Switch - Chip Heath [131]
As it turns out, this is not just an English-language proverb. In Sweden, the saying is “Rather one bird in the hand than ten in the woods.” In Spain: “A bird in the hand is better than a hundred flying birds.” In Poland: “A sparrow in your hand is better than a pigeon on the roof.” In Russia: “Better a titmouse in the hand than a crane in the sky.”
Other variants can be found in Romanian, Italian, Portuguese, German, Icelandic, and even medieval Latin. The first documented case in English is from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678. But the proverb may be much older still. In one of Aesop’s fables, a hawk seizes a nightingale, who pleads for its life, arguing that it is too tiny a morsel to satisfy the hawk. The hawk replies, “I would be foolish to release the bird I have in my hand to pursue another bird that is not even in sight.” This story dates from 570 B.C.
The “bird in hand” proverb, then, is an astoundingly sticky idea. It has survived for more than 2,500 years. It has spread across continents, cultures, and languages. Keep in mind that nobody funded a “bird in hand” advertising campaign. It spreads on its own. Many other proverbs share this longevity. In fact, a repertoire of proverbs has been found in almost every documented culture. Why? What is their purpose?
Proverbs are helpful in guiding individual decisions in environments with shared standards. Those shared standards are often ethical or moral norms. Proverbs offer rules of thumb for the behavior of individuals. The Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is so profound that it can influence a lifetime of behavior. The Golden Rule is a great symbol of what we’re chasing in this chapter: ideas that are compact enough to be sticky and meaningful enough to make a difference.
Great simple ideas have an elegance and a utility that make them function a lot like proverbs. Cervantes’s definition of “proverbs” echoes our definition of Simple ideas: short sentences (compact) drawn from long experience (core). We are right to be skeptical of sound bites, because lots of sound bites are empty or misleading— they’re compact without being core. But the Simple we’re chasing isn’t a sound bite, it’s a proverb: compact and core.
Adams managed to turn his core idea—the need to focus relentlessly on local issues—into a journalistic proverb. “Names, names, and names” is an idea that helps guide individual decision-making in a community of shared standards. If you’re a photographer, the proverb has no value as a literal statement, unless you plan to shoot name tags. But when you know that your organization thrives on names — i.e., the specific actions taken by specific members of the local community—that knowledge informs the kinds of photo ops you look for. Do you shoot the boring committee deliberations or the gorgeous sunset over the park? Answer: the boring committee deliberations.
Palm Pilot and the Visual Proverb
Compact ideas help people learn and remember a core message. But they may be even more important when it comes time to help people act properly, particularly in an environment where they have to make lots of choices.
Why do remote controls have more buttons than we ever use? The answer starts with the noble intentions of engineers. Most technology and product-design projects must combat “feature creep,” the tendency for things to become incrementally more complex until they no longer perform their original functions very well. A VCR is a case in point.
Feature creep is an innocent process. An engineer looking at a prototype of a remote control might think to herself, “Hey, there’s some extra real estate here on the face of the control. And there’s some extra processing capacity on the chip. Rather