One of the most powerful frameworks for clear thinking is the Pyramid Principle.
It comes from the classic business book: The Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto. Minto was the first female consultant at McKinsey and developed these ideas to help consultants communicate complex ideas clearly.
The core concept is simple: structure your thinking in the shape of a pyramid. The core synthesized idea at the top, and supporting details below.
But in practice, it can be confusing to apply to your work.
This is because there is really two ways to think about it.
- Bottom-Up: Using the principles to go from lots of information to a synthesized core idea
- Top-down: Once you have a structured set of ideas using things like MECE, this is how you think about organizing the sequence and order of events.
The Pyramid Principle forces clarity and simplicity
Visually we can look at a set of ideas as follows:
At the lowest level is “evidence” – these are the data points, interview insights, public information, and your own knowledge.
Above that are the “insights” – you synthesize your information into the “so what?” that is relevant to your audience.
And then the “main idea” is really a coherent narrative – often a 2-3 sentence paragraph of the insights.
An example of bottom-up insight generation
Let’s say you’re researching reasons why sales declined last quarter.
You may find:
- The economy weakened, hurting purchasing power
- A new competitor took 20% market share
- Manufacturing delays led to product shortages
The insight could be: “Sales declined due to external economic factors and internal execution issues.” In pyramid form:
The pyramid is about moving up to a higher level of abstraction and getting to the point: what happened and why does it matter?
From here, this is often the message you would start with when communicating externally.
But there is some nuance
In consulting it is common wisdom to “start with the top.” This means starting with the top of the pyramid, the highest level of insights.
But in reality, it depends (probably the most useful mantra for consulting)
If you have a hostile audience or a team that is very comfortable with getting in the weeds with data, you may actually want to start with the lower-level insights.
Getting this right takes a bit of trial and error.
So for the above example, if you were talking to the head of manufacturing, you may actually want to bring up the manufacturing data FIRST. This is because you’d want to get that person’s agreement on your shared version of reality before moving on to the other points. If they don’t agree on how you are analyzing their manufacturing function, they will be skeptical of your high-level takeaway.
Try it out this week. Identify a project or problem and sketch a pyramid. Pay attention to how you sequence and order the levels next time you explain it to someone. I bet it reveals new insights!
Apply The Skills In A Structured Way
I wrote this email with the goal of giving you a practical tool you can apply in your work. If you’re ready to go deeper, consider enrolling in Think Like a Strategy Consultant. I wrote a full lesson in the curriculum covering how to synthesize & structure your argument with The Pyramid Principle. Get a preview from this free preview of an introductory video:
Get access to project checklists, MECE practice examples, detailed walkthroughs, best practices, a simple method for using the pyramid principle, and McKinsey slide design principles
Do you have a toolkit for business problem solving? I created Think Like a Strategy Consultant as an online course to make the tools of strategy consultants accessible to driven professionals, executives, and consultants. This course teaches you how to synthesize information into compelling insights, structure your information in ways that help you solve problems, and develop presentations that resonate at the C-Level. Click here to learn more or if you are interested in getting started now.
