Skill: quochungto/bookforge-sticky-message-antipattern-detector (version 1.0.0)

--- name: sticky-message-antipattern-detector description: Scan a draft, pitch, or copy for the named failure modes that kill stickiness — buried leads, decision paralysis, common-sense sedation, semantic stretch, stats-without-story, abstract strategy talk, scope creep, and the direct-message fallacy. Use this skill whenever a user asks to audit a draft, diagnose why a message is not landing, review a pitch, find the problems in copy, spot issues in an announcement, critique a marketing page, debug a speech, or check an internal memo — even when they do not explicitly use the word "stickiness". Activate on phrases like "audit this draft", "what is wrong with this message", "why is not this landing", "find the problems in this copy", "review my pitch", "spot the issues", "this is not resonating", "my announcement fell flat", "tell me what is broken in this email", "diagnose this speech", "why does not anyone remember what I said", "critique my copy", or any situation where the user supplies a short-form prose artifact and asks for a rigorous problem diagnosis rather than a rewrite. The skill produces a flagged-passage report with each instance located, severity-scored, and paired with a fix strategy — it does NOT rewrite the draft end-to-end and does NOT cover the Curse of Knowledge (that is a separate detector) or score the full six-principle SUCCESs rubric (that is a separate audit skill). version: 1.0.0 homepage: https://github.com/bookforge-ai/bookforge-skills/tree/main/books/made-to-stick/skills/sticky-message-antipattern-detector metadata: {"openclaw":{"emoji":"📚","homepage":"https://github.com/bookforge-ai/bookforge-skills"}} status: draft source-books: - id: made-to-stick title: "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die" authors: ["Chip Heath", "Dan Heath"] chapters: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12] tags: [communication, diagnostic, anti-pattern, messaging, copywriting, editing, audit, writing, marketing, persuasion] depends-on: [] execution: tier: 1 mode: hybrid inputs: - type: document description: "Draft to audit — a message, pitch, announcement, ad, explainer, speech, slide, memo, or product page as markdown or pasted text" - type: document description: "Audience profile — who the draft is for, what they care about, what they already believe" tools-required: [Read, Write] tools-optional: [Grep] mcps-required: [] environment: "Any agent environment with file read/write. Document-set working environment: the agent operates on short-form prose drafts provided by the user." discovery: goal: "Surface every instance of eight named stickiness failure modes in a draft, with location, severity, and a concrete fix strategy for each." tasks: - "Audit a pitch, ad, or announcement for named stickiness anti-patterns" - "Diagnose why a message is not resonating with an audience" - "Produce a prioritized defect list before running a full rewrite" audience: roles: [marketer, founder, communicator, product-marketer, public-speaker, copywriter, teacher, fundraiser] experience: any when_to_use: triggers: - "User pastes a draft and asks what is wrong with it" - "User says a message is not landing and wants a diagnosis" - "User wants a rigorous defect report before rewriting" prerequisites: [] not_for: - "Rewriting the draft end-to-end — use a message-clinic skill" - "Scoring the full SUCCESs six-principle rubric — use a stickiness-audit skill" - "Diagnosing expert blind spots specifically — use curse-of-knowledge-detector" environment: codebase_required: false codebase_helpful: false works_offline: true --- # Sticky Message Anti-Pattern Detector ## When to Use You have a draft — a pitch, ad, announcement, ad copy, speech, memo, slide, or product page — and the user has asked what is wrong with it, why it is not landing, or wants a rigorous defect report before rewriting. Use this skill when the goal is **named-defect diagnosis**, not rewriting. The output is a flagged-passage report that lists every instance of eight specific failure modes, each located, severity-scored, and paired with a fix strategy. **Preconditions to verify before starting:** - The draft exists as text the agent can read (pasted, markdown, or file path). - The target audience is named with at least role + what they already care about. Without audience context, "common sense" and "semantic stretch" cannot be scored. - The user wants diagnosis, not a rewrite. If they want a rewrite, produce the report first, then hand off. **The eight anti-patterns this skill detects (each with a book citation):** 1. **Burying the Lead** — the most important fact is not in sentence one. (Ch 1 — Nora Ephron's journalism-teacher story; Carville's "It's the economy, stupid" was an antidote to Clinton burying his own lead.) 2. **Decision Paralysis** — multiple co-equal "top priorities" with no hierarchy. (Ch 1, Epilogue — Iyengar jam study 24→6, Redelmeier-Shafir doctor study, Jeff Hawkins's Palm team.) 3. **Common-Sense Trap** — the message says what every reader already believes. (Ch 2, Ch 6, Epilogue — "customer service is important" fails; Nordstrom "gift-wrap from Macy's" sticks.) 4. **Semantic Stretch** — words like *unique*, *strategy*, *awesome*, *great*, *amazing* are used so broadly they have lost meaning. (Ch 5 — Heath & Gould 2005 Stanford working paper; "unique" is no longer unique, "relativity" now means "it depends".) 5. **Stats Without Story** — claims are defended with numbers alone, not human-scale anchors. (Ch 4, Ch 5, Epilogue — 63% of students remember stories vs 5% remember individual statistics; Rokia/Save the Children identifiable-victim study; nuclear warheads demonstrated as BBs in a bucket.) 6. **Abstract Strategy Talk** — sentences live at the strategy level (synergies, vision, shareholder value) with no concrete observable behavior. (Intro, Ch 3 — Beth Bechky silicon chip engineers vs manufacturers; "maximize shareholder value" vs JFK moon mission.) 7. **Scope Creep** — the message tries to make three or more co-equal top points and therefore makes none. (Notes p.175 — "If you say three things, you don't say anything"; related to but distinct from decision paralysis.) 8. **Direct-Message Fallacy** — raw abstract directives delivered where a springboard story would transfer the idea better. (Ch 6 — Stephen Denning at the World Bank: "hit the listeners between the eyes, they fight back"; Velcro theory of memory.) For detailed detection criteria, consequences, and fix recipes for each pattern, see [references/antipattern-catalog.md](references/antipattern-catalog.md). --- ## Context & Input Gathering ### Required Context (must have — ask if missing) - **The draft:** The actual text to audit — not a summary. -> Check prompt for: pasted text, file path, document attachment. -> Ask if missing: "Paste the draft you want audited, or give me the file path." - **The audience profile:** Who the draft is for, and what they already believe. -> Check prompt for: audience description, target persona, reader role. -> Ask if missing: "Who is this draft for? One sentence on (a) their role, (b) what they already care about, (c) what they already believe is obvious about this topic." ### Observable Context (gather from environment) - **Channel and constraint:** Is this an ad (character limit), a speech (time limit), an email (subject-line constraint), a slide (visual), or long-form prose? Affects severity scoring. -> Infer from: length, formatting, user framing. -> If unclear: ask one question — "What format and where will this run?" - **Tone constraints:** Brand or legal tone limits change which fixes are legal. -> Look for: user comments like "it has to stay on-brand" or "legal signed off on this phrasing". ### Default Assumptions - **Assumption: audience cannot ask follow-up questions.