General

I conducted a workshop recently for high school science and math teachers. We were working together to find ways to make their lesson plans stickier. My favorite example came from a couple of teachers who were trying to revamp the oceanography unit. Below is my own paraphrasing of what they said:

“We weren’t happy with how our unit on oceanography went last year. So we’ve put a lot of energy into how to make it better. Here’s what we’ve come up with.

In the first class in the unit, we start with a mystery: Let’s say you put a message in a bottle, drive out to the coast, and throw it as far as you can into the ocean. Where will the bottle end up? We let students make their guesses. (‘The waves will bring it right back to shore.’ ‘It’ll end up in Antarctica.’ ‘It’ll sink.’ Etc.) But we don’t give an answer (since there isn’t a clear answer).

Then we began to explore this same mystery in a more dramatic form. We’ll have students read a wonderful article from Harper’s magazine. What happened is this: In January 1992, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, a cargo ship hit a severe storm lost a container overboard which held 7,200 packages of plastic toys, including thousands of rubber duckies. Years later, we know where many of these rubber duckies ended up. In fact, many of them ended up on the same beach! By tracing the paths that these duckies swam, we learn a lot about the way ocean currents work.

Next, we let the kids do some hands-on experimentation. We’ll set up tanks of water with different salinities and different temperatures, and let them see how those variables change the water current. In essence, we are letting them create their own ocean currents.

Finally, we’ll pivot to the critical role that oceans play with global climate. We’ll start by asking them: What determines the weather of a city, like New York City? Inevitably, students say it depends on the latitude of the city ‘ the closer to the equator the city is, the warmer it is, and the closer to the poles it is, the colder it is. There is much truth to that, but there are huge discrepancies: For instance, New York City and Madrid are at roughly the same latitude. Yet it snows every winter in NYC and doesn’t snow in Madrid. What’s the difference? That paves our way to talk about the way that ocean currents influence climate.

We will be trying this ‘new & improved’ sequence this fall, and we’re hopeful it will make the unit much more vivid for students!”

How do you make your idea believable? You can get an external authority (the C. Everett Koop of your field) to vouch for it. You can use data and statistics. Or you can find a way to make your idea credible on its face. One technique for doing that is to use what we call a testable credential. A classic testable credential was Ronald Reagan’s line from the 1980 presidential debate: Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Reagan didn’t use statistics, and he didn’t cite influential economists. (It would have been easy to do either.) Instead, he simply let the audience judge for itself: Is my idea credible? Do you believe the economy has worsened?

A great example of a testable credential hit my inbox this week. A graphic designer named John Burns, who created the Ruffles logo (among others), used one against me. And it worked. Here’s what he said:

“As a career-long graphic designer, I love your book cover and website.
I have one suggestion for you, after reading a few of your blog
entries. Unlike the old days of the typewriter, where you would hit the
space bar twice after a sentence, the current typographic practice on
the computer is to hit it only once. In the typewriter days, there was
mono-spacing. Each letter, whether it was an i or a W, or even a .
(period), was given the same amount of space. That lead to uneven
spacing. The only way to make the end of sentences obvious, was to add
two spaces. Current technology, however, has given us proportional
spacing. So, now the type looks better, and the extra space after a
sentence is extraneous.

I’m now going to copy and paste below the above paragraph, to prove my
point. In the top paragraph, I used only one space after a sentence.
Below, I’ve added an additional space. Note how the extra space
actually creates a distractive hole in the text.

As a career-long graphic designer, I love your book cover and website.
I have one suggestion for you, after reading a few of your blog
entries. Unlike the old days of the typewriter, where you would hit
the space bar twice after a sentence, the current typographic practice
on the computer is to hit it only once. In the typewriter days, there
was mono-spacing. Each letter, whether it was an i or a W, or even a .
(period), was given the same amount of space. That lead to uneven
spacing. The only way to make the end of sentences obvious, was to add
two spaces. Current technology, however, has given us proportional
spacing. So, now the type looks better, and the extra space after a
sentence is extraneous.”

I have to admit, after I read the first few sentences, I was skeptical. A little annoyed. But then Burns said, basically, “See for yourself.” And he was right (see for *your*self). He has made me a one-space believer. What an ingenious way to make the case.

As a side note, I am finding it incredibly difficult to break this habit. (Even as I typed up this story, I continually had to backtrack and delete the double-spaces my fingers had imperiously inserted.) Learning to limit myself to one space feels about as natural as learning to end sentences with a comma.

From an article on nice-but-cheap bottles of wine in the NYT:

Let’s face it, you can find hundreds if not thousands of bottles in [the $10 or under category], down to the lowest of the low. We cannot try them all and say, “Here are the 10 best.” But we can give you some suggestions as to where to look, while offering up some good examples. …

Here’s what I find remarkable about this: The writer, Eric Asimov, isn’t saying anything that should be shocking when he points out the impossibility of finding the 10 best wines under $10. And yet it stopped me in my tracks. In saying the obvious, he became much more credible to me. Because most of the other “best-of” lists you see don’t concede their obvious limitations. “Hey, look, it’s absurd to think that we’ve found the best 10 albums of the year, out of thousands that were released…” Asimov’s admission made me more curious, not less, to hear what he had to say.

It reminds me of the sales world. We’ve all come across salespeople who are reluctant to admit any weakness in their product or service, no matter how insignificant. As many a sales guru has pointed out, building trust involves being candid, and being candid involves admitting that your products aren’t flawless.

Admitting weakness can, oddly enough, make your core ideas more powerful.

We got a note from David Foster of St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Mountain View, CA. He says: “I was tasked with doing a presentation on church finances. We have done these before with relatively low attendance.” So this year he tried something different. He put a quiz in the church newsletter the week before the meeting, in hopes of creating some curiosity gaps. He asked questions like these:

1. How much does St. Timothy’s spend to host coffee-hour after services in a year? (a) $3,500; (b) $8,000; (c) $8,750; (d) $9,250
2. If income and expenses are on track with the budget, at the end of the year, we will have: (a) a large surplus; (b) a large deficit; (c) break even; (d) a small deficit.

David says attendance more than doubled this year, despite it being a year with no major financial news to report (i.e., a budget crisis).

I love this story because it shows how a little effort can make a big impact in even an ordinary, day-to-day situation. Thanks for letting us blog it, David!

So I’m looking for some advice on an absurd situation that I have blundered myself into. Here’s the backstory: I was looking for some kind of fun giveaway related to the book. I had the profound insight that maybe the giveaway should relate to stickiness. So I Googled all manner of variations on “sticky,” which yielded some interesting findings that shall not be repeated here, but ultimately I found something that sounded cool: handmade candy from Sticky, an Australian company. Not only is their name “Sticky,” they can actually create custom orange “lollies” with the words “Made To Stick” on them! Are you kidding me? So this seemed a no-brainer solution.

Cue up mistake #1. Moderation has never been my strong point, so I ordered $619 of custom candy. The candy would be divided up into neat little glass jars. 4-6 weeks later, the box arrives! And it is filled with many neat little glass jars — that have been shattered to smithereens, along with the candy inside! The box was packed with all the care that your teenage grocery store clerk uses to bag your groceries. So imagine if your groceries had to cross an ocean. The net effect was more shrapnel-rific than sticky.

I emailed the company, along with a couple of choice photos, and a very nice woman apologized for the situation and agreed that a refund was in order. That was on May 10. Since then, this nice women has gone AWOL.

Any advice? Is there a Better Business Bureau equivalent of Australia? Etc. And I hope the moral of this story is clear for the children: Always opt for custom duct-tape over custom Australian candy…