The idea is to start with your main idea, and then use logically grouped arguments to support your position. In a follow-up post, we will look at an example of applying the tool on a business news article. But you must remember that they were paid to read our writing. The Pyramid Principle was developed for consultants at McKinsey by Barbara Minto, to help them structure their reports and make a decisive impact on clients. The pyramid principle was invented by Barbara Minto at McKinsey. Barbara did it by employing a principle that could take large amounts of information and structure it to simplify the story yet retain the detail. Barbara was the best at getting all the new recruits to go from hot-shot, straight-from-campus hires to expert consultants in the shortest amount of time. By focusing on the key actionable point, or the “bottom line,” and supporting it through the underlying arguments and data, Barbara was able to teach her students to get straight to the point. at getting all the new recruits to go from hot-shot, straight-from-campus hires to expert consultants in the shortest amount of time. For the Love of Physics - Walter Lewin - May 16, 2011 - Duration: 1:01:26. Use the following examples of connected and complementary models to weave Minto’s pyramid into your broader latticework of mental models. If you’re right, it will allow the audience to grasp the idea quickly and easily. Executive attention spans are notoriously short – don’t make your point in the first 10 seconds, and you’ve already lost your audience. If you  fail to get right to the point, you risk losing them. The Minto Pyramid Principle Then came the 1973 Oil Crisis, leaving in its wake a troubling economic situation in the U.K. and a major force reduction in the London office.  The answer or recommendation is then provided as the resolution, the (hopefully) happy ending to the story. If your answers aren’t mutually exclusive, the lines become blurred, and clients may become confused and try clarify your logic on the fly. Twenty-five options are way too many choices for busy executives. Minto Books International, Inc. 19 Cadogan Place London SW1X 9SA UK BARBARA MINTO„S PYRAMID PRINCIPLE® (AND SOME OTHER USEFULL STUFF TO STRUCTURE YOUR WORK) Tools // Strategy 2. This is a key tenet of both effective information analysis and communication to your audience. Barbara was. The most common cause of unclear writing is poor structure. Put in simpler terms, it starts with asking for what you want, and explaining why you want it. If you want to move up the ranks from in any business, then you need to master a critical skill beyond work ethic: the ability to communicate more information, more clearly, in a limited amount of time. Minto's book also gives us the MECE rule and the publication's contents have become ubiquitous in consulting and are often being repackaged for audiences in other areas. Then, each of your “whats,” or key points, will branch out from your premise. What Is the Minto Pyramid Principle? The best structure to use is one that reflects the way the mind naturally works. It starts with the answer first, then gives 3 general supporting reasons why, then multiple more granular details about each reason below that. tl;dr - it's worth reading Barbara Minto's The Pyramid Principle.. Exercise 2: Below are two examples of communication. “How can we increase profitability for Hot Fire Shoes?”. The Pyramid Principle is a famous book by Barbara Minto on the McKinsey method for effective communication.  Sound like any presentations you’ve seen? In this example section, our “what,” or main takeaway, is “report metrics in your wiki instead of in a meeting,” which is also the section header. Pyramid Structures. Then, from there, you support your conclusion with layers of evidence that flow in a logical order.Structuring your information like this allows you to instantly convey the takeaway that your readers are looking for and then prove its value throughout the rest of the article. In short, you’ve grabbed their attention. If your answers aren’t completely exhaustive, clients’ minds may wonder what is missing and ask you, “What about these other options?”. It’s to lay out your argument in the clearest terms possible, so that listeners can understand your thinking and engage more fully. The Pyramid Principle is Barbara Minto’s powerful and compelling process for producing everyday business documents. You need to tell your stories in a way that models the way people process information. This is from 4 years ago and covers the Minto’s pyramid principle – one of the most important concepts in executive communication and logical structuring of arguments.This is really big at all the big 4 and big 3.It is the scaffolding of management consulting thinking. Data is just a bunch of numbers packed into a spreadsheet. This will also allow you to see which of your teammates read the reporting doc and which didn’t.”. In the consulting world, we accomplish this with The Pyramid Principle. You want to pick three to five options to highlight as answers to the question you’ve presented to them.  Completely exhaustive means you have included every possible answer. With 79% of online readers strictly skimming their content today, we can safely assume that people crave writing that gets to the point and gets to it early.Whether it’s an article or an internal wiki post, people want to consume it as fast as possible. As written on Minto’s website, “Extended thinking eventually ends in a single pyramid of ideas, at many levels, obeying logical rules, and held together by a single thought. Derek was quantitatively brilliant, but his comfort zone wouldn’t allow him to offer a client an idea with 3-5 supporting options. How do you use the Pyramid Principle? Structure the case conclusion recipient-friendly by applying the Pyramid Principle Use the pyramid structure to provide syntheses and recommendations at the end or in between your case interviews. The Minto Pyramid Principle® is the powerful and compelling process for producing everyday business documents – to-the-point memos, clear reports, successful proposals, or dynamic presentations. To keep executives focused, you need to craft a coherent story. Tens of thousands of people worldwide have benefited from former