** Drafts are read asynchronously. If the user corrects this, raise severity of buried-lead and scope-creep flags (readers cannot re-ask for the core). - **Assumption: the author is an insider.** Make the author a secondary stickiness risk: the common-sense trap and abstract-strategy talk are more likely when the author is deep in the domain. ### Sufficiency Threshold - **SUFFICIENT:** Draft text + audience with role and "what they already believe" + known channel. - **PROCEED WITH DEFAULTS:** Draft + role-only audience. Flag the missing beliefs list in the report so the user can confirm. - **MUST ASK:** No draft, OR audience is "general public" with no narrowing (too vague to score common-sense or semantic-stretch hits). --- ## Process ### Step 0: Initialize task tracking **ACTION:** Create a TodoWrite checklist with one item per detection pass (Steps 2–9) plus Step 1 and Step 10. **WHY:** Each anti-pattern targets a different axis (structural, lexical, narrative, prioritization). Fusing passes into a single scan defaults to the most visible axis (usually jargon-ish word problems) and silently drops the subtler ones — buried assumptions about common sense, semantic stretch in background phrases, scope creep across sections. The checklist enforces that every axis gets its own independent pass. ### Step 1: Establish the audience belief baseline **ACTION:** Write a short profile of the audience: (a) role, (b) what they already believe is true / obvious about this topic, (c) what would genuinely surprise them, (d) what they actually care about (outcomes, pains, wins), (e) what counts as credible to them (data, peer stories, authority, personal anecdote). Use the user's supplied profile plus your reasoning. **WHY:** Three of the eight anti-patterns — common-sense trap, semantic stretch, stats-without-story — can only be scored relative to a specific audience. "Customer service is important" is common sense to customer-service managers and news to a junior engineer. "Unique" is semantic stretch to a marketing buyer and fresh to a child. Skip this and the report becomes generic clarity advice. **Save:** The audience belief baseline as Section 1 of the output report. ### Step 2: Pass AP-02 — Burying the lead **ACTION:** Read the draft's first sentence (and for long pieces, the first paragraph). Ask: "Is this the single most important thing the reader must walk away with?" Then scan the whole draft for the sentence that SHOULD be the lead — the single fact, offer, news, or claim whose loss would gut the piece. If that sentence is not in position 1, flag `AP-02: Buried Lead`. **WHY:** Journalism's inverted-pyramid rule exists because readers stop reading. The Heaths' Epilogue names this as the first villain for speakers: "we're tempted to share it all." If the actual news is buried in paragraph four, the audience never reaches it. Detection is mechanical — compare sentence 1 to the sentence you would keep if forced to delete 90% of the piece. **For each hit record:** the actual first sentence (quote), the sentence that should be the lead (quote + location), severity (High if the lead is in paragraph 3+ or absent; Medium if in paragraph 2), and a fix strategy — usually "promote sentence X to position 1" with any needed connective tweaks. ### Step 3: Pass AP-03 — Decision paralysis **ACTION:** Count the number of sentences that claim to be "the most important", "our top priority", "the key thing", or equivalent. Also count the number of top-level bullet lists with 5+ items framed as co-equal. Flag `AP-03: Decision Paralysis` if there is more than one "top" or if a co-equal list of five or more priorities is presented without a designated single core. **WHY:** Iyengar's jam study (24 flavors → 3% bought; 6 flavors → 30% bought) and the Redelmeier-Shafir doctor study (doctors delay treatment when forced to choose among multiple good options) show that audiences freeze when confronted with multiple equally-weighted "bests". The Heaths explicitly prescribe "relentless prioritization: 'It's the economy, stupid.'" Detection is a simple count. **For each hit record:** the conflicting "top" claims (quotes), severity (High if 3+ top claims; Medium if 2), and a fix strategy naming a single recommended core (or asking the user to pick one). ### Step 4: Pass AP-04 — Common-sense trap **ACTION:** For each standalone claim sentence, ask: "Would a member of the audience, based on the belief baseline, nod in agreement BEFORE reading?" If yes — flag `AP-04: Common Sense`. Especially target sentences like "customer service is important", "communication is key", "quality matters", "our people are our greatest asset", "we are committed to excellence", "safety first", and any variant. Also flag any "advice" section whose advice the audience would already give. **WHY:** Chapter 2 names this explicitly: "common sense is the enemy of sticky messages." The reader's guessing machine is not broken, so nothing is encoded to memory. The test in Epilogue: Nordstrom's "gift-wraps packages from Macy's" sticks because it breaks the schema of what a store does. Detection: any sentence the audience would have written themselves fails. **For each hit record:** the flagged sentence, why it is common sense relative to the audience baseline, severity (High if it is the lead, Medium elsewhere), and a fix strategy — either the counter-intuitive reframe (surface the uncommon claim hiding in the material) or deletion. ### Step 5: Pass AP-05 — Semantic stretch **ACTION:** Scan for stretched words. The book-named list (Heath & Gould 2005 working paper, Stanford): *unique*, *strategy*, *strategic*, *awesome*, *amazing*, *fantastic*, *great*, *excellent*, *innovative*, *leverage*, *synergy*, *world-class*, *best-in-class*, *relativity* as "it depends", *revolutionary*, *game-changing*. For each occurrence, check whether the word is carrying its original distinctive meaning in context (a genuine one-of-a-kind claim for "unique"; a real strategic choice for "strategy") or whether it has been diluted into a generic positive vibe. **WHY:** Heath and Gould documented that extreme synonyms for "good" (fantastic, amazing) are increasing in use faster than less-extreme synonyms — i.e., the vocabulary is inflating. Overused words do not just fail to impress; they flatten any sentence they touch because the reader's processing discounts them to zero. Detection is a fixed-list scan with a context check. **For each hit record:** the stretched word (with surrounding phrase), whether the original meaning is intact or diluted, severity (High if 3+ stretched words in one paragraph or in the lead; Medium if 1–2), and a fix strategy — narrow it to a concrete claim ("our onboarding is 30 minutes, half the category average" beats "we have an awesome onboarding experience") or revive the word's original force via a vivid anchor. ### Step 6: Pass AP-06 — Stats without story **ACTION:** Count every statistic, percentage, or quantitative claim in the draft. For each, check whether it is paired