Strategy is one of the most important aspects when it comes
to being successful within a business or just life in general. According to
Heath and Heath, Made to Stick, a
strategy is essentially a guide to behavior. To me, a strategy defines how a
person should act. In order for a strategy to be a good strategy, it must “drive
action” (255). If a strategy does not drive action, according to Heath and
Heath, then it is inert or simply irrelevant. To many people, it can be fairly
simple to produce a strategy that will be successful; however, for many there
are barriers that keep a strategy from being communicated effectively. Heath
and Heath list three barriers that make communication of a strategy more difficult:
Curse of Knowledge, Decision Paralysis and Lack of Common Language.
Out of the three barriers, I think it is necessary to highlight
Curse of Knowledge, which is the first barrier that inhibits strategic communication.
This barrier is the one that I believe is used most commonly because people
believe it is the best way to reach people. However, Talking about strategy in conceptual
terms and using language that is on a higher-level than most people’s intelligence
is not the best way to reach a target audience. To counteract the Curse of
Knowledge it is better to implement stories into a strategy. Stories use
concrete language instead of abstract; because of this, stories make it easier
to guide behavior. Stories evoke emotion and are easily relatable; thus, driving
people to want more.
All three of the barriers that inhibit strategic
communication, can be avoided. Like the Curse of Knowledge, Decision Paralysis
can be avoided by talking about strategy: “When people are able to talk about
strategy, they’re more likely to make good decisions than when strategy exists
only as a set of rules” (260). If strategy regulated, than people will be
hindered from making good decisions; however when people are able to talk about
strategy, it will lead them to make a better decision. Lastly, to avoid the
last barrier, Lack of Common Language, Heath and Heath recommends that people
use language that is essentially diverse so that it can be relatable to not
only one group, but all groups.
It seems like a lot of the readings for this semester have dealt with the importance of "stories"; the Heath Bros. build their strategies for making ideas stick into relatable stories, and their advice even explicitly emphasizes the importance of stories to overcome their "Curse of Knowledge" (a rather dramatic, narrative term, imo). It always relates back to being better able to make a connection with people, and since humans are essentially story-telling animals, it makes sense that we talk about Social Media "Authoring" as a concept.
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