The Pyramid Principle: The Thinking Framework I Wish I'd Learned Before My First Big Pitch

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Jun 17, 2020

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A practical review of Barbara Minto's Pyramid Principle — the structured thinking framework that changed how a 15-year marketing consultant writes proposals, briefs, and client presentations.

The Memo That Came Back With Red All Over It

Early in my career, I spent three days writing a campaign proposal for a senior client. I was proud of it. It was thorough. It started with the market context, moved through the research findings, walked through the analysis in careful detail, and arrived — on page eleven — at the recommendation.

It came back the same afternoon. One comment at the top, in red: "What are you actually proposing? I had to read to the end to find out."

That comment stayed with me for a long time. I understood what the client meant. I just didn't know how to fix it structurally — I kept writing the way I'd been taught to think, which was: gather evidence, build the argument, arrive at the conclusion. Start at the bottom and work up.

Barbara Minto's The Pyramid Principle is the book that explained, clearly and specifically, why that approach fails in professional communication — and what to do instead.

I read it about two years into my consulting work. It's one of those books that feels obvious in retrospect and transformative at the time.

What the Book Actually Is

The Pyramid Principle was developed by Barbara Minto during her time at McKinsey in the 1970s, and it has remained the foundational text on structured business communication ever since. Most major consulting firms still teach some version of it. Business school writing courses reference it. If you've ever read a McKinsey report or a well-constructed strategy deck and wondered why it felt so clear and easy to follow, this is usually the reason.

The core idea is simple enough to state in one sentence: lead with your conclusion, then support it.

But the book goes considerably deeper than that, into the specific mechanics of how to organize a complex argument so that every piece of it earns its place and the reader always knows where they are. That depth is what makes it useful for working professionals rather than just an interesting concept.

One important caveat Minto states upfront, which I appreciated: the book assumes you already know how to write clear sentences and paragraphs. It's not a writing guide. It's a thinking and structuring guide. If your sentences are unclear, no amount of pyramid structure will save them. What the framework does is organise clear thinking into a form that other people can actually receive and use.

The Idea That Changed How I Write Everything

The thing that landed hardest for me when I first read this book was the explanation of why "save the conclusion for the end" fails in professional contexts.

Minto's argument: when you present information without a clear conclusion upfront, you're forcing the reader to hold all of your evidence in working memory while trying to figure out where it's going. That's cognitively expensive. By the time they reach your recommendation, they've spent so much mental energy tracking the argument that they have less capacity to actually evaluate the conclusion.

When you lead with the conclusion — "we should do X, for three reasons" — you give the reader a frame before they encounter the evidence. They know what they're reading toward. Each piece of evidence slots into a structure they already have. The whole thing is easier to follow, easier to remember, and easier to push back on if they disagree.

In marketing and agency work specifically, this matters constantly. Every brief, every proposal, every client presentation, every internal recommendation — all of these live or die by whether the person reading them can quickly grasp what you're asking them to think or do. Burying the recommendation on page eleven doesn't demonstrate rigour. It demonstrates that you haven't done the work of deciding what actually matters most.

The professional habit shift the book requires is real and takes practice: finish your thinking before you start writing, not during. The structure is only as good as the clarity of thought behind it. When I catch myself writing in circles, it's almost always because I haven't actually decided what I think yet — and I'm using the document to figure it out rather than to communicate a conclusion I've already reached.

The SCQA Framework — The Most Useful Tool in the Book

The part of The Pyramid Principle that I've probably used most frequently in actual work is the SCQA structure for introductions. It stands for: Situation, Complication, Question, Answer.

The idea is that every effective professional communication starts by establishing a shared context (Situation), introducing the tension or problem that makes action necessary (Complication), raising the question that naturally follows from that tension (Question), and then answering it directly (Answer). The rest of the document supports the Answer.