with a human-scale anchor, a named person, or a concrete analogy ("5,000 nuclear warheads" → "one BB per thousand people in a bucket"; "400,000 children in need" → "one child, Rokia"). Compute the ratio of bare stats to anchored stats. Flag `AP-06: Stats Without Story` if any high-stakes stat is bare, or if the ratio of bare-to-anchored is worse than 1:1. **WHY:** The Heaths cite a student-speech recall study directly: 63% of listeners remember stories; 5% remember any individual statistic. The Rokia/Save the Children study showed that a single identified child raised more than statistics about millions. Statistics do not engage the machinery that produces caring. Detection is mechanical — count and check for pairing. **For each hit record:** the bare statistic (quote), why a human-scale anchor is needed, severity (High if the stat is load-bearing for the argument, Medium if decorative), and a fix strategy — either wrap the stat in a physical analogy (Human Scale principle), pair it with a single named person, or cut it if the story does the job alone. ### Step 7: Pass AP-07 — Abstract strategy talk **ACTION:** Re-read each sentence and classify it as ACTION-level (names a concrete actor doing a concrete verb on a concrete object) or STRATEGY-level (goals, synergies, visions, competencies, alignment). Flag every sentence that sits at strategy level without an adjacent action-level translation. Especially target: "maximize shareholder value", "drive outcomes", "align around", "leverage synergies", "operational excellence", "execute our vision", "deliver value", "transform the business", "our North Star is X" (without naming the number and the specific target). Apply the "soccer team test": if you were the coach with this as your message, would your players know what to DO on Monday? **WHY:** Chapter 3 uses the Beth Bechky silicon chip study: designers and manufacturers could not coordinate because they worked at different levels of abstraction. The Heaths contrast JFK's "man on the moon" (concrete, sensory, time-bound) with a modern CEO's "maximize shareholder value" (unbounded, opaque, unactionable). Abstract-only prose is grammatical but un-actionable. Detection: look for sentences without an actor-verb-object. **For each hit record:** the abstract sentence, whether there is ANY concrete translation in the draft, severity (High if the whole draft lives at strategy level, Medium if mixed), and a fix strategy — either add an actor-verb-object concretization ("grow revenue 20% this year by winning back 10 lapsed accounts") or replace the sentence entirely with the behavior it implies. ### Step 8: Pass AP-08 — Scope creep **ACTION:** Count the number of distinct top-level points, themes, or "key takeaways" in the draft. If there are 3 or more with no explicit hierarchy, flag `AP-08: Scope Creep`. This is related to but distinct from decision paralysis: paralysis is about competing priorities presented as co-equal, scope creep is about a piece trying to communicate too many separate ideas at once. **WHY:** The Heaths cite the "If you say three things, you don't say anything" principle from a named comms expert (Notes p. 175). Mechanism: multiple priorities cancel each other out and the audience retains none. Common trigger: high school research papers where students feel obligated to include every unearthed fact. Detection is a section / theme count. **For each hit record:** the enumeration of top points (quotes or summaries), severity (High if 4+ themes or the draft is long-form; Medium if exactly 3), and a fix strategy — name THE one core message (Commander's Intent) and demote the rest to supporting evidence or cut them. ### Step 9: Pass AP-09 — Direct-message fallacy **ACTION:** Scan for passages that deliver abstract directives ("we need to be more X", "you should Y", "the key is to Z", "it is important to A") without any narrative scaffolding — no springboard story, no worked example, no before/after. Flag `AP-09: Direct Message Fallacy` where the piece is making an argument or prescribing a change and relies entirely on assertion rather than story. **WHY:** Chapter 6 tells the Stephen Denning World Bank story: Denning initially believed in being direct and thought stories were "too ambiguous, too peripheral, too anecdotal". He found that when you "hit the listeners between the eyes, they fight back" — abstract directives do not simulate the outcome, so they cannot engage the listener's reasoning machinery. The Velcro theory: more hooks = more stickiness. Direct assertion has few hooks. **For each hit record:** the directive passage, the change it is trying to cause, severity (High if this is a change-management or adoption message; Low-Medium if a status update), and a fix strategy — suggest a springboard-story frame ("tell us one concrete story where this worked, then name the principle") or identify an analogy / comparison the user could draft. ### Step 10: Synthesize the report **ACTION:** Combine the nine passes into a single prioritized report. Structure: 1. **Audience belief baseline** (from Step 1). 2. **Scorecard** — a table with each anti-pattern, hit count, and max severity. 3. **Top 3 fix targets** — the three highest-impact hits across all passes, ranked by (severity × how much of the draft they poison). Each gets: quote, anti-pattern ID, why it hurts, specific fix. 4. **Full flagged-passage table** — every hit with columns: anti-pattern ID, location, passage, severity, fix strategy. 5. **Handoff note** — one decisive sentence: "cosmetic fixes" (stretch + stats only) vs "structural rework" (lead + scope + paralysis) vs "rewrite from core message" (common-sense + strategy-talk dominate). **WHY:** The report's value is in ranked, actionable specificity. An unranked dump causes decision paralysis — the exact failure mode named in AP-03. The top-3 is the action surface; the full table is the audit trail; the handoff note tells the user what to DO with the report. **Save:** The full report to `antipattern-report.md` in the user's working directory. ### Step 11: Structural self-check **ACTION:** Before returning, verify: (a) every flagged passage has a location, a severity, and a fix — not just "this is bad"; (b) the top-3 are ranked, not listed; (c) the scorecard counts match the flagged-passage table; (d) the handoff note is one decisive sentence, not a hedge; (e) AP-01 (Curse of Knowledge) is NOT included — that is a separate skill. **WHY:** Specificity is what makes this skill outperform generic critique. A report that says "the tone could be punchier" is indistinguishable from baseline advice. Location + severity + fix strategy is what gives the user something to act on. Missing the hedge-note check is the most common late-stage failure. --- ## Inputs - `draft` — the text to audit (markdown, pasted text, or file path). - `audience_profile` — role, what they already believe, what they care about, what counts as credible to them. - Optional: `channel` — ad / email / slide / speech / memo / long-form (affects severity weighting). ## Outputs A single file, `antipattern-report.md`, with this shape: ```markdown # Sticky Message Anti-Pattern Report — {draft name} ## Audience Belief Baseline {role, pre-read beliefs, what would surprise, what they care about, what is credible to them} ## Scorecard | Anti-Pattern | Hits | Max Severity | |---|---|---| | AP-02 Buried Lead | ... | ... | | AP-03 Decision Paralysis | ... | ... | | AP-04 Common Sense | ... | ... | | AP-05 Semantic Stretch | ... | ... | | AP-06 Stats Without Story | ... | ... | | AP-07 Abstract Strategy | ... | ... | | AP-08 Scope Creep | ... | ... | | AP-09 Direct Message | ... | ... | ## Top 3 Fix Targets 1. **{quote}** — {AP-ID}. Why: {reason}. Fix: {specific}. 