[Book 42] The Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto

The Pyramid Principle clarifies business writing by providing a framework to logically and succinctly organize research and analysis. Research is a deductive process where insights lead to further research, iterating until the desired solution is found. In contrast, an inductive process should be used when sharing results. This involves stating conclusions up front and supporting them with detailed rationale. The “pyramid” concept places the central idea and conclusion at the top, with supporting rationale below.

To ensure research yields meaningful insights, structure it in advance so that findings always reveal coherent conclusions. Fortunately, the scientific method is an ideal framework: 1) generate alternative hypothesis, 2) devise tests to confirm or refute each hypothesis, 3) carry out each test, and 4) iterate as needed. The key is to develop a plan first rather than diving in with whatever data is immediately available.

Barbara explains that effective writing involves distilling extensive amounts of information into a few mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive summary points. To do so, list all the points, group similar ones together under a summary point, and determine their logical order.

Finally, a good presentation of analysis is a well-flowing story. Start with an introduction that reminds the reader of what they already know to be true and then reveal the main point. Follow this with 3-5 key line points, often shown as an executive summary. Next, expand upon each point with summarizing headers and succinct supporting details. In longer documents, use transitional language to guide the reader from one section to the next.

This book has helped improve my business writing and storyboarding by providing a framework to evaluate the organization of its underlying logic.

You should read this book if you…

• want to improve your business writing
• seek to more effectively organize and summarize your analysis
• want to learn how to impose logic in your thinking

Additional Information

Year Published: 1987
Book Ranking (from 1-10): 8 – Very Good – In depth insights on a specific topic
Ease of Read (from 1-5): 4 – Moderately challenging

Key Highlights

1. The easiest order for a reader is to receive the major, more abstract ideas before he is required to take in the minor, supporting ones. And since the major ideas are always derived from the minor ones, the ideal structure of the ideas will always be a pyramid of groups of ideas tied together by a single overall thought. Within that pyramidal structure, the ideas will relate vertically-in that a point at any level will always be a summary of the ideas grouped below; and horizontally-in that the ideas will have been grouped together because together they present a logical argument
2. Controlling the sequence in which you present your ideas is the single most important act necessary to clear writing. The clearest sequence is always to give the summarizing idea before you give the individual ideas being summarized
3. All of this suggests that the clearest written documents will be those that consistently present their information from the top down, in a pyramidal structure, even though the original thinking will have been done from the bottom up
4. Fortunately, you can define in advance whether or not you have built the structure properly by checking to see whether your ideas relate to each other in a way that permits them to form pyramidal groups. Specifically they must obey three rules:
   1) Ideas at any level in the pyramid must always be summaries of the ideas grouped below them
   2) Ideas in each grouping must always be the same kind of idea
   3) Ideas in each grouping must always be logically ordered
5. A shortcut in checking your groupings is to be sure that you can clearly label the ideas with a plural noun
6. You can work out the ideas from the bottom up by following a 3-step process.
   1. List all the points you think you want to make
   2. Work out the relationships between them
   3. Draw conclusions
7. Never have a heading called “Findings,” for example, or “Conclusions.” Such headings have no scanning value
8. That’s what you want to do in an introduction. You want to build on the reader’s interest in the subject by telling him a story about it. Every good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That is, it establishes a situation, introduces a complication, and offers a resolution. The resolution will always be your major point, since you always write either to resolve a problem or to answer a question already in the reader’s mind
9. Introductions are meant to remind rather than to inform. This means that nothing should be included that would have to be proved to the reader for him to accept the statement of your points
10. You want to push deductive reasoning as low in the pyramid as possible, to limit intervening information to the minimum. At the paragraph level deductive arguments are lovely; and present an easy-to-follow flow; but inductive reasoning is always easier to absorb at higher levels
11. This example has demonstrated the only process I know for getting at the real thinking underlying lists of ideas grouped as a class.
    1. Identify the type of point being made
    2. Group together those of the same type
    3. Look for the order the set of groups implies
12. The first rule of the pyramid: ideas at each level must be summaries of the ideas grouped below them, because they were in fact derived from them. The act of summarizing the grouping is the act of completing the thinking
13. Once you have the steps in your process sorted out, you come to what is the absolute hardest part of dealing with action ideas-stating the overall summary effect. I can’t really give you a fool-proof technique for doing this, rather than to say that
    • The grouping must be MECE
    • The summary must state the direct effect of carrying out the actions, worded to imply an end product
14. The major value of making a proper summary statement is that it helps you to find out what you really think. It also tells the reader in advance what he is meant to think about the ideas, and thus prepares his mind to receive them more easily, with greater confidence in their validity
15. To generate the conclusions and actions most efficiently, the analyst must deliberately structure his initial fact-gathering effort so that it will yield logically coherent findings. That is not the general practice. More likely is for people to go out and gather whatever data are available in an area, and postpone any real thought until they have the facts and figures all in one place
16. Eventually they determined that what makes sense (and what the better consulting firms now do) is to structure the analysis of the problem before beginning to gather any data. To an extent they are replicating the classic scientific method, in which you:
    • Generate alternative hypotheses
    • Devise a crucial experiment (or several of them) with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will as nearly as possible exclude one or more of the hypotheses
    • Carry out the experiment so as to get a clean result
    • Plan remedial action accordingly
17. Introduce each group of headings. In doing so, you want to state the major point that the grouping will explain or defend, as well as the ideas to come. To omit this service is to present the reader with a mystery story, since he will then not be able to judge what the points are you are trying to make in that section until he gets to the end-and by then he may well have forgotten the beginning. For this reason, you should never have a major section heading begin immediately after the title, nor should you ever have a subsection heading begin immediately after the section heading
18. You must be totally ruthless in limiting your points to tile outline of your deductive or inductive argument. Most people disregard this requirement and simply list points, ignoring the niceties of either induction or deduction. You know that there are never more than four points in a chained deductive argument, and never more than five in an inductive one. If you find yourself going beyond, the likelihood is that you have overlooked em opportunity to group, and should rethink what you are saying
19. You need to produce a “Show” and a show requires a star, a script, a storyboard, technically excellent visual elements, and consideration of such intangibles as timing, pacing, and suspense
20. The storyboarding approach that I take to moving from the pyramid to a presentation is as follows: 1) Write the introduction in full, putting down every word you will say in the order in which you will say it. This ensures that you have left nothing out of your beginning story, and allows you to double check that the question you are answering is really valid for the audience 2) Have available a blank storyboard form, and write across the top of each blank slide the points from the introduction you wish to illustrate visually, plus those from the Key Line and one level below the Key Line 3) Rough out the visual way you will illustrate each point. Generally you do this without real numbers, but simply with an indication of the types of data you would include, plus notes to yourself and the designer of the sort of relationship you want to show 4) Script the words to be said around each slide, to ensure the set of slides flows as a story 5) Complete the design of the slides and send them off to be properly drawn
    6. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse!
21. A storyboard at its simplest is a sheet of paper turned sideways and divided into separate sections, each of which represents a blank slide. It enables you to write down the specific points that you expect to turn into slides, and to indicate which should be presented as text slides and which should be illustrated with a graphic of some sort