On Thinking & Communicating -- Thank you Barbara Minto

In 2016, my co-founder Jas and I attended Harrison Metal’s General Management Course, led by Michael Dearing. Designed primarily for startup founders, executives, and middle-managers, the program provided a 3-day crash course on management and provided a number of tools and frameworks that I’ve found indispensable ever since. 

The very best of those frameworks -- one that subsequently became the primary apparatus through which I determine what I actually think -- is Barbara Minto's immortal communication framework, the Pyramid Principle. 

In the early 60’s Barbara was one of the first women to graduate from Harvard Business School. Upon graduation, she was the first female MBA professional hired by the global consulting firm McKinsey, and over the course of her decade at the firm, she became essential to many of her colleagues for her ability to help them rationally communicate complex business challenges and solutions.

Over time, she began noticing a pattern — the shape of the most effective communication resembled a pyramid. And there were always four essential elements to the structure:

1. Situation — the context, laid out unambiguously and unemotionally 
2. Complication — the change, or the cause of increasing difficulty 
3. Question — the question posed by the situation and the complication
4. Answer — the possible solutions, supported by evidence 

Great communication, she observed, wasn’t a function of language (in fact language is rarely the problem), but rather a function of how thinking is organized. The thinking could be correct, but if the sequential organization of the thought were poorly organized, the efficacy of the resulting communication would deteriorate. 

In practice, what did this mean? As consultants, Barbara and her colleagues were responsible for diagnosing the business challenges of major corporations and then presenting solutions. If the communication of the challenges and the presentation of the solutions were organized pyramidally, McKinsey could better serve their clients. In return, their clients made more money, and so, too, did McKinsey. If, on the other hand, business challenges and their solutions were presented with poor structure, the results could take on any number of catastrophic shapes, including misunderstanding, misdiagnosis, incorrect solutions, ineffective collaboration, and on and on. 

I use the word catastrophic not to be glib, but to highlight the damage that can occur when people fail to communicate effectively. We can increase the probability that we make fewer mistakes if we incorporate Barbara’s insight — that the structure of our thinking — not the language we use to describe our thinking — is the essential catalyst of collaboration. 

Michael Dearing demonstrated the power of the pyramid principle in an emphatic real-world example.

The CEO of a rapidly growing startup asks a middle-manager to send her an email on the status of a certain product line. The middle-manager responds to the CEO’s request with the following email:

“We’re doing okay in the X product line. I’m not sure though that I like what I’m seeing with the ads we’ve been running to our enterprise customers. We’ve also seen some decline in repeat purchases over the last month. Not sure why exactly, but probably a result of declining email marketing efficiency. We should probably run some new test campaigns soon."

Dearing referred this answer as the "narrative style" and asked us to describe the middle-manager's answer.

Difficult to parse...unclear...not solution-oriented...ambiguous...hard to know how to help... These were the adjectives and descriptions we felt encapsulated the email.

We were then shown a Mintoized response.

Situation: X product line is critical to our growth strategy. It's 25% of our sales and a gateway category to Z and Y product lines.

Complication: Over the last month, we've seen two complications emerge: 1) repeat purchase has declined by 10% from the previous month; and 2) our return on ad spend has declined by 30%.

Question: What should we do?

Answer: I believe we need to improve marketing and merchandising to our buyers and suggest we take 2 actions:

1. Increase X, Y, Z related to ad campaigns {evidence}
2. Accelerate X, Y, Z related to repeat purchases {evidence}

Over the years, I've found that I use the Pyramid Principle constantly. It's become an essential apparatus for thinking, and like meditation, I've come to believe that applying Minto's framework is a practice. Practitioners can improve, and those that invest in the practice open up opportunities for themselves by, as Dearing says, "greasing the gears" of their organizations.

Barbara eventually left Mckinsey to start her own company. She packaged her insights about communicating into the Pyramid Principle and has been coaching business leaders ever since. Today, she lives in London, and the great business schools and consulting companies of the world use her model to train their students and staff.