2. ... 3. ... ## Flagged Passages | AP-ID | Location | Passage | Severity | Fix | ## Handoff Note {one decisive sentence: cosmetic | structural | rewrite-from-core} ``` --- ## Key Principles - **Named defects beat vibes.** "This feels vague" is a stylistic reaction. "AP-07 Abstract Strategy Talk — sentence lives at the strategy level with no actor-verb-object; needs concretization" is a diagnosis. Every flag MUST carry an anti-pattern ID and a fix strategy, or it is noise. - **Scoring requires a baseline.** Three of the eight patterns (common sense, semantic stretch, stats without story) cannot be scored without a specific audience. The belief baseline (Step 1) is not decoration — it is the denominator for the scoring function. Skip it and you produce generic critique. - **Mechanical passes beat impression passes.** The book's methodology is six independent principles, not one fused heuristic, precisely because humans and agents cannot hold all axes at once. This skill enforces the same structure: one pass per pattern, independent, in order. Fusing passes silently drops the subtler ones. - **Rank ruthlessly, report faithfully.** The top-3 is the action surface; the full table is the audit trail. Both are required — top-3 alone lacks justification, full-table alone causes the exact decision paralysis (AP-03) this skill detects. The report structure is load-bearing. - **The skill diagnoses; it does not rewrite.** The book distinguishes the Answer stage from the Telling Others stage. This skill operates at the Telling Others diagnostic layer — it flags and suggests fixes but does not produce the new prose. Crossing that boundary erodes the per-passage specificity that makes the audit valuable and hands off cleanly to a rewriting skill. - **Severity is a function of position and stake.** A common-sense sentence in the lead is fatal; the same sentence in a parenthetical is a minor hit. A buried statistic in a decorative list is low-stakes; the same bare statistic in the close of a fundraising letter is a flameout. Always weight by where the flaw sits in the reader's attention path. --- ## Examples **Scenario: SaaS product announcement email** Trigger: User pastes a 400-word product email that opens "At Acme, we believe that communication is the key to great teams. That is why we are incredibly excited to announce our amazing new unified platform, which represents our strategic commitment to driving better outcomes. Our customers — over 5,000 of them — have been asking for integrations, a better inbox, and smarter notifications. We think you will love it." Audience: "Product managers at mid-market SaaS companies who already use our product." Process: (1) Audience baseline notes PMs already believe "communication matters" and already use the product. (2) AP-02: buried lead — the actual news (unified platform) is in sentence 2 but buried under belief framing; the real "what changed" is unspecified. (3) AP-03: three co-equal "asks" (integrations, inbox, notifications) with no hierarchy. (4) AP-04: "communication is the key to great teams" is pure common-sense sedation for this audience. (5) AP-05: "incredibly excited", "amazing", "strategic commitment", "better outcomes" — four stretched words in two sentences. (6) AP-06: "over 5,000 customers" is a bare stat with no human scale. (7) AP-07: "driving better outcomes", "strategic commitment" are strategy-level with no behavioral anchor. (8) AP-08: three themes crammed into one email. Output: `antipattern-report.md` with scorecard showing 8 hits. Top 3: (1) cut the opening "we believe" sentence and lead with the single biggest user-visible change; (2) pick ONE of the three features as the core of this email and demote the other two to a "also shipping" line; (3) replace "amazing", "strategic commitment", "better outcomes" with a concrete behavioral claim. Handoff note: "Structural rework — lead repositioning plus scope reduction to one feature." **Scenario: Nonprofit fundraising letter** Trigger: User pastes a 600-word letter that leads with organizational history, cites "We reached 1.2 million children across 14 countries", and closes with "We are committed to lasting impact." Audience: "First-time donors, $25–$100 range." Process: (1) Baseline notes first-time donors do not know the org, care about individual impact, are moved by specific stories. (2) AP-02: buried lead — the "why you should give" is absent from sentence 1. (3) AP-06: 1.2M children / 14 countries is a bare stat with no Rokia-style anchor; high severity because this is the emotional close. (4) AP-04: "committed to lasting impact" is common-sense sedation. (5) AP-07: "lasting impact", "sustainable outcomes" are strategy-talk. (6) AP-09: entire letter is direct assertion with no springboard story. Output: Scorecard shows 5 hits. Top 3: (1) open with a single named beneficiary (Rokia effect); (2) replace the 1.2M stat with a one-child story or an analogy that scales to a donor's $50 gift; (3) cut the commitment-to-impact sentence. Handoff note: "Rewrite from core message — this letter is architected around the org, not the donor's decision." **Scenario: Internal strategy memo** Trigger: CEO pastes a 500-word memo: "Team, our North Star is net revenue retention. We will drive synergies across BUs, maximize shareholder value, and align around operational excellence. Quality is non-negotiable, our people are our greatest asset, and I am confident we will achieve excellence together." Audience: "All 400 employees, roles from engineering to facilities." Process: (1) Baseline: most employees do not know NRR, BUs, or what "shareholder value" means for their week. (2) AP-04: "quality is non-negotiable", "our people are our greatest asset", "I am confident" — three consecutive common-sense sentences. (3) AP-05: "synergies", "operational excellence", "excellence together" — three stretched words. (4) AP-07: entire memo is at strategy level with zero action-level sentences; invokes the Boeing 727 / JFK test and fails. (5) AP-08: NRR, synergies, shareholder value, quality, people, excellence — six co-equal themes. Output: Scorecard shows all-strategy, all-common-sense, heavy stretch. Top 3: (1) add a "what changes for you on Monday" paragraph per role category; (2) cut the entire "quality / people / excellence" paragraph (common-sense sedation); (3) replace "North Star is NRR" with the actual number and the behavior change needed to hit it. Handoff note: "Rewrite from core message — this is the canonical 'maximize shareholder value' failure at scale." --- ## References - For the full eight-entry catalog with detection criteria, book citations, consequences, and fix recipes, see [references/antipattern-catalog.md](references/antipattern-catalog.md) --- ## License This skill is licensed under [CC-BY-SA-4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Source: [BookForge](https://github.com/bookforge-ai/bookforge-skills) — Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. ## Related BookForge Skills This skill is standalone (Level 0 foundation). Browse more BookForge skills: [bookforge-skills](https://github.com/bookforge-ai/bookforge-skills)

