Made to Stick
Circularity is a complicated idea that needs to be simplified to be remembered. The Heath brothers wrote the book on that, and it points to a story we should have been telling all along.
One of my earliest observations about circularity was: it has plenty of Davos. It needs more Cannes. Made to Stick is the Heaths' guide to overcoming "the Curse of Knowledge" in order to make complicated ideas memorable. Even though Chip Heath was one of my professors in business school, somehow I missed the book when it came out. To conclude Summer Reading 2026, I'm fixing that now.
I was reminded of Made to Stick at the gentle urging of a friend. Jim Lecinski, who wrote the book on Zero Moment of Truth, knows a thing or two about making ideas sticky. It was time to take his advice.
The book in brief
Chip and Dan Heath went looking for why some ideas travel into the world under their own power and others die noble deaths in slide decks. Their method was to study ideas that spread naturally — urban legends, proverbs, conspiracy theories — and deconstruct the recipe of their stickiness.
They identified six traits, under a memorable acronym: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories. SUCCESs. A checklist rather than a formula, with a meaningful sequence.
Step one of their method is finding the core of the idea. Step two is mapping the elements of that core against the SUCCESs checklist. As you might expect, the book is chockablock with memorable stories and anecdotes.
All this is arrayed against the villain of their story: the Curse of Knowledge. It's what happens when you come to understand a subject so well that you lose the ability to remember what not knowing it is like. In explaining it, you lose the ability to connect. It's a failure of communication, strategy, and above all, empathy.
It didn't take me long into the book to see how I struggle with the Curse of Knowledge when it comes to circularity transformation.
Sustainability is the new sportsmanship
One of the book's cases was about a coach who was concerned that sportsmanship had lost its meaning. Sportsmanship trophies, the coach told the Heaths, had become consolation prizes for losers. The word had been stretched until it asked for nothing more demanding than not cheating. In promoting sportsmanship, the coach's organization was participating in its dilution.
The solution was not to rehabilitate the word but to recharacterize its essence. Sportsmanlike conduct became Honoring the Game. That reframing foregrounded what people cared about: the integrity of the game.
The Heaths call this problem semantic stretch. A term under pressure gets pulled like taffy into new, indistinct shapes.
It's hard not to wonder if sustainability suffers from this affliction. The word now exceeds its core meaning. To utter it is to summon its side-effects or invoke its caricature: costly do-goodism. Greenwashing. The word fails its meaning, and distracts from its purpose.
Looking at circularity through this lens, what is the equivalent of the Game? What does the world already honor, that circularity can be shown to serve?
The house always wins
Why does the consumer always pay for what the producer begs poverty to provide? Because the house always wins.
In 1972, the quality of American cars was such that some of them were exploding from rear-end collisions. A buyer of an American car at the time was treated to the explanation that quality costs money, so the choice was a car the buyer could afford, or one that didn't occasionally explode. To ask otherwise of the producer was to not understand his predicament, or to unfairly demand the impossible.
Of course, at the same time, Taiichi Ohno was busy proving the choice between quality and low cost was not, in fact, a choice. The Toyota Production System, later known as Lean, consistently demonstrated that quality lowers cost, because quality assurance processes surface waste. And waste costs money.
Meanwhile, someone had to bear the burden of all of those exploding cars. The house always wins.
One of the prescriptions for generating the unexpected — the U in SUCCESs — is to associate a story with a schema in the mind of the audience, and subvert it. What's a more salient schema than "the house always wins"?
There is a scene early in Ocean's Eleven where Danny explains his plan to Rusty. The house always wins, he says; you play long enough, never changing stakes, and the house takes you. The only way to win is to change the rules before the house can stop you. You have to seize the moment when it comes.
It's an interesting restatement of the dynamics of disruption theory. Like Danny's plan, the disruption comes from below; it starts small.
Sometimes the disruption comes from within. Ohno was an insider. His lesson transformed an industry. Ford followed suit. Is Ford better off now that its cars don't explode? Yes. Was the price of not fixing it borne by the consumer? Yes. Was the fix good for producer and consumer both? Also yes. Ohno cracked the code from inside the house.
Three plots, and a story that uses all of them
The Heaths' chapter on stories is helpfully prescriptive. Sorting through a large pile of inspirational stories, they found three canonical plots that account for 80 percent of them.
The Challenge plot is David and Goliath: the obstacle looks impossible, the protagonist prevails, and we want to take something on. The Connection plot is the Good Samaritan: a bond forms across a gap of class or race or distance, and we want to help somebody. The Creativity plot is the apple and Newton: an old problem yields to a new trick, and we want to try something.
Even though their book begins with the kidney heist story (if you don't know it, consider yourself lucky), it was in this chapter about story archetypes that I started thinking about Ocean's Eleven. Because if you look at it, a good heist story (told from the thief's perspective) embodies all three archetypes.
The vault is impenetrable, which is Challenge. The crew is assembled from people who have nothing in common and cannot do the job alone, which is Connection. And it turns on a trick nobody has thought of, which is Creativity. Most stories inspire in one direction; this one inspires in three, which may be why the genre never dies and seldom needs a moral.
It is also the story circularity should be telling.
The house? That's the linear system. The safe contains its advantages in cost, quality, and convenience; it's guarded not by force, but by a puzzle. The score is better things that last, in ordinary hands rather than a constrained few. The crew is all of us, because no single profession can do it alone.
Christian Rishel
Danny's key insight is not to bet harder; it is to wait for the hand that comes around and be there when it does. That is the timing argument I keep making under the Catalysts domain. Transformations do not go when somebody shoves harder. They go when the enabling conditions converge and somebody acts first.
Ocean's Eleven concludes not with a celebration of the acquisition, but with a calm moment of achievement. The transformation to circularity involves a kind of theft, to be sure; the Promethean kind. It's a reallocation of power from the gods to humanity, not from the house to the burglars. It's the kind that makes you feel calm when it's done.
Christian Rishel
I'm very grateful for this moment of calm that Chip and Dan Heath's old book has given me with this insight. I hope you share it too. There's no reason why our job — building the Circular Century — can't be every bit as fun, cool, and stylish as Danny and Rusty's.
The rest of this letter is for Dynamo members — the people building plenty with us. If you're reading as a guest, you're welcome here. But the best seats are reserved. Join the Dynamos
