Michael's Workbench

Short version

If you want people to remember stuff, make a good story

Slightly longer version

In my previous post, I wrote about communication, focusing mostly on writing to get people to do stuff. I thought, I’d be done with the topic of communication and move on to other stuff, but something happened.

Earlier this week I had another conversation with a coworker, in which I offered to explain a certain concept. His response was “I believe that you can explain it, but can you make me remember that explanation?”

Which got me thinking:

• What makes things memorable for us?
• What explanations of complex technical concepts (or just information on how to do non-trivial stuff) stay with you and why?

For me the answer is stories.

My fascination with telling stories to explain boring stuff started when my professor in university used Hilbert’s hotel story (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.0059.pdf) to explain why a union of two countable infinite sets is the same as one countable infinite set. That was 25 years ago and I still remember the story.

Later, I got to work on software for HP calculators, and got exposed to internal API documentation written by HP engineers (I found this piece of it quoted in multiple places online):

The setting sun shining beneath a boiling smoke-colored ceiling of a thunderhead gives a strange gilded lighting to these grazing lands of New Zealand.  A bright-eyed young boy comes running through the field.

    “Wendy, Wendy!”

A raven-hair maiden steps out onto the porch of the cottage, her hair blowing in the wind before the oncoming storm.

    “Joey?”

    “Yes. . . . Are you Wendy?”

Meanwhile, in a small mining community in Idaho; Roo-man, sweat pouring down his face:

    “If only (pant) I could (pant) make the calc program look like any other program!”  Roo-man sat back on his haunches.  “Even in my alternate form I don’t seem to be able to come up with a different way of doing this.  If calcprog becomes pointer allocated then it acquires new VPA entries.  If at this point environmental allocation fails then the new VPA entries must be destroyed.  All these special cases!  I’m glad that I sent Joey off to New Zealand.”

excerpt from the HP-75 Internal Design Specification

Obviously here the story doesn’t explain anything, unlike the Hilbert hotel, but spreading pieces of this seemingly irrelevant humorous story through the document accomplished two things:

• Otherwise unbelievably boring design spec was almost the most popular document in R&D
• People still remember various aspects of that design by association with adventures of Joey, Wendy and Roo-man (HP75 project code name was Kangaroo)

So, what do we learn from this:

• Humor works
• Adding fiction to a dry document to add color to the story works

Is it worth the effort to do this every time for every piece of information you need to communicate? Probably not – if you don’t use stories sparingly, this changes from entertaining and memorable to annoying and memorable real fast.

But when it really matters and when you want to make it memorable, that’s the way to do it.

So, how do you help your audience remember the information you give them? What works for you?