path: references/antipattern-catalog.md
content: # Sticky Message Anti-Pattern Catalog

Eight named failure modes that kill stickiness, with detection criteria, book citations, consequences, and fix strategies. Derived from *Made to Stick* (Chip Heath & Dan Heath, 2007). Use this as the deep reference for the `sticky-message-antipattern-detector` skill.

Note: The Curse of Knowledge (the book's "villain") is NOT in this catalog — it is covered by the separate `curse-of-knowledge-detector` skill. This catalog contains the eight secondary named failure modes the Heaths warn against throughout the book.

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## AP-02 — Burying the Lead

**One-liner:** The most important fact is not in sentence one.

**Detection criteria**
- The first sentence is background, caveats, history, or belief framing — not news.
- The single fact whose loss would gut the piece sits in paragraph 2 or later.
- Test: if forced to delete 90% of the draft, which sentence would you keep? That is the lead. Check if it is currently in position 1.
- Nora Ephron's journalism-teacher test: given "Principal Kenneth Peters announced today that the entire faculty will be attending a seminar on new teaching methods", the real lead is "There will be no school next Thursday".

**Book citation**
- Chapter 1 (Simple) — journalism inverted-pyramid rule, Nora Ephron story, and the Carville "It's the economy, stupid" antidote: Carville had to stop Clinton from burying his own lead when Clinton's instinct was to lead with "balanced budget".
- Epilogue — "The first villain is the natural tendency to bury the lead — to get lost in a sea of information. One of the worst things about knowing a lot, or having access to a lot of information, is that we're tempted to share it all."
- Easy Reference Guide — "Inverted pyramid: Don't bury the lead."

**Consequence**
Readers stop before they reach the lead. Inverted-pyramid violations are silently fatal: the draft looks complete but the audience retains nothing usable.

