The third attribute of stickiness is concreteness. I spent most of the past week at Agile 2023 in Orlando, Florida. It was a metaphorical banquet of agile knowledge. I had more hallway conversations than I can count ruminating over presentation topics. The third chapter of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die reminded me that language is abstract but real life is not. Most of the readers of the Software Process and Measurement Cast blog have been to conferences, so reflect on how many ideas and concepts you implemented when you returned to the office. I suspect the answer is very few. This is because few of them were tangible enough to be sticky.
When an idea is concrete it becomes easier to remember. One of the presenters, Chris Li, introduced his workshop with an exercise that linked his central theme to a very concrete concept. Chris was speaking on the need to tailor the approach and mechanism of training to the goal and audience. He asked everyone in the room to write down the first five ingredients of their favorite recipe. If you use the wrong ingredients or combine them in the wrong order the outcome could be yucky. The exercise made the central idea of the workshop concrete. I will remember it. As I reflected on the session, the opening exercise also ticked the box for being simple and unexpected.
Chris assumed his audience was a mixture of experts and novices. He kept his approach very concrete for the whole 90 minutes. Anyone that can make Bloom’s Taxonomy concrete will have my attention. Perhaps an expert designer of education material would be able to absorb a highly abstract discussion of using the Taxonomy. A little concreteness is very useful in making a connection and making that connection memorable.
The authors point out that abstraction is a luxury for experts. Abstraction is a secret language that allows experts to create a boundary between those in the know and everyone else. The shared abstractions create an exclusive turf for experts to exist within. Concreteness does the same thing for everyone else (inclusive rather than exclusive). I have noted that context, where you are and what you are doing, impacts how you interpret what you are reading. This week I caught myself judging speakers on how concrete they were making the ideas in their material. The speakers that made the most impact on me made their ideas concrete. I will take that knowledge to heart as we design the class material to support Mastering Work Intake: From Chaos to Predictable Delivery (working title, the publisher will have their say soon) by Tom Cagley and Jeremy Willets to be published at the end of 2023.
A week of presentations and workshops has made the concept of concreteness very concrete!
Buy a copy of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die and then catch up on the logistics of this re-read:
Week 1: Announcement and Logistics – https://bit.ly/46tn5Bz
Week 2: Introduction – https://bit.ly/46CLmp1
Week 3: Simple – https://bit.ly/3PZLWaq
Week 4: Unexpected – https://bit.ly/43zfkaB
