Pyramid Principle: State the Effect of Actions
This is a summary of a section of The Pyramid Principle. I don’t do it justice; go read the source.
A lot of business writing is about actions: project plans, proposals, postmortems, etc. Unfortunately, actions are really hard to write about (how many unreadable proposals have you read?).
This difficulty comes from the fact that actions may appear to have common structure even if they are poorly grouped. They will likely be in a chronological sequence and all have the same sentence form (“You should” followed by a verb); however, it is easy to accidentally group actions poorly by lumping together both causes and effects.
In order to prevent this confusion, Minto suggests wording actions to describe their result and organizing them based on the cause/effect relationship between them. (Minto [1996] 2018, p 99)
Word actions to state their effect
Before actions can be grouped correctly, they have to be worded to “reflect an end-product” (Minto [1996] 2018, p 103). A concrete statement is much easier to understand and will naturally fit in multiple levels of the pyramid. For example, “Establish a system for following up on old bugs” is much clearer than “improve our bug backlog.” In addition, the former statement can easily be the summary of several earlier actions or a preliminary step towards a larger goal. Wording actions to describe their effect makes them easier to use.
Organize actions based on their cause/effect relationship
Once actions are clearly worded according to their end result, it becomes easier to understand the cause/effect relationship between ideas. Minto compells us to always group actions together by their common effect. This common effect is the abstraction that summarizes the group of actions below it in the pyramid. Thus, understanding if two ideas have a cause/effect relationship allows us to understand how they should be positioned in the pyramid:
Distinguishing the level of action is relatively simple: an idea is at the same level if you expect the reader to take this action before he takes the next action listed; it is at a lower level if you expect him to take it so that he can produce the next action. (Minto [1996] 2018, p 104)
Summary
After wording actions to describe their effect and grouping actions according to their cause/effect relationships, it becomes possible to judge if the structure is MECE (mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive). To summarize, Minto offers these tips for writing clearly about actions:
- Word each action as specifically as possible before you try to relate them
- Look for obvious cause-effect groupings, so that you can keep the steps in each grouping to five or fewer
- Derive the effect directly from the statements of the actions ([1996] 2018, p 99)
Other Quotes
The point should say something like “I do these three things to improve profits by 10 percent by January 15.” The specificity of the statement permits you to judge whether the steps you have grouped together underneath would in fact bringabout the end result. (Minto [1996] 2018, p99)
There will always be some tangible way to judge that a step has been completed. A useful technique is to visualize a real person actually taking the action, so that you can see what he will have in his hand, and then word the action to reflect the end product. (Minto [1996] 2018, p 99)