**Severity rubric**
- High: the lead is in paragraph 3+ or absent entirely; OR the first sentence is pure common-sense framing.
- Medium: the lead is in paragraph 2.
- Low: the lead is in sentence 2–3 of the first paragraph.

**Fix strategy**
Promote the buried sentence to position 1. Demote or delete the prior content. If the lead does not exist in the draft at all, the user must first extract it (Commander's Intent: the single sentence the piece must convey if everything else is lost).

---

## AP-03 — Decision Paralysis

**One-liner:** Multiple co-equal "top priorities" with no hierarchy cause the audience to freeze, defer, or pick nothing.

**Detection criteria**
- Count sentences claiming "the most important", "our top priority", "the key thing", "what matters most". More than one = flag.
- Co-equal lists of 5+ priorities presented without a designated single core.
- Test: ask "if the audience could only act on one of these, which should it be?" If the draft does not answer, it is paralysis.

**Book citation**
- Chapter 1 (Simple) — Decision Paralysis: "Why is prioritizing so difficult? Because what if we can't tell what's 'critical' and what's 'beneficial'? ... people can be driven to irrational decisions by too much complexity and uncertainty."
- Iyengar jam study (Chapter 1 & Notes): 24 flavors produced ~3% purchase; 6 flavors produced ~30% purchase — 10x difference from reducing the option set.
- Redelmeier-Shafir doctor study (Notes): doctors delayed prescribing any treatment when forced to choose among multiple equally good drugs.
- Epilogue — Jeff Hawkins's Palm team freezing on features; "students who missed both a fantastic lecture and a great film because they couldn't decide which one was better".
- Easy Reference Guide — "Beat decision paralysis through relentless prioritization: 'It's the economy, stupid.'"

**Consequence**
Audience takes no action. Worse, they may discount the piece entirely because the lack of priority signals low author confidence.

**Severity rubric**
- High: 3+ co-equal "top" claims, OR the paralysis is in an action-requesting piece (CTA, fundraising, product decision).
- Medium: exactly 2 co-equal "top" claims.
- Low: paralysis is in decorative content (values page, about section).

**Fix strategy**
Force a single core (Commander's Intent). Demote the rest to supporting evidence OR cut them. If the user cannot pick, ask a disambiguating question: "If your audience remembered exactly ONE thing from this, what would it be?"

---

## AP-04 — Common-Sense Trap

**One-liner:** The message says what every reader already believes — so nothing is encoded to memory.

**Detection criteria**
- Scan for claims the audience (per the belief baseline) would nod at BEFORE reading.
- Tell-tale phrases: "customer service is important", "communication is key", "quality matters", "our people are our greatest asset", "we are committed to excellence", "safety first", "innovation matters", "we care about our customers".
- Advice sections whose advice the audience would already give.
- The Nordstrom test (Epilogue): an uncommon-sense claim breaks the reader's schema. "Nordies gift-wrap packages from Macy's" sticks because it breaks the schema of what a store does.

**Book citation**
- Chapter 2 (Unexpected) — "Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. When messages sound like common sense, they breeze right through the brain." The reader's guessing machine is not broken, so nothing is encoded.
- Chapter 6 (Emotional clinic) — "Notice that there's nothing unexpected here — nothing that is uncommon sense. ... Most of the advice ... is both too abstract and too obvious to stick."
- Chapter 2 — the local-news reporter Adams episode: "Names, names, and names" seems like common sense to reporters, but Adams broke their schema by going radically further.
- Epilogue — "Surprise them by breaking their guessing machines — tell them something that is uncommon sense."

**Consequence**
The reader nods, feels agreement, and forgets. Worse than jargon — jargon at least triggers a "huh?" reaction. Common-sense sedation produces zero friction and therefore zero encoding.

**Severity rubric**
- High: the common-sense sentence IS the lead, or dominates the close.
- Medium: common-sense sentences appear in body paragraphs.
- Low: parenthetical or transitional.

**Fix strategy**
Surface the uncommon claim hiding in the material. Ask: "What is the genuinely non-obvious, counter-intuitive thing you believe about this that your audience does not already believe?" Lead with that. Alternatively, cut the common-sense sentence entirely — the draft usually gets stronger, not weaker, when generic sedation is removed.

---

## AP-05 — Semantic Stretch

**One-liner:** Powerful words have been used so broadly they have lost their original distinctive meaning.

**Detection criteria**
- Scan for the stretched-word list (research-backed from Heath & Gould 2005): *unique*, *strategy*, *strategic*, *awesome*, *amazing*, *fantastic*, *great*, *excellent*, *innovative*, *leverage*, *synergy*, *world-class*, *best-in-class*, *relativity* as "it depends", *revolutionary*, *game-changing*, *disruptive*, *seamless*, *powerful*, *intuitive*.
- For each occurrence, check whether the word is carrying its original distinctive meaning in context or whether it has been diluted into a generic positive vibe.
- "Unique" test: is this genuinely one-of-a-kind, or could you substitute "nice" with no loss? If "nice" works, "unique" has been stretched.
- "Strategy" test: does this name a real strategic choice (doing X and not Y), or is it a fancy word for "plan"?

**Book citation**
- Chapter 5 (Emotional) — "Semantic Stretch and the Power of Association".
- Easy Reference Guide — "USE THE POWER OF ASSOCIATION. The need to fight semantic stretch: the diluted meaning of 'relativity' and why 'unique' isn't unique anymore. Transforming 'sportsmanship' into 'honoring the game.'"
- Notes — "Chip Heath and Roger Gould, 'Semantic Stretch in the Marketplace of Ideas,' working paper, Stanford University, 2005... extreme synonyms for the word good (e.g., fantastic or amazing) are increasing in use faster than synonyms that are less extreme."

