I was really intrigued by this reading in "Made to Stick". It was all about making things and ideas stick by making them simple. And by simple, Heath & Heath did not mean "dumbing things down". Simple means stripping ideas to their bare core, where it won't survive if anything else is taken away from it, but it can survive without anything extra tacked on to it.
The chapter starts by referring to the military chain of command. Piecing together a step-by-step, move-by-move, tactical plan never works. You can plan and prepare down to the smallest detail, but you can't predict the future; when things don't go "as planned", military personnel do not know what to do because the event is not fitting into the pre-constructed strategy. Instead, one must simplify from plan, and strip it down to the simplest idea that needs to be accomplished, H & H call it "intent". This way, if and when things don't pan out as planned, the military soldiers know the general goal, or intent, and can react accordingly.
The next example used in the book is about Southwest Airlines. What is so different about the way their company works that makes it more successful than other airlines? Simplification. They have one intent: to be the lowest airline out there. This is a basic goal that guides all other actions. Any decision that may come up that will alter their intent is disregarded easily and immediately because all of the workers have one goal in mind-- instead of having to balance a detailed plan of business.
It is not about dumbing down, it is about finding the core idea. I tried to do this with my video project of the social media site Habbo.com. Yes, there are a ton of intricate things you can do on the site like play games, build rooms, complete quests, the list goes on and on. I did not include any of those things in my video. Why? Because I wanted to get straight to the point: the site's main purpose and how a company can manipulate it to benefit them. There was no need to go into all the little, minute "nuts and bolts" of the site, because that just bogs it down. Keeping things simple gets points of cross; complicate things, and you will lose everyone's attention, maybe even including yours.
I liked the Southwest Airline example in the book. The book made the point of addressing that simplification can be a powerful tool in providing taglines for others to find. South Airline's uses "We are THE lost cost airline," so employees know what the airline is all about and make decisions based on it.
ReplyDeleteI was looking at a Chipotle coupon to day and noticed that they had modified the fine print "this is the fine print, why are you reading this?" Chipotle does this with a lot of their marketing stuff, such as bags and cups. But to do it in the fine print of a coupon where most companies would be worried about legal jargon surprised me. It make me wander what simple company slogan their pass around to let employees know this is okay to do because it sets up the image they want to produce.