You Pay Attention to Unexpected Ideas
Amazon Uncontacted Tribe
In May of this year, we all saw the pictures of one of the Amazon’s last uncontacted indigenous tribes. The pictures and associated message spread rapidly around the world on television, internet, and newspaper. The pictures were taken and released by Funai – Brazil’s Department of Indian Affairs. If Funai was hoping to draw attention to their cause of protecting indigenous people’s habitats from illegal logging, then they were certainly successful on a massive scale. Many commercial companies would pay millions and still not come close to this level of global and rapid exposure.
So why were these photos and the associated message so successful? I for one was fascinated by this story when it came out. We live in an age when we all have mobile communication devices, we can fly in an Airbus A380 carrying 524 other passengers, and we can take photos of galaxies 28 million light years from earth. Yet at the same time we have parts of our own planet that remain unexplored, where ancient tribes live untouched by modern society. To me this seemed counter intuitive – it violated my expectations – it was an unexpected idea.
In their book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
How do we get people to pay attention to our ideas and how do we maintain interest when we need to get ideas across?
And their answer is by providing unexpected ideas that break people’s guessing machines and that violate their expectations. People become used to standard patterns and quickly stop paying attention – you must break the pattern with unexpected ideas to get their attention.
The uncontacted Amazon tribe was a fantastically successful message and its unexpectedness was a key to this success.
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Brendon, great story. I have started reading the Heath bros book. It is excellent. Got an audio version that I can listen to on my iPod. Do you have any other material that you would recommend in this area.
Cheers pete