Quantum Computers You Don’t Care About: Lessons from Made to Stick
Book review on Chip and Dan Heath’s, Made to Stick.
Welcome to another book review.
Today we’re taking a look at a beautiful book by the Chip and Dan Heath, on how to transform our mundane ideas into sticky, memorable ones.
As a product manager, I find myself constantly going back and forth between user stories and development road maps, that are ultimately brought to life by teams of people with ideas, beliefs and opinions.
This book offers quite an actionable framework to improve the way we pass down our ideas to our teams so that we can create an environment where our vision of the future is both explicit and clear, hence facilitating team work and elevating output.
Without further ado, let’s go.
PROBLEM: “The more you know, the harder it is to communicate your ideas effectively”
What? How come? This makes no sense. If you know “a lot”, naturally you can teach others… because well… you know a lot.
Nope.
The Curse of Knowledge prevents us from seeing the world from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know what we already know.
“Abstraction is the luxury of the expert”
Novices perceive concrete details as concrete details. Experts perceive concrete details as symbols of patterns, insights that they’ve learned through experience. They see on a higher level of insight, so naturally they want to talk in a higher level.
This ultimately results in an inability to communicate the essence of an idea in a way that’s memorable. And all this does is bore people to death as they listen to us.
Quantum Computers You Don’t Care About
Last year, I helped a colleague prepare his poster presentation for an academic symposium on Quantum Computing. Yeah, talking about the Curse of Knowledge.
To give the situation a little bit of context, my colleague is Japanese, deeply technical and he’s currently learning English but, without much chances of practicing conversation often, his speaking skills are rather limited.
So this guy was presenting his results on the use of Machine Learning for Quantum Communication Protocols.
Just for fun, this is the name of his paper:
“Automatic Quantum Circuit Generator by Genetic Programming and Three-qubit Superdense Coding to Transmit Three Classical Bit Codes"
Yeah, I was perplexed too.
The challenge was tough.
We were not only struggling to find the essence of a complex and highly technical message (the research findings), we were also trying to overcome a language barrier.
At that time we worked based on our intuition and on the overarching fact that, the more we listened to my colleague’s presentation, the less we cared about his “conclusion” and the more disengaged we got with his entire presentation.
It was bad.
We resorted to trying things that seemed coherent and rational, such as distilling the conclusion into a more compact, concrete idea.
We also tried to focus a little bit more on the benefit that his research could bring.
We turned critical asking why after why
Why should a regular guy like me give a damn about his work? How can my life could be affected by it? What new kinds of technologies could be created if his research had more funding?
Unfortunately, we were unable to make his idea compelling enough.
I was sure that during my colleague’s presentation almost everyone would be either sleeping or deeply engaged on their phones.
Now, while I read Made to Stick, I couldn’t help but think all along about this experience, so this is what I would have done at that point, had I had the Heath brother’s book at hand.
Remaking it Sticky
The books presents a framework that is fairly straightforward and there is no rocket science in any of the steps. In fact the book unfolds it quite organically.
The logic of the book is as follows:
- Problem: We suck at communicating.
- We are cursed by our own knowledge and, once we know something, we fail to empathize with our audience’s state of mind, so we gush out non-sticky, boring ideas.
- We can tackle the curse of knowledge in two ways: don’t learn anything (not the best choice) or we can transform the way we present our idea (much, much better alternative).
- To transform our idea, we must first find its core.
- Once we have the core, we need to translate it using the SUCCESs checklist into its sticky version.
Finding the Core
We were going in the right direction when we assaulted my colleague with inquires about the motivation behind his research.
What is your intention? I mean, who are you trying to help with this? Why is this piece of research important to begin with? Why should I care?
Telling people to their face that their ideas suck, sucks.
You don’t want them to feel bad, but you do need to shake their paradigms, so that they will wake up from their curse of knowledge.
In journalism jargon, we worked on bringing ‘the lead’ (as in the main idea) back up front: We are one step closer to radically increasing the speed of internet communication.
Yeah, as incredible as it might seem, that was my colleague’s buried lead. Apparently, his research uses a novel approach to communication protocols (imagine the interaction between your phone and your friend’s when you send each other messages on Whatsapp), based on quantum computing and AI, that can potentially multiply x-fold the speed at which the exchange happens. This could enable crazy futuristic things in terms of technology progress, such as virtual experiences a-la Ready Player One.
Now, was that visible at first glance? Of course not. Was that even included in the original conversation? No way. Is this something that (even though not sticky yet) you can at least understand? Sure.
Cool, we did make some progress.
Now we need a way to make this more sticky. Let’s then run it through the SUCCESs checklist.
Make your ideas Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional Stories
(Extracted As Is from the book)
SIMPLE
Make your ideas not necessarily short, but make them conceptually uncomplicated, so that anyone could understand. There’s always an easier way to frame things.
Definitely a challenge for the quantum communication case, since it has tons of highly technical details that make up the story. Yet, replacing much of the scientific content with a more actionable message seems the way to go. So the morale here is: strip down everything that your grandma wouldn’t get.
UNEXPECTED
Take advantage of the mental schemas people have in their minds about certain topics, so that you can add a twist that breaks a pattern.
We can remake the idea’s core (faster internet speed) leveraging on the fact that people are not aware of the kinds of futuristic things that can become a reality just by a radical increase in internet speed. Breaking a pattern here could be crafted in the shape of mentioning a commonly known, truly compelling case of a futuristic technology that seems yet Jetsons’ like, yet is now much closer thanks to this research.
CONCRETE
Fill your ideas with vivid images that your audience can picture in their heads while listening (or reading). Imagination is a powerful tool so you need to get your readers using theirs.
Borrow concrete images from an idea that people already have in their minds. Making Ready Player One a reality is not a crazy idea. Those who watched it will have an idea of how computationally expensive it might be to create such an immersive virtual reality, so the image of a technological breakthrough that enables such a leap forward is concrete and memorable.
CREDIBLE
Find ways to infuse your ideas with sources of credibility so that the audience wouldn’t even doubt the truthiness of them.
This is a challenging item in the list, because neither the presenter (my colleague) nor the entity sponsoring his research have inherent credibility (he is not a Nobel prize, and the sponsor is not Google, Amazon, Facebook). To be entirely fair, not every sticky idea needs to meet every single point in the list. Since Quantum Computers are not yet ready, it might be difficult to make a visual demo, but, something in those lines could be setup in order to address this item in the list.
EMOTIONAL
Make people feel something. Joy, fear, empathy, loath, something. The more your ideas can move people, the more they’ll stick.
Again, going back to the mental image of a super futuristic concept that closer to reality thanks to the research being presented, we can imprint emotion by connecting to people’s nostalgia of when they watched that old futuristic show and wondered if they’d ever experience something like that on their lifetimes.
STORY
Making your ideas into a story (or tapping into an existing one) facilitates memorability, so you better keep the storyteller inside you active.
A Creativity plot could spice things up quite nicely, as we could present the audience with the idea of using a combination of known technologies, that no one else had tried before, in order to push us one step closer to a future we thought was further ahead than it really is.
Thank you for reading and if you found this interesting, don’t hesitate to comment or reach out. I’ve found that a healthy discussion about a topic of our interest is the best way to digest the content.
I’m a Product Manager with a proclivity for web design and programming. I live in Japan and currently help a startup in AgTech and other in EdTech get off the ground. Happy to connect on LinkedIn or Instagram. And while you’re at it, here’s my website and YouTube channel as well.
