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 wrong.

A pyramid is a finished object, inert. You admire it from a distance. A pyramid is a finished object. You admire it from a distance. No one thinks about the labor of placing each block, or the foundation that had to hold before anything above it mattered. It 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 hangs off it.

Most communication fails at the posts. You’ve seen the deck: twenty slides, clean charts, smooth transitions. At the end, someone asks, “So what are we actually saying?” There’s no answer, because nothing was sunk deep enough to hold.^[1]

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

Fences age. A post that felt solid when you set it shifts after a hard season. You either reinforce it or pull it out and start over. Arguments do the same. 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 how someoone thinks 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 temptation 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.

You can tell when an argument will hold by how it behaves when you walk it.