McKinsey consultant Barbara Minto’s famous Pyramid Principle. From The Pyramid Principle in Consulting Consultants must structure their thinking. ConsultingMethodology.com page 1 of 5 The Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto (The logic of writing) The pyramid structure A person that seeks to learn your thinking about a particular subject faces a complex task. Another upside to mastering how to craft coherent ideas, is that executives are keenly aware of how hard it is to do what you’ve demonstrated. Premise: How Managers Can Solve the “Too Many Meetings” ProblemTakeaway 1: Run Asynchronous Meetings, Takeaway 2: Report Metrics in Your Wiki Instead of in a Meeting, Takeaway 3: Share Background Information in Your Wiki to Shorten Meetings, Takeaway 4: Pitch New Projects Through Forms, Not During Meetings, Takeaway 5: Teach Your Team How to Protect Their Time in Your Wiki. The pyramid principle was invented by Barbara Minto at McKinsey.  The top of the pyramid is a statement, with the supporting base of the pyramid ready to provide answers to the questions the statement raises. © 2021 Jeff Kavanaugh. Just like a pyramid, your article’s premise, which should be stated in the introduction, will sit at the very top of your article. , otherwise known in business lingo as MECE. My preferred story structure for presentation, e-mail or blogging was previously S-C-Q-A: Situation, Complication, Question and Answer – also known as The Minto Pyramid Principle. She loves snow and hiking in the nature, and is fed up with the busy city-life in New York. Lectures by Walter Lewin. You’ve established your familiarity with their company, established a positive atmosphere, and set the stage for your story. While it might be overkill for most writing we do, it is still a useful reference. The Pyramid Principle was created by Barbara Minto, who headed training for McKinsey & Company back in the ’70s. At that point you’ve already lost their attention, andwhatever momentum you had. Instead, he felt he had to demonstrate his intellect by telling them about all 25 options that might work, in a semi-organized list. Here’s what your Pyramid Principle-driven presentation intro might look like: “For years, Hot Fire Shoes has shown a steady increase in yearly revenue and profitability.”. The Pyramid Principle was created by Barbara Minto at McKinsey as a method of structuring communications for maximum impact. In The Pyramid Principle, the question extends logically from the complication, which keeps the overarching problem mentally straightforward and easier to follow.  That is why 3-5 items is the optimal size of components for a given idea. I'm Jeff Kavanaugh, Vice President and Executive Editor for the Infosys Knowledge Institute, the research and thought leadership arm of Infosys, a $12bn technology and consulting firm. Repost. Yes, it’s possible your recommendation may be wrong. We recommend following the Minto Pyramid Principle. So, in your reporting document, ask your team to discuss which factors impacted their performance the most and how they can act on the data at hand. This is a seminal concept in executive communication, and has spread like a virus from McKinsey to every other con… Always present the summary idea before you give the individual ideas being summarized. Let’s pretend a shoe company (which I’ll refer to as Hot Fire Shoes) hired you as a consultant. Namely, communicating a key takeaway right away can potentially hold your audience’s attention for the entire duration of your article.This still begs the question, though — how do you get to the point, and how do you do it in an engaging way? We’ve all experienced the pain these meetings inflict. This is something, Derek, a true genius who I thought would change the game for my firm, couldn’t grasp, Derek was quantitatively brilliant, but his comfort zone wouldn’t allow him to offer a client an idea with 3-5 supporting options. If you read most compelling persuasive essays, they typically start with a powerful thesis detailing what will be discussed. At the top, you start with the most important takeaway.  For horizontal relationships, the supporting points relate to each other, using either deductive or inductive reasoning. The Pyramid Principle is a structure to present your synthesis in an effective and convincing manner. Barbara Minto, 1995. For most of us, the Minto Pyramid Principle is the opposite of what our high school English teachers and college professors taught us. My free guide explains what they are and how to develop them. You’ve started a question and answer dialogue (drawn from ancient techniques, like the Socratic Method). My revised thoughts (2016) shown in red color.. Consultants must structure their thinking. No one may say I didn„t convey anything new. The Pyramid Principle advocates that “ideas in writing should always form a pyramid under a single thought.” The single thought is the answer to the executive’s question. Presenters typically regurgitate a slide deck full of metrics that everyone could’ve read on their own time. If you’re wrong, it will make your thinking clearer, so that a listener can point out the flaw in your logic and collaboratively provide you constructive feedback. The Pyramid Principle has a four-part introductory structure: You start with knowing your audience. The Pyramid Principle Training module This document is part of a set of supporting material available for download upon purchase of Strategy Execution Heroes by Jeroen De Flander (isbn 978-908148731-3) . What’s nice about The Pyramid Method is that you’re conveying bite size morsels of information that can easily fit on a slide, in a chapter, or in a section of a report that an executive—or functional leader—can quickly absorb. Communicating the thinking requires only that you guide the reader down the pyramid.” In other words, we can break down the Pyramid Principle into three main points: 1. Next, the “why,” or your supporting evidence for your takeaways, will branch out from each point. One of the reasons The Pyramid Principle is so effective is that it uses vertical relationships.  