**Consequence**
Stretched words fail to impress and silently flatten any sentence they touch. Readers' processing discounts them to near-zero; the writer thinks they have packed the sentence with emphasis but has actually delivered a bland neutral.

**Severity rubric**
- High: 3+ stretched words in one paragraph, OR stretched words in the lead/CTA.
- Medium: 1–2 stretched words in body copy.
- Low: stretched words in navigation, metadata, or decorative footer.

**Fix strategy**
Narrow it to a concrete claim. "Our onboarding is 30 minutes, half the category average" beats "we have an awesome onboarding experience". Alternatively, revive the word's original force via a vivid anchor: "honoring the game" replaced "sportsmanship" in youth sports programming because it carried concrete ritual weight. Or cut the word entirely — most sentences tighten when stretched words are removed.

---

## AP-06 — Stats Without Story

**One-liner:** Claims are defended with statistics alone, which are forgotten almost instantly, instead of human-scale anchors or single-person stories.

**Detection criteria**
- Count statistics, percentages, and quantitative claims. For each, check whether it is paired with (a) a named person, (b) a physical analogy ("5,000 nuclear warheads" → "one BB per thousand people in a bucket"), or (c) a concrete scenario.
- Ratio test: bare stats to anchored stats. Worse than 1:1 = flag.
- Load-bearing test: if a stat is the emotional close or core credibility anchor, it MUST be paired. A bare close is always high severity.

**Book citation**
- Chapter 4 (Credible) — "Since grade school, we've been taught to support our arguments with statistical evidence. But statistics tend to be eye-glazing."
- Chapter 4 — 5,000 nuclear warheads anti-example: "The statistic didn't stick. It couldn't possibly stick. No one who saw the demonstration would remember, a week later, that there were 5,000 nuclear warheads in the world. What did stick was the [BBs in bucket demo]."
- Chapter 5 (Emotional) — Rokia / Save the Children study: a letter with statistics about millions of African children raised less than a letter about a single identified child, Rokia. Identifiable-victim effect.
- Epilogue (student-speech recall study) — "In the average one-minute speech, the typical student uses 2.5 statistics. Only one student in ten tells a story... when students are asked to recall the speeches, 63 percent remember the stories. Only 5 percent remember any individual statistic." 63% vs 5% is the foundational ratio.

**Consequence**
Audience recalls nothing quantitative. Worse, stats without story suppress emotional engagement — the reader's analytic mindset is activated, which dampens caring. This is the Mother Teresa effect in reverse: aggregate suffering moves people less than a single identified person.

**Severity rubric**
- High: the bare stat is load-bearing (in the lead, the close, or the primary evidence block).
- Medium: multiple bare stats in body copy.
- Low: decorative stat in a navigation element, footer, or background paragraph.

**Fix strategy**
Three options: (1) wrap the stat in a physical analogy (Human Scale principle — BBs in a bucket, football fields, houses per city block); (2) pair it with a single named person (Rokia, Jared from Subway); (3) cut it if the story can carry the argument alone. The default recommendation is Option 2 if the audience needs to feel, Option 1 if the audience needs to comprehend magnitude, Option 3 if the argument already has a strong narrative.

---

## AP-07 — Abstract Strategy Talk

**One-liner:** Sentences live at the strategy level (synergies, vision, shareholder value) with no concrete observable behavior — readers cannot name what anyone would DO differently tomorrow.

**Detection criteria**
- Classify each sentence as ACTION-level (actor + verb + observable object) or STRATEGY-level (goals, synergies, visions, alignment).
- Flag every strategy-level sentence without an adjacent action-level translation.
- Tell-tale phrases: "maximize shareholder value", "drive outcomes", "align around", "leverage synergies", "operational excellence", "execute our vision", "deliver value", "transform the business", "best-in-class experience", "our North Star is X" (without naming the number).
- Soccer-team test (from Chapter 3, via Stephen Covey): if you were the coach with this as your message, would your players know what to DO on Monday?
- Boeing 727 test: replace the abstract sentence with a concrete constraint ("seat 131 passengers, land on Runway 4-22 under a mile long"). Does the sentence gain or lose meaning? If concrete GAINS meaning, the abstract original is a hit.

**Book citation**
- Introduction — "Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions — they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. ... Let's take the CEO who announces... 'maximize shareholder value.' Is this idea simple? ... Is it concrete? Not at all."
- Chapter 3 (Concrete) — "Even the most abstract business strategy must eventually show up in the tangible actions of human beings. It's easier to understand those tangible actions than to understand an abstract strategy statement."
- Chapter 3 — Beth Bechky silicon chip study: engineers and manufacturers could not coordinate because they worked at different levels of abstraction. Coordination only happened when both groups walked the concrete chips on the factory floor.
- Chapter 3 — JFK "man on the moon by the end of the decade" contrasted with "maximize shareholder value".

**Consequence**
Grammatical but un-actionable prose. Audience reads, understands the words, and walks away with no behavior change. Cross-functional teams cannot coordinate because abstract language hides the concrete work each side must do.

**Severity rubric**
- High: entire draft lives at strategy level with no action-level translation.
- Medium: mixed, but the lead and close are strategy-only.
- Low: occasional strategy-level sentences in a mostly concrete draft.

**Fix strategy**
Add an actor-verb-object concretization for every flagged sentence. "Grow revenue" becomes "win back 10 lapsed accounts worth $500K by end of Q2 via personal outreach from the CS team". If the strategy sentence cannot be concretized, the strategy itself is probably incoherent — surface that to the user rather than trying to polish the prose.

