Hierarchically structured logic, thinking and communication
When I was in a business case study club during undergraduate, they were quite obsessive on abiding by a method for structuring the logic and communicating with each other with that. The method or principle is called Minto’s Pyramid Principle, which seems to be widely adopted by many major management consulting companies such as McKinsey & Co. (It is related to a principle called “MECE Principle — Mutually Exculsive Collectively Exhaustive.”) The person who coined this principle herself was a consultant at McKinsey a few decades ago, specialized on business communication.
The reason why I am talking about this is that I realized this principle would look pretty similar with the principle we had studied for devising our own vocabulary when we were doing the assignment 3 or 4. The principle is quite simple to explain. It argues that one should communicate with each other with a pyramid-looking logic, especially in business environment. Let me walk through this process for a second. See the picture below.
Let’s say you are consulting a company. You are trying to argue that the reason the company is suffering recently is that it is losing the customer base of Product A. Without structuring, every reason will be
just linearly enumerated. The listener will be confused with whether the investigation is comprehensive and whether there is no logical gap or leap. You need to structure your logic into hierarchy, so that the
listener can get the point easily and you and the client can be on the same page.
There are two dimensions in the pyramid principle: one is horizontal dimension and the other is vertical dimension of the logic. The horizontal dimension checks whether you achieve comprehensiveness in each layer of your logic without any overlapping. The vertical dimension guarantees that your logic does not contain any logical jump. The lower layer should be able to answer “Why so?” question of the upper layer’s argument. On the other hand, the upper layer should be derived by asking “So what?” after collecting the lower layer arguments. By doing this, you can have a comprehensive, efficient and logical-leap-proof logic for your presentation.
Isn’t this process sound quite similar with information organization principle we used this semester for designing vocabulary?
This principle is very useful when you present your idea to other people and try to persuade them, although the example above was extremely simple. Since they are probably not on the same page with you, you have to have a well-structured logic something like this. If you train yourself with this principle well, I believe that this will be definitely helpful for you from sending a flyer for your party to writing a paper. (I found a link explaining MECE framework. Here.)