propose. 

They define six principles that help make an idea “sticky”. In other words, it integrates and is absorbed best when some or all of these principles are applied. 

1. Simplicity: A simple idea that is easily understood will adhere much better than a complex, intricate idea! Grain-free: this concept was already integrated fairly deeply in the public knowledge bank with the trend of gluten free hitting the health-conscious community. Grain-free becomes a simple extension of that. Taurine deficiencies? Unless you have a higher education, or a deep drive to self-educate, most people won’t remember this factoid beyond the here and now conversation! 

2. Unexpectedness: “Whoa! Look! I can be as diligent with my Fifi’s food as I am with mine! Cerulean Native Cow has made a diet grain-free, without any fillers! It never occurred to me that I might be poisoning my pet just by loving and caring for them!” (Disclaimer- if you are not in the veterinary profession, the previous example is full of misinformation and advertising ploys that are entirely unfounded and untruthful, though largely believed by the general public. Don’t say these to your vet. They will collapse to the floor with a frustration induced seizure.) Advertisers have “empowered” our clients, by “educating” with a deep dark secret we have been keeping from them! (Disclaimer- this is also extremely untrue and deeply hurts our feelings and makes us feel wholly untrusted.) We have only just started to gain a foothold in the debate because of an unexpected and shocking publication by the FDA, issuing a warning regarding concern that grain-free diets may induce a lethal disease in dogs. Only by using our enemy’s tactics have we gained our client’s attention! 

3. Concreteness: Which would you remember better at the dinner party where gossip naturally turns to comparing how much more each party goer loves and invests in their dogs: “Grain is horrible for our dogs! They are wolves, really, if you think about it!” versus “Actually, domestic canids are omnivores, which a distinctly different nutritional requirement from wolves, adapted to living alongside us for thousands of years. They do in fact require a higher carbohydrate content, which can best and most efficiently be provided with grains.” One of you is popular at the dinner table and succeeds in having your gossip carried forward to more dinner parties, and one of you is the nerd, who quickly finds yourself alone, petting the host’s cat, while the conversation quickly turns to more exciting subject matter. For the majority of people (and even those of us with a dubious sense of excellent dinner conversation topics), visions of wolves gorging on bloody deer carcasses stimulates our mind significantly more than visions of a pedantic professor standing at the front of a sleeping class. Humans generally assimilate material best with sensory associations, rather than abstract ideas. 

4. Credibility: That CEO of a small, boutique pet food company that has spent a career formulating and generating the optimized balance of food ingredients has solicited credibility because he communicates well. Sadly, those that speak with authority, whether earned or not, are often assumed credible. The person that speaks confidently and passionately, and actually is willing to speak for 2-3 hours on this subject matter is more easily viewed as credible, than the individual with 8 years of education in the subject matter that merely says, “Because I told you so.” People pick up on your discomfort, uncertainty, or dislike of a subject matter. They are turning to those that will spend untold hours speaking about it, and those that confirm their pre-existing ideas about that matter. Veterinarians have been discredited in this subject by those accusing us of financially benefiting from our dietary recommendations. Veterinarians have neglected to effectively demonstrate that much of false information out there is generated by people that actually directly financially benefit from this misinformation! Again, I’ll point to the foothold we have gained- where a highly credible source (FDA) confirmed our concerns. Think of every piece of information given as having a weight attached to it and being placed on the weighted scale of the brain. The more credible the source, the more the scale tips toward that piece of information. The more dubious the source (as deemed by brain), the less the scale tips. Which are you going to pick to keep? Why, the heavier chunk of gold, of course! 

5. Emotions: “Our breeder put into the contract the types of food that were acceptable for Fifi! It is also worded so they could take Fifi back if we feed something else!” Our clients are being terrorized, guilted, and shamed right alongside being miseducated. As frustrating as the whole situation is, we do need to recognize what a horrible battle they are in the midst of! It is wholly unfair that their emotions are being played like a fiddle in the battle for their money. And you know why they are starting to ask questions about the FDA’s report? Fear, guilt, shame. Same story, different day. Emotions are enormously powerful in assimilating and retaining information. Even if you choose not to wield this weapon as a tactic for communicating, it is very wise to recognize when you are battling it trying to correct misinformation!

6. Stories: “But Fifi’s breeder said that one client that fed Evil Entity food had their dog die at 3 years old from bloat! But none of her other clients fed that food, and none of them have lost their dogs! I could never live with myself if I lost Fifi just because I was cheap and fed the bad food!” That is going to be much more memorable to a client than a free packet of puppy food and a couple verbal recommendations at their first puppy exam, isn’t it?! Never underestimate the power of a story! In fact, what does most of the history you take from your client consist of? The story of their dog! Stories are the brain’s way of making a concrete structure of details, dressed up in emotion! Double whammy! Our competitors are outstanding story-tellers. 

Do you remember the last social get-together you had with a bunch of people in the veterinary community? What do you remember about it? I’ll bet it was the story(ies) we swapped about the most bizarre (unexpected), case that your colleague referred, which the surgeon (credibility) had never seen before, and sent a picture, {shared with all people eating, of course (concreteness)}, of the gallon of pus removed from the left kidney! We actually do have these skills, and we wield them well! Let’s stop limiting them to our social lives and start honing them in our professional lives! 
What’s your favorite analogy (concreteness) to use when explaining something to a client?! Share below!