In practice, a campaign brief introduction might run something like:

"Our Q4 campaign on TikTok is currently underperforming against benchmarks — reach is on target but conversion to purchase intent is 40% below last quarter. [Situation] The primary driver appears to be a mismatch between content format and the platform's current algorithmic preferences, which have shifted significantly toward video-first formats since our last campaign cycle. [Complication] How do we close the conversion gap before the end of Q4? [Question] We recommend reformatting 60% of planned content into short video within the next two weeks, prioritising the three product lines with the strongest existing community signal. [Answer]"

This sounds obvious when you read it. The reason it's worth formalising is that most professional writing skips one or more of these elements — usually the Complication (which explains why action is needed now, not just what the situation is) or the explicit Question (which makes clear what kind of answer the document is actually providing).

Minto also offers four variations on this structure depending on context — Standard (Situation → Complication → Answer), Direct (Answer → Situation → Complication), and two others suited to specific situations like emphasizing urgency or pre-empting resistance. The flexibility is genuinely useful once the base structure is internalized.

Deductive vs Inductive: The Distinction That Cleans Up Messy Arguments

The other part of the book that I found genuinely clarifying — and that I still use as a diagnostic when a document isn't working — is the distinction between deductive and inductive reasoning structures.

Deductive reasoning builds an argument step by step, where each point follows from the previous one, leading to a conclusion. Major premise → minor premise → conclusion. The classic syllogism. In a document, this looks like: "X is true. Y is true given X. Therefore Z." The problem with pure deductive structure in long documents is that it's slow and the reader has to wait through the whole chain before they get the conclusion — which is exactly the problem SCQA and conclusion-first structure solve.

Inductive reasoning groups several independent points that all support the same conclusion. "We should do X for three reasons: A, B, and C." The points don't depend on each other — they each stand alone as supporting evidence. This is the structure that works better for most business documents because the reader can see the conclusion immediately and each supporting point adds independent weight.

The practical diagnostic: if you're writing a document and it feels like it's going in circles, check whether your supporting points actually stand independently or whether they depend on each other to make sense. If they depend on each other, you have a deductive chain and you need to be more explicit about the logical sequence. If they're independent, you have an inductive structure and you should lead with the conclusion they support.

This sounds technical. In practice, once you've applied it a few times, it becomes second nature — the kind of thing you notice immediately when a document isn't working and can usually fix in under ten minutes.

How I Actually Use It Now

After fifteen years of writing proposals, briefs, strategy documents and client presentations across North American and Greater China markets, here's what has stuck from this book:

Always write the conclusion first — in your head if not on the page. If you don't know what you're recommending before you start writing, stop and figure that out first. The document exists to communicate a decision, not to reach one.

Use SCQA for anything that requires context-setting. Briefing a new client. Explaining a platform strategy change. Presenting unexpected results. Recommending a budget reallocation. The Situation-Complication-Question-Answer structure makes the stakes immediately clear and the recommendation immediately legible.

Check your supporting structure when something isn't landing. When a client pushes back in a way that feels like they've missed the point, the problem is often structural rather than substantive. They received the information but not in an order that allowed them to process it correctly. This is fixable.

The framework matters more in high-stakes communication. For a Slack message or a quick email, overthinking structure creates friction. For a board presentation, a major proposal, or a brief that will be briefed to a team — the investment in getting the structure right pays back many times over.

The one limitation I'd note: this book was written in a consulting context, and some of its examples and assumptions reflect that world. For social media marketers, content creators, or anyone whose communication is more conversational than formal, the framework requires some translation. The underlying logic — lead with what you want the person to think or do, then give them the reason to believe it — is universal. The specific mechanics need calibrating to context.

Who Should Read This

The Pyramid Principle is not a quick read and it's not a light one. It rewards careful, slow reading and benefits enormously from being applied in real work as you go through it rather than read end-to-end and shelved.

The audience it's most useful for: anyone who regularly writes documents that need to persuade or inform — proposals, strategy briefs, campaign post-mortems, internal recommendations, client presentations. If you've ever sent something carefully constructed and received a response that suggested the other person had read something entirely different, this book will tell you why and give you specific tools to fix it.

If you're early in your marketing career and building a writing practice: read this book before you develop too many bad structural habits. The habits the framework builds are much easier to form from scratch than to replace later.

If you're running a small business and writing your own proposals and pitches: the SCQA structure alone is worth the price of the book. Apply it to your next proposal. See what happens.