In vertical relationships, the supporting points (the base) need to answer the question raised by the statement above (the tip). You’ve established your familiarity with their company, established a positive atmosphere, and set the stage for your story. Finally, the “how,” or tactical, practical advice for executing the main takeaway, will branch out from each “why.”To crystalize your understanding of the Minto Pyramid Principle at the article level, we’ll flesh out the structure of our article 5 Ways Managers Can Solve the “Too Many Meetings” Problem in the diagram below. Next, the “why,” or your supporting evidence for your takeaways, will branch out from each point. SCQ Framework SM 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.. Minto Books International, Inc. 19 Cadogan Place London SW1X 9SA UK Tel: +44 (0)207 235 6274 Fax: +44 (0)207 823 1827. What is the Pyramid Principle? 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. Here’s an example of it at work: The McKinsey Minto Pyramid Principle for communicating complex topics easily. Derek was quantitatively brilliant, but his comfort zone wouldn’t allow him to offer a client an idea with 3-5 supporting options. The Pyramid Principle will show you how to communicate your ideas clearly and succinctly.  The answer or recommendation is then provided as the resolution, the (hopefully) happy ending to the story. If you’re right, it will allow the audience to grasp the idea quickly and easily. 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. 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. Data is just a bunch of numbers packed into a spreadsheet. Although it's not universally true, I've found that as folks move into more senior roles, they spend a lot more time writing. If you  fail to get right to the point, you risk losing them. She based her thinking around ideas ranging from Aristotle’s Rhetoric and other sources on logic throughout history.Her pyramid principle works really well with the consulting problem solving process as it is a natural partner for hypothesis-driven thinking. Barbara Minto reveals that the mind automatically sorts information into distinctive pyramidal groupings. The Pyramid Principle. The same is true with your audience. 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. One of the best, yet relatively unknown tools to help you hold the attention of executives (or any audience) is The Pyramid Principle. You still need to hustle, and you still need to hit your targets.  Then a question is posed to highlight the decision at hand, the moment of truth for the individual or company. It is now widely part of the toolkit every strategy consultants around the world needs to learn and use. Why is the Pyramid Principle important in consulting? This creates a sense of urgency, compelling the executive to listen and possibly act, based on your upcoming ideas. 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 top of the pyramid is a statement, with the supporting base of the pyramid ready to provide answers to the questions the statement raises.  Completely exhaustive means you have included every possible answer. You’ve started a question and answer dialogue (drawn from ancient techniques, like the Socratic Method). 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. Then, each of your “whats,” or key points, will branch out from your premise. Â. The Pyramid Principle explained. tl;dr - it's worth reading Barbara Minto's The Pyramid Principle.. This is a seminal concept in executive communication, and has spread like a virus from McKinsey to every other con… It’s to lay out your argument in the clearest terms possible, so that listeners can understand your thinking and engage more fully. You can use your wiki page’s comments to prompt engagement and discussion about this data. Recommended for you. 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. If your answers aren’t mutually exclusive, the lines become blurred, and clients may become confused and try clarify your logic on the fly.  How is this possible?  The sequence in which you present your ideas is the most important aspect to improve the clarity of your writing, and you can control this sequence. I also work as an adjunct professor at The University of Texas at Dallas, where I help business school students develop the skills necessary to thrive in consulting and industry roles. The Pyramid Principle was created by Barbara Minto, who headed training for McKinsey & Company back in the ’70s.  Absolutely, though in a different way. Exercise 2: Below are two examples of communication. This is the only way to present your ideas clearly to clients. The Pyramid Principle was created by Barbara Minto, who headed training for McKinsey & Company back in the ’70s. 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. Presenters typically regurgitate a slide deck full of metrics that everyone could’ve read on their own time. The Pyramid Principle is a structure to present your synthesis in an effective and convincing manner. This is a key tenet of both effective information analysis and communication to your audience. The Minto Pyramid Principle® Course The most common cause of unclear writing is poor structure. In The Pyramid Principle, the question extends logically from the complication, which keeps the overarching problem mentally straightforward and easier to follow. 