Dear Friends and Colleagues:

For the last newsletter of 2023 David and I thought we would change things up a bit and highlight a book that both of us love and often refer to. It is Made to Stick by Dan and Chip Heath. Together they wrote a book that helps us think about why some ideas just stay around -- whether they are right or wrong. Take a look, we both think you will learn a lot from this short overview. And if you like it enough, remember to buy from a local bookstore if you can!

I also wanted to tell you to save the dates for our April 3-4, 2024 joint conference with MATSA. This will be even better than last year if that is possible. Also if you are interested in campus sexual misconduct, then please save the date for our campus conference on June 12, 2024.

Finally, we are almost at our fundraising goal, but we are still a little short of the $10,000 we hoped to raise. This pays for our BIPOC fellowship, scholarships to our conferences and many other intangibles that we try to offer throughout the year. If you enjoy our newsletter, if you have ever asked for a copy of an original article, or you just appreciate the work of MASOC, please consider giving a donation today. You can do that through our website, through PayPal, or you can go old school and send us a check. We would deeply appreciate your support of $5, $50 or $500 this year!

As always, thank you for your own good work as well as your continued interest and support of MASOC.

Warmly

Joan Tabachnick

Executive Director

PS If you want a copy of the original article please let us know that too.

DECEMBER 2023 MASOC NEWSLETTER

By Joan Tabachnick and David Prescott

Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Some Die

BOTTOM LINE

It is possible to make a truly worthwhile idea circulate as effectively as a great urban myth (e.g., strangers placing razor blades in applies on Halloween – or sex offenders luring kids into their houses).

RESEARCH

Chip Heath and Dan Heath have written an incredibly readable book that explains why some ideas stick – they coined the idea of “stickiness”. Many of us struggle with how to communicate our ideas effectively, whether it is with a client, our community, or with family around the dinner table. The Heath brothers have simplified this process down to six key principles: 

1.     Simplicity: This is not a sound bite, but more of a proverb. It should be both simple and profound (e.g., the Golden Rule). 

2.     Unexpectedness: To grab our audience’s attention and for an idea to endure we must generate interest and curiosity. We do this by opening gape in our audience’s knowledge and then systematically filling those gaps. 

3.     Concreteness: Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images – razor blades and apples, a baby seat left on top of a car – our brains are wired to remember concrete data. 

4.     Credibility:  If there is not a credible spokesperson, we must find ways for people to test the ideas for themselves. A “try before you buy” approach to ideas. 

5.     Emotions:  By making people feel something you can get them to care about our ideas. For example, we are more likely to give to a needy child than to an entire region of the world.     

6.     Stories: Stories draw us in and often can help us feel another perspective. And simply hearing a story, helps us to prepare us for those situations and also prepares us to respond more quickly and effectively. 

The best way to convey these six principles (yes, they also spell out SUCCESs) is with a simple example. They suggest taking almost any nonprofit or for profit mission statement and run it by these six principles. Most likely, it will fail. They use the example of John F Kennedy’s 1962 famous call to “Put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade.” The statement is simple, unexpected, concrete, credible (given he was the president of the USA), emotional and a story in miniature. Contrast this simple statement with what most CEOs or nonprofit executives might say: “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives.” Cleary JFK’s approach is both brilliant and engaging and motivated millions of people over that next decade. 

Why doesn’t everyone do this? The problem is the “Curse of Knowledge.” If we are questioned, we often want to resort to data and statistics. However, listeners are not swayed to change their minds by more facts. They will change if you talk about your journey, what you have seen, and what moves you. What clinicians see every day with the kids you work with are not the stories in the news, social media, or in our daily conversations. 

IMPLICATIONS FOR PROFESSIONALS

Professionals working to end sexual abuse are often very familiar with their information – assessment findings, treatment reports, letters to policymakers, court testimony – going unheard, not respected, or misunderstood. Organizations such as MASOC and ATSA have provided plenary and keynote addresses at their conference on the importance of getting our communication skills right.

Just as importantly, we also want our clients in treatment to remember what we say and how we say it. It may be helpful, as we enter the new year, to focus on making our messaging to clients (and their loved ones) stick. Finally, it behooves us all to study how we talk with our clients in order to best get our points across and our voices heard. We all can make a bigger difference when our message is sticky!

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FIELD

When someone asks what you do for a living, it’s probably best not to say that you “treat juvenile sex offenders”. Certainly, your answer is simple and has “unexpectedness”. But it fails in all of the other six principles. MASOC's founder Steve Bengis, spoke regularly about how important it was to talk about our values first. This is especially true when talking with legislators. His answer to the question above was to say, “I work to prevent sexual violence.” That answer is simple, unexpected, and has an emotional quality not often shared when talking about one’s work.  If someone wanted to dive deeper, his answer would first explain why he does this work - to prevent anyone from being a victim of sexual violence. And if the listener was still interested, he would explain that he works with the people that few others want to: the adolescents who cause the sexual harm. He wanted to ensure that these kids don’t ever harm anyone again. With this, response, the legislator or any listener would have heard an answer or an appeal that was: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and told a Story.

We recommend this book highly. Anyone can improve their skills in this!

CITATION:

Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2007). Made to stick: Why some ideas survive and others die. Random House.

REVIEW:

American Library Association Book Review: https://www.ala.org/rt/nmrt/news/footnotes/november2010/book_review_made_to_stick_le