Then a question is posed to highlight the decision at hand, the moment of truth for the individual or company. That’s what The Pyramid Principle is at its core: a principle that allows you to quickly seize your audience’s attention and communicate with gravitas, by creating a compelling story that is easy to understand and remember. Although it's not universally true, I've found that as folks move into more senior roles, they spend a lot more time writing. 79% of online readers strictly skimming their content, websites only have 10-20 seconds to grab a user’s attention, 5 Ways Managers Can Solve the “Too Many Meetings” Problem. The Pyramid Principle was created by Barbara Minto, who headed training for McKinsey & Company back in the ’70s. Why is the Pyramid Principle important in consulting? The Pyramid Principle. The image above is shaped like a pyramid. Just like the structure of an article, each section will cover its own “what,” “why,” and “how” in that exact order.Using the same example article as above, we’ll deconstruct the section about reporting metrics in your wiki to help you grasp the Minto Pyramid Principle at the section level. This means restructuring answers into the right scopes and right descriptions. This creates a sense of urgency, compelling the executive to listen and possibly act, based on your upcoming ideas. This is the only way to present your ideas clearly to clients. The Pyramid Principle is the international best-seller on how to produce crisp, clear, compelling business writing. Barbara was the best at getting all the new recruits to go from hot-shot, straight-from-campus hires to expert consultants in the shortest amount of time. That’s where the Pyramid Principle comes in. Personally, I like three to five because that gives you room to be wrong on one or two options. You can use your wiki page’s comments to prompt engagement and discussion about this data. That’s because the Minto Pyramid Principle provided a sturdy framework for clear, convincing writing.If you’re wondering how we ordered our main points, we approximated how much our audience would value each takeaway and ranked them from most helpful to least helpful. The Pyramid Principle is Barbara Minto’s powerful and compelling process for For the Hot Fire Shoes example, you can start with a relatively simple answer. Research from George Miller has shown a human being can hold about 7 items in their short-term memory, and for some people it is even less. Barbara Minto reveals that the mind automatically sorts information into distinctive pyramidal groupings. If this were a story, however, we would list our main points in chronological order. Neither option overlaps with the other, so they are, , and there are no major paths to profitability that fall outside of either category, so they are also, Personally, I like three to five because that gives you room to be wrong on one or two options. It’s about your ability to communicate, with impact. As a result, if your content can’t cut to the chase, your readers will likely bounce to the next article that will. This is something Derek, a true genius who I thought would change the game for my firm, couldn’t grasp. The main difference between the Minto Pyramid Principle and the IPS is that the former presents ideas and conclusions that rest on logical analysis and reasoning, whereas the latter is used to report facts in typical news writing style, starting with more and ending with less important information. Good stories don’t just dump information on their audiences, they begin by crisply describing a situation, creating a mental picture in the mind of the audience. You’ve made the dilemma immediately clear to everyone in the room. Minto Pyramid Principle, also referred to as the McKinsey’s Pyramid Principle, is a At the top, you start with the most important takeaway. In business, you have a few minutes to get your point across before a busy executive stops paying attention to you. S-C-Q-A helps you write introductions which engage an audience’s attention before you provide the answers. Barbara was among those to leave.  And the base of one pyramid can (and often does) become the tip of another, to maintain the ‘rule of 3’ discussed above. In vertical relationships, the supporting points (the base) need to answer the question raised by the statement above (the tip). Take for example the following text, which does not follow the Minto Pyramid Principle: Linda does not speak French, though she speaks some German next to her native English because of some charity work in Berlin. However, the purpose of the Pyramid Principle isn’t always to convince everyone that you’re right. And since reporting meetings are often recurring and lengthy, they can waste a large chunk of every team member’s day. There are six skills you need to learn in order to succeed in the world of consulting. Coined by Barbara Minto, a former McKinsey consultant, the Minto Pyramid Principle is a writing framework that suggests structuring information in a pyramid format. Like any good story, you introduce a complication to highlight the conflict, the problem or opportunity that affects the situation. Note that the question above is over simplified – in practice, a good question is often more subtle and the result of analysis to ensure the right question is asked. Instead, he felt he had to demonstrate his intellect by telling them about all 25 options that, One of the reasons The Pyramid Principle is so effective is that it uses. The Pyramid Principle will show you how to communicate your ideas clearly and succinctly. In the real world, the only currency that people pay to read blog posts and internal wiki articles is their attention. Here, you present your results first and then how you got there. Recommended for you. The vertical relationship is important because it presents an idea, allows the reader to absorb it, and then provides answers and supporting evidence.  But all else being equal, the person who advances the fastest is usually the one who knows the value of time, how to deliver value, and tell a succinct story with sound reasoning. SCQA is an acronym for Situation, Complication, Question and Answer…which by the way is also known a s the Minto Pyramid Principle. What is the Pyramid Principle? If I handed you a list of 25 options, you’d have no chance of making a smart decision. Â.  Absolutely, though in a different way. 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