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. 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. Minto Pyramid Principle, also referred to as the McKinsey’s Pyramid Principle, is a The Pyramid Principle is used the consulting world over – whether during interim internal discussions or executive-level presentations. You’ve made the dilemma immediately clear to everyone in the room. The Pyramid Principle is Barbara Minto’s powerful and compelling process for The question you raise needs to have answers that are. What makes it valuable are the learnings within. If this were a story, however, we would list our main points in chronological order. Then you arrange the information in a way that your audience can rapidly process. ”, Last comes the “how.” Check out the tips we dish out in our example section below.“But don’t just report the metrics—report the insights you extracted from your metrics. 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. From The Pyramid Principle in Consulting Consultants must structure their thinking. In fact, according to research from Nielsen, websites only have 10-20 seconds to grab a user’s attention.However, there is a silver lining that you can pluck from that unfavorable statistic. Tens of thousands of people worldwide have benefited from former McKinsey consultant Barbara Minto’s famous Pyramid Principle. The image above is shaped like a pyramid. The classic approach to using the pyramid principle is the one recommended by Barbara Minto to “start with the answer.” This is almost always the best way to communicate if you are delivering something in writing. 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. “How can we increase profitability for Hot Fire Shoes?”. For the Love of Physics - Walter Lewin - May 16, 2011 - Duration: 1:01:26. For most of us, the Minto Pyramid Principle is the opposite of what our high school English teachers and college professors taught us. Barbara was. If you read most compelling persuasive essays, they typically start with a powerful thesis detailing what will be discussed. In short, you’ve grabbed their attention. The Pyramid Principle Training module Dit document is onderdeel van een set ondersteunend materiaal dat ter download wordt aangeboden aan kopers van Strategiehelden door Jeroen De Flander (ISBN België 978 90 4860 959 8 - ISBN Nederland 978 90 4700 410 3). 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. Lectures by Walter Lewin. Barbara was among those to leave. The best structure to use is one that reflects the way the mind naturally works. 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. All Rights Reserved. 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. Instead, he felt he had to demonstrate his intellect by telling them about all 25 options that might work, in a semi-organized list. Use the following examples of connected and complementary models to weave Minto’s pyramid into your broader latticework of mental models. S-C-Q-A helps you write introductions which engage an audience’s attention before you provide the answers. The vertical relationship is important because it presents an idea, allows the reader to absorb it, and then provides answers and supporting evidence. The question you raise needs to have answers that are mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive, otherwise known in business lingo as MECE. Personally, I like three to five because that gives you room to be wrong on one or two options.  Sound like any presentations you’ve seen? Here, you present your results first and then how you got there. 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. This is something Derek, a true genius who I thought would change the game for my firm, couldn’t grasp. She loves snow and hiking in the nature, and is fed up with the busy city-life in New York. , otherwise known in business lingo as MECE. 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. Pyramid Structures. At the top, you start with the most important takeaway. 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. 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 horizontal relationships, the supporting points relate to each other, using either deductive or inductive reasoning. What Is the Minto Pyramid Principle? Coined by Barbara Minto, a former McKinsey consultant, the Minto Pyramid Principle is a writing framework that suggests structuring information in a pyramid format. If there is power in the vertical relationships, is there also power in the horizontal relationships? Coined by Barbara Minto, a former McKinsey consultant, the Minto Pyramid Principle is a writing framework that suggests structuring information in a pyramid format. It concentrates instead on the thinking process that should precede the writing. But you must remember that they were paid to read our writing. We recommend following the Minto Pyramid Principle. 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. To learn and use fits all solution here and explaining why you want, and explaining why you want.! Content, and explaining why you want to hire you to listen and possibly act, based your. 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