Start with the Posts

Once, I took a course that spent what seemed to me an almost unbelievable, preposterous amount of time on the "right" way to structure communication. Not public speaking tips or writing tips, exactly, or how to make a nice set of slides, although all of those things got dragged into the course fairly quickly. No, it was about communication in the more basic and somehow much more irritating sense of something like this: you have some information and ideas in your head, another person does not have either of those in theirs, and now what do you do to translate from point A to point B and achieve something like forward progress? It was annoying because once we all really got it, the realization rippled through the room: why didn't we get this before? Intuitively?

I remember having a mild resistance to the whole enterprise. Because I was there to get better at the work. Communication as a topic seemed important-but-adjacent to the getting better at work. Kind of in the same way being on time and knowing how to use Excel and not behaving strangely in meetings are also important to being good at work. Or like listening to a Ted Talk on public speaking. Sure, yes, speak loudly and enunciate well and breathe: good advice.

But the coursework ultimately honed in on the last-mile problem of translating what's obvious in your head now into other heads where that thing-being-translated is not obvious. We studied examples side by side, and the ripple was in how obvious it was once laid out before you.

I remember there being a lot of insistence on distilling what the other person actually heard, which was a much less comfortable question than what you thought you'd said or written to that person. These are obviously different things, but I had (apparently) spent a fair amount of my working life treating them as approximately the same thing.

We learned other frameworks and exercises, most of which have since vanished from memory in the normal way that coursework vanishes once you've passed a test and are no longer actively preparing for that same test, along with enormous amounts of perfectly useful information I once paid money to know.

But one thing stayed with me, and it was the framework that's so obvious it hurts: Minto.

The Minto Pyramid Principle says something almost offensively straightforward: tell people the answer first. After that, give them the reasons underneath that answer. And then after that, it's time for the evidence underneath those reasons. With a caution: don't force another person through the chronology of your thinking. You'll want to merely because you lived through it yourself, but it's usually not important, and by the way no one cares!

This sounds so obvious just typing all that. Yes, obviously: of course. Who doesn't do this?

Me, apparently, back then. And everybody else in that room, apparently. And most of the world, usually. We spent two days going through entire workbooks shared with us comparing and contrasting the same memos, communiques, emails, etc., in the Minto method and not, along with the question: which of these would you like to receive?

Once you see it, you start seeing how often that pyramid isn't adhered to. Someone has spent three weeks doing analysis and therefore feels, perhaps a bit understandably, that everyone reading that analysis should experience something of what those three weeks entailed. Here's what we looked at, the method, and four interesting things we found. Oh and here is a chart that took a legitimately upsetting amount of time to make. And around page three or slide eighteen, if you're still conscious, here's what we think we should do.

Minto was useful to me because it made something perfectly clear: the person(s) receiving something from you shouldn't even have to try to reconstruct your thinking. You know what you think, so start there, clearly. Then you can be disagreed with, which is what's actually useful.

Minto has a failure mode, even when you place every part of the pyramid in its right place. One of those reasons holding everything up will bend a little to a not-even-out-of-nowhere question, something like, "Where did that number come from?" or "Why are we assuming that?" The person answers, then answers again with a lot more hesitation and a quizzical look. Thirty seconds later the pyramid is still there but with a lot less authority.

When this happens, I leave ancient Egypt and suddenly I'm walking a fence; you walk past one, and then you put your hand on one of the posts. Uh oh, it moves. And because now you're suspicious, obviously you try the next one.

Annoying to the fence builder.

Finance has a phrase I like: "walking" the model.^[1] You go column by column and make it all explain itself. Why does this grow? Where did that come from? If this comes in three months late, why doesn't this other thing move three months too? You keep going until something gives. If nothing gives: great.

But sometimes one of the posts will move and then I have a hard time caring how straight the rest of the fence looks.