It was hard enough to book my CPO’s calendar, but now I find myself in desperate need to discuss this new strategy and direction for our team.

Another urgent meeting required his attention, leaving me just 10 minutes to compress everything and get alignment.

Weeks' worth of research, insights and slide designs disintegrated in an instant.

Luckily, I had applied a flexible slide structure that made it easy for me to readjust my flow.

Introducing The Minto Pyramid Principle

The Minto Pyramid Principle was developed by Barbara Minto in the 60s. She was a Harvard MBA graduate who worked at McKinsey – one of the biggest and most prestigious consulting firms.

Thanks to the Minto Pyramid Principle, McKinsey was able to deliver clear, thorough, yet flexible presentations. It also made it easier to synthesize complex data and extract insights from it.

Since then, other consulting firms have adopted the Minto Pyramid as a standard (every junior analyst gets training to do this). There’s even a book that goes into more detail on this principle - The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking.

Now I’m going to show you the steps of applying this slide structure and the flexibility you’ll unlock.

1. Start with the answer

To organize slides, use a top-down approach when referring to the pyramid. The core concept of this approach is to get straight to the point and then explain reasoning to make it easier for the audience to follow along.

Here’s an example of a normal explanation:

Well, our audience’s attention spans are diminishing, and they are consuming more content on mobile and social media algorithms are now favouring short form video. So to double our leads, we must prioritize creating short form video content. ​

Using the Minto Pyramid Principle, the answer comes first:

To double our leads, we must prioritize creating short form video content because our audience’s attention spans are diminishing, they're consuming more content on mobile and social media algorithms are now favouring short form video.

This might not be obvious, but lots of presentations disengage the audience as they wonder: “what’s the point of all this?”. If you present the main idea or answer at the end, the brain will need to go back to each reasoning and data point after the fact (which is more difficult).

To complete the pyramid, add supporting data/facts for each reasoning:

2. Strengthen with encapsulation

Encapsulation is a concept that will strengthen your answer and supporting points.

As you work through your pyramid, check to make sure that each box should summarize the bottom boxes.

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This will ensure that the supporting points are in the right places and are sufficient.

3. Strengthen with MECE

The second concept that will strengthen your pyramid is MECE, which stands for: Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive.

Mutually Exclusive means that each box is distinctly different and does not overlap with other boxes horizontally.

Collectively Exhaustive ensures that together, all boxes make a complete whole. If there are ‘stray’ boxes, they should be regrouped or removed.

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4. Top-down when presenting

Now that’s you’ve assembled your pyramid, it’s time to arrange them as slides.

The numbers represent the order of the slides:

The default flow is to go from top of the pyramid and work your way down each box until you reach the bottom. Then you move to the next vertical branch. Start with the answer -> reasoning 1 -> data 1a -> data 1b -> reasoning 2 -> data 2a -> data 2b -> (repeat for the rest).

5. Adjust when rushed

This is the part you’ve been waiting for! The magical antidote to the classic “you’ve only got 10 mins”.

If you need to go through the presentation faster, you can readjust the time spent on each slide:

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Because the answer is given up front, you can choose to just go over the reasoning slides and it should be strong enough to support the argument.

You can always have a follow up discussion if needed or send the details via email.

6. Drill down when scrutinized

Sometimes you might get interrupted as the exec disagrees or challenges one of your main points. Once again, you have the flexibility to redistribute the time spent across your slides.

You can spend more time discussing one vertical branch and less time on the others:

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What’s great about this pyramid structure is that despite the shuffle of slide sequence and timing, the actual message is not lost. This is because the answer is already given up front and the details come right after.

Bonus: Bottom-up for extracting insights

We covered how to use the Minto Pyramid Principle for delivering presentations, but it’s worth noting that you can also flip it around and synthesize data.

Start from the bottom of the pyramid by organizing your data into groups using MECE. Then summarize each set of data. Finally, you can pull everything together to form a central thesis – this is your answer at the top of the pyramid.

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Now you can start the process from top-down again to arrange your slides accordingly and deliver the presentation.

Conclusion

To summarize, you can use the Minto Pyramid Principle to structure and present your slides in a coherent and flexible manner:

1. Start with the answer
2. Encapsulation
3. MECE
4. Present from top-down
5. Adjust when rushed
6. Drill down when scrutinized

You can also reverse the process to uncover your main thesis by grouping your data and building the pyramid from bottom-up.

I hope this will reduce your anxiety the next time you only have a few minutes to present your slides.

See you 😁