---

## AP-08 — Scope Creep (Three Messages Equals No Message)

**One-liner:** The draft tries to make three or more co-equal top points and therefore makes none.

**Detection criteria**
- Count distinct top-level points, themes, or "key takeaways". 3+ with no explicit hierarchy = flag.
- Related to but distinct from AP-03 (Decision Paralysis): paralysis is about conflicting priorities presented as co-equal, scope creep is about a piece trying to communicate too many separate ideas at once.
- High school research-paper pattern: the author feels obligated to include every unearthed fact.

**Book citation**
- Notes p. 175 — "If you say three things, you don't say anything" (attributed comms expert quote).
- Chapter 1 — "If 'it's the economy, stupid' is the lead, then the need for a balanced budget can't also be the lead."
- Epilogue — "High school teachers will tell you that when students write research papers they feel obligated to include every unearthed fact."

**Consequence**
Audience retains zero. Multiple priorities cancel each other out. This is particularly pernicious in long-form copy where the author feels each paragraph is "important" — the sum is less memorable than any single paragraph would have been on its own.

**Severity rubric**
- High: 4+ themes, or the draft is long-form (speech, memo, landing page) with no hierarchy.
- Medium: exactly 3 themes with no designated core.
- Low: 3 themes with a clear primary and two supports.

**Fix strategy**
Name THE one core message (Commander's Intent). Demote the rest to supporting evidence for the core, OR cut them into separate drafts. Hard rule: one core per draft. If the user insists all three matter, split into three separate artifacts rather than combining.

---

## AP-09 — Direct-Message Fallacy

**One-liner:** Raw abstract directives delivered where a springboard story would transfer the idea better.

**Detection criteria**
- Scan for change-management or adoption messages delivered as abstract directives — "we need to be more X", "you should Y", "the key is to Z", "it is important to A".
- No narrative scaffolding: no springboard story, no worked example, no before/after.
- Especially dangerous in change-management contexts (new strategy, culture change, process change) where stories transfer adoption but directives trigger resistance.

**Book citation**
- Chapter 6 (Stories) — Stephen Denning, World Bank: "had always believed in the value of being direct, and he worried that stories were too ambiguous, too peripheral, too anecdotal. He thought, 'Why not spell out the message directly? ... Why not hit the listeners between the eyes?' The problem is that when you hit listeners between the eyes, they fight back."
- Chapter 6 — Velcro theory of memory: "A story is powerful because it provides the context missing from abstract prose. It's back to the Velcro theory of memory, the idea that the more hooks we put into our ideas, the better they'll stick."

**Consequence**
Listeners hear but do not internalize. Abstract directives do not simulate the outcome and so cannot engage the listener's reasoning machinery. Worse, direct directives in change contexts trigger defensive reactions ("fight back") — the opposite of the intended adoption.

**Severity rubric**
- High: the piece is a change-management or adoption message delivered entirely as directive.
- Medium: the piece is informational but relies on assertion where a story would work better.
- Low: the piece is a status update or FAQ where direct delivery is appropriate.

**Fix strategy**
Suggest a springboard-story frame: "tell us one concrete story where this worked, then name the principle". Denning's pattern at the World Bank: a single story of a health worker in Zambia finding CDC information online did more to spark the idea of a knowledge-sharing organization than any directive ever could. If no story is available, suggest an analogy or comparison the user could draft. Acknowledge that direct delivery is sometimes correct (status updates, FAQs) — the flag is only material in change contexts.

---

## Severity Weighting Summary

| Factor | Effect on severity |
|---|---|
| Hit is in the lead sentence | +1 level (Medium → High) |
| Hit is in the close or CTA | +1 level |
| Hit is in a change-management / adoption piece | +1 level for AP-09 specifically |
| Hit is in a decorative / navigation element | -1 level |
| Hit count in same paragraph ≥ 3 | +1 level (compound failure) |

---

## Cross-Pattern Interactions

- **AP-02 (Buried Lead) + AP-04 (Common Sense):** the most common compound failure. The buried lead symptom is usually caused by common-sense sedation in the first sentence. Fix common sense first; the lead often reveals itself.
- **AP-03 (Paralysis) + AP-08 (Scope Creep):** overlapping but distinct. Paralysis is about choosing among competing priorities; scope creep is about failing to choose. A draft can have both (too many themes AND no designated primary).
- **AP-05 (Semantic Stretch) + AP-07 (Abstract Strategy):** stretch words are the atomic units of strategy talk. A draft heavy on "leverage synergies to drive outcomes" is simultaneously a semantic-stretch hit and an abstract-strategy hit. Fix them together.
- **AP-06 (Stats Without Story) + AP-09 (Direct Message):** both are about using the wrong register. Stats without story fails because data does not simulate outcome; direct-message fallacy fails because assertion does not simulate outcome. Story solves both.

---

## What This Catalog Does NOT Cover

- **Curse of Knowledge (AP-001 in hunter findings):** handled by the separate `curse-of-knowledge-detector` skill. That skill covers lexical jargon, tacit shared context, and expert blind spots. This catalog's AP-07 (Abstract Strategy Talk) overlaps slightly, but is scoped to strategy-level abstraction as a stickiness failure rather than as an expert-audience mismatch.
- **The full six-principle SUCCESs scoring rubric:** handled by a separate stickiness-audit skill. This catalog is diagnostic (find defects), not evaluative (score the message).
- **Rewriting the draft:** this catalog and its parent skill produce defect reports. Rewriting is downstream and belongs to a separate message-clinic skill.


Security scan verdicts — ClawScan: clean | static analysis: clean | VirusTotal: clean | SkillSpector: suspicious (MEDIUM)