Transcription
I will explain to you how to use the Pyramid Principle from McKinsey & Company to craft a comprehensive and persuasive message, and as a bonus near the end, I will tell you about a related concept, the MECE principle from McKinsey. This is how to ensure your talking points are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive if you follow it. This is the second part of a four-part series on McKinsey & Company's frameworks for communication, which you can use to improve your communication skills in professional environments. And like all McKinsey frameworks, the Pyramid Principle is an analytical tool to clarify your thinking as much as it is a blueprint for crafting a message. It’s akin to the old saying, “Thinking clearly shows clear thinking.” I am drawing on my personal experience in this video working as an external consultant for McKinsey and watching them use the Pyramid Principle in practice. Barbara Minto wrote a book based on her experience at McKinsey titled “The Pyramid Principle,” and there is a great article on the “Product Mindset” website that I am also quoting from, and I will put links to the book and the article in the description below this video. The McKinsey pyramid consists of three levels: the top level, the second level, and the third level. Your message at the top level answers the question: What is your overall idea? What is the main message you want your listeners to grasp? What do you want your message to achieve? This is more than just stating a general idea. Your message at the first level should be action-oriented towards something you want to see happen. Some call this the “key takeaway,” the bottom line, your headline, your argument, or in some cases, the viewpoint you are advocating for. If you were asked to summarize your entire message in one concise and memorable sentence, what would you say? Here are two examples of a top-level statement for a presentation you might give. We must update our logo and branding. We must increase our investment in reaching new customers. Notice that these efforts are summarized in one concise and effective sentence. Your message begins with your key statement at the top of the pyramid. One reason McKinsey promotes the hierarchical approach is that some speakers and writers want to do the opposite. They want to tell the whole story and its details, and then finally arrive at the final recommendation at the end of the message. If you are one of those, I encourage you to identify the main message you tend to put at the end as a call to action, and instead, rephrase it slightly and present it as your main message first to see what you truly want to say here at the first level. Ask yourself questions like these. This is the one thing the listeners heard, my main message. What am I going to say? What is the overall point I want to make? What is the main idea or action I want the listeners to be convinced of? The second level of the pyramid consists of your supporting points. These are the supporting points needed to build your overall argument at the first level. Many call these supporting points “clusters,” and as they broaden, they look more like a visual pyramid. You might present three arguments or three reasons to support a direction you believe is correct. It’s possible that the second level might define a process you want your listeners to follow, and you have your three-part plan that puts your ideas into practice. For example, the three reasons why I think we should update our logo and branding are: First, the current logo is too complex and doesn’t look good in print. Second, customers find the meaning of our current logo confusing, and the branding is vague, and third, we are losing old customers without gaining new ones. In this example, I will present three reasons or justifications to support my overall argument at the first level. This time, let’s assume I wanted to focus on explaining a process I recommend for reaching new customers. I could say that the three ways to invest in reaching new customers are through online advertising, email outreach, and personal follow-up. You will notice in this example that the way I phrased my supporting points was more concise, and in the previous example, you always want to strive to be clear and concise in your first-level message and your second-level supporting points. Using three points is also fairly traditional in writing and speaking. Readers can digest that, and listeners can digest that, but ultimately the essence of your message will determine exactly how many main points you use, and if you’ve done this before, you know that trying to figure out what goes into those buckets is not an easy task. You have to ask yourself, what are the key questions the listeners need to have answered? What are the main reasons for doing this? What are the main parts of the plan? Who specifically should be involved in this project? Now to the third level, the third level is where you put all the data that supports each of your supporting points. The supporting details will be entirely unique to each of your messages. The idea is that each of your points should have support behind it, not just your opinion. You can’t really just say, you really need to do this. That usually won’t be enough. To be truly accurate and persuasive, you need to provide logic and rationale, strong data, case studies, illustrative examples, customer testimonials, and other tangible support in each cluster. I would use a courtroom analogy. The first level would be your big overall argument like the innocence of my client. The second level of the pyramid is where you have your specific argument planks that you will put in court. My client has an alibi, has no motive, and was physically incapable of committing the crime. For each of these three elements, of course, you will need evidence, official documents, surveillance, and video witnesses. In other words, the lawyer in court must support every aspect of the case, and just as in court, the supporting details are where you will spend the vast majority of your time when communicating. It doesn’t take long to communicate a first-level point and state your second-level supporting points, but it takes time to flesh out all the details in the supporting materials within those clusters as a bonus. Now, let’s talk about how to ensure your supporting points are what McKinsey calls MECE. This is MECE, which stands for Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive, which is a mouthful. Mutually exclusive simply means that each of your supporting points and the data that supports each of those supporting points do not overlap. Each cluster is mutually exclusive, so for example, in my message about finding new customers, my supporting points were that we should reach them through online advertising, email outreach, and personal follow-up. Let’s say, for example, that one of my data points to support using more online ads was a story, a specific story about a customer who discovered our business through online ads. Once that story is included in the online ads section, I should not reuse any part of it or use it to support another point, such as the issue of email outreach. Similarly, do not repeat the same statistic in each section, as this will seem redundant and create unwanted ambiguity between the supporting points. Instead, strive to make your clusters of supporting points and the evidence within each cluster distinct. You must use new and distinct data in each of your supporting points. You can ensure your clusters are mutually exclusive by doing what we call vertical logic checking. Ensure that each of your data points supports the point directly above it and ensure that that supporting point supports your overall argument at the top level. If you find that some data or an example or an illustration does not support the point directly above it, then that might be a loose thread that does not belong in your outline. And when you do vertical logic checking, if you find a piece of data that appears in more than one cluster at the second level, keep it with the supporting point it fits best with and remove it from the other cluster. Now, are there exceptions to this rule of being mutually exclusive? Of course, but strive as a default approach to ensure that each supporting point and the data within it are distinct, and CE stands for collectively exhaustive. You will do what McKinsey calls horizontal logic checking to ensure that you have the correct overall spread of supporting points and that these supporting points flow in a natural logical order. First, second, third. In our example about creating a new logo and new branding, you need to ensure that you answer the key questions that listeners will ask themselves with your supporting points. Do your best to anticipate what the listeners most want to know. Now, I personally think the word exhaustive is a bit of an overstatement. This sounds like a lot of pressure that might give the wrong impression that you are supposed to tell the listeners everything you know, which is often a cause for rambling. Instead, just ensure that you have the correct spread of supporting points and that there are no obvious questions or parts of the process that have been omitted. If you omit something important, expect your listeners to raise some objection to that missing point, and by doing both vertical and horizontal logic checking, you will ensure that your supporting points and details are integrated and comprehensive. Let’s quickly summarize. The Pyramid Principle consists of three levels, and ensure that the information in your pyramid is accurate by doing both vertical and horizontal logic checking. As we mentioned, this framework is as much a thinking and analytical tool as it is a speaking tool, because it forces you to take a disciplined approach to your preparation, and it clearly clarifies your thinking and presentation process. Using the pyramid is a great way to write written messages or craft presentations. In the next video, part three, I will show you how to use the SCR framework from part one of this series and combine it with the Pyramid Principle to create a presentation framework that McKinsey recommends. Until then, thank you. God bless you, and see you soon.