4.3
SUCCESs
Six properties — simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, story — shared by ideas that survive being retold.
Chip & Dan Heath, Made to Stick (2007)
What it does
Six properties of an idea that sticks: simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, story. A fast comb for filtering and sharpening ideas.
When it breaks
An evaluation tool posing as a generation tool. Chase all six at once and you achieve none.
Case
The Heaths open with CSPI's 1994 popcorn study, where an abstract “37 grams of saturated fat” was recast as more than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries, and a steak dinner combined. Trade reporting put the fallout at roughly a 50% drop in movie popcorn sales — journalistic, not peer-reviewed.
Roger Ebert — the weighty truth about movie popcorn ↗Diagram — not yet drawn
One abstract statistic on the left, the same fact rebuilt as a concrete comparison on the right, with only the properties that changed labelled.
In the wild
Unvetted · not part of the tier assessment
What has been written about this tool in the last twelve months. Machine-retrieved and unchecked — everything above this line was checked.
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