Start with the Posts

There's a communication framework called The Minto Pyramid Principle that business schools and consulting firms love to teach. Lead with the conclusion. Stack your supporting arguments beneath it. Build a pyramid, tip first.

The idea is sound. The metaphor is a bit lifeless.

A pyramid is a finished object, inert. You admire it from a distance. Few walk up to a pyramid and thinks about the labor of placing each block, the angles that had to hold, the foundation that had to be right before anything above it mattered. A pyramid just sits there, looking inevitable.

Fences are different.

A fence works because the posts are strong and sunk deep enough. The boards between them, the wire, the rails, all of that is secondary. You can restring wire. You can replace a board. But if a post rots or leans, the whole section sags, and no amount of cosmetic repair will save it. The post is the argument.

Everything else is connective tissue.

Most communication fails at the posts. Someone walks into a room with fifteen minutes of beautifully strung wire and no posts to hang it on. The presentation looks finished, with pretty charts and smooth transitions. But the audience can feel the sag. They nod politely and leave without remembering what was said, because nothing was sunk deep enough to hold^[1].

When wire sags, the instinct is to tighten it. Add more data. More slides and more connective explanation. But wire strung between weak posts just pulls them closer together until the whole thing collapses inward. The fix is only sometimes more wire. The fix is more often fewer, stronger posts, driven deeper.

There's something honest about a fence that a pyramid can't offer. Fences age. They weather. A post that seemed solid when you set it shifts after a hard season, and you have to decide whether to reinforce it or pull it and start over. Arguments do the same thing. The case you made six months ago may have settled in the soil differently than you expected. Some posts hold. Some need resetting.

And fences have to be walked. You check them by moving along the line, post by post, testing each one, looking for where the wire has gone slack or a post has started to lean. Finance people use the same language when they talk about "walking" a model build: stepping through each assumption in sequence, checking whether the logic still holds under pressure. The walk is where you find the weakness. Not from a distance, not from the top of a pyramid looking down, but up close, with your hands on it^[2].

And fences reveal their builder's priorities. You can tell a lot about someone's thinking by which posts they chose to set and how far apart they spaced them. Too many posts, too close together, and the fence feels anxious, over-explained. Too few, spaced too wide, and the wire droops between them, unable to carry the weight of what connects one idea to the next. The spacing is the judgment. Anybody can buy posts. The temptation in most professional communication is to build pyramids: grand, stable, impressive from a distance. But pyramids don't need to be walked. They don't need to hold anything back or keep anything in. They just need to be looked at.

Fences do work. They mark boundaries, bear weight, survive seasons. They ask you to commit to a line across real terrain, accounting for the slope, the soil, the places where the ground gets soft. And when they fail, they fail visibly, honestly, in a specific spot you can point to and repair.

The best arguments I've encountered didn't feel like pyramids. They felt like well-built fences: a few strong posts, wire strung taut between them, and just enough space to see through to the other side.