Three Keys to Clear Communication

The most important skill for anyone in business is clear communication.

I've found many great ideas don't see the light of day, not because they were bad ideas, but because they were poorly communicated.

One of the best resources on clear communication is The Pyramid Principle by Barbaro Minto.

I first learned about The Pyramid Principle when I stumbled on a thread about how McKinsey uses the Pyramid Principle to pitch solutions to busy executives. McKinsey charges an arm and a leg for this. After learning The Pyramid Principle, you can too.

Here are the three keys to clear communication:

1. Start with the answer
2. Group and summarize supporting arguments
3. Present supporting ideas in a logical order

Easier written than done, so let’s take a look at each.

Start with the answer

The first reason you should lead with the answer is that the person you’re communicating with may have already arrived at your same conclusion. That’s great. In that case, we can all get on with the solution.

This is true whether you’re writing landing page copy or pitching an executive. If your reader/listener agrees with the conclusion from the jump, you accelerate the pace of implementation.

The second reason is most people think in a top-down fashion.?

Their thought process is a waterfall of “whys”:

Q: What should we do?

A: We should do X. (leading with the answer)

Q: Why?

A: Because of A, B, and C

Q: Why A? Why B? Why C?

This is how we think. If we’re not totally sold on the answer, we start to dive deeper into supporting details. Starting with the answer naturally leads you to expanding on it in a top-down fashion.

Group and summarize supporting arguments

People will naturally group and summarize the ideas you present, so you should make their life easier and do this for them.

The Pyramid Principle says that “ideas in writing should always form a pyramid under a single thought.”

Take a look at our previous conversation.?

The first thought is your answer. The second layer is a summary of supporting ideas or arguments. These were A, B, and C.

It just so happens, the magic number of ideas in a group is 3 (see this great post from Ameet Ranadive). So let’s stick with “A, B, and C” as a rule of thumb.

So now we’re breaking down the “why” from our answer into 3 summaries: A, B, and C.

From there, we can break each summary into more detail: A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, C1, C2, C3, etc..

Let's talk about how you’d do that.

Present supporting ideas in a logical order

Each group of ideas should belong together and follow some logical structure. Here’s how to order them:

• Time order: if there is a cause-and-effect associated to these ideas, they should be ordered as such
• Structural order: Break a single thought into all its parts, making sure you hit all supporting ideas
• Degree order: Present ideas from most to least important (similar to this whole concept)

TLDR:? Market your ideas like a movie.

A good way to reinforce this principle is to think about how movies are marketed.

First there’s the trailer, then the movie, then the “making of”…

The trailer is the answer you lead with. The movie is the supporting summaries for why that’s your answer. The “making of” is the detail underneath those summaries.

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This post is one of a series of posts from a playbook on product strategy I’ve created over the past 7 years.

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