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The Pyramid Principle & BLUF

Someone asks how to get to your house. There are two answers available.

The first starts with where you moved from, why you chose the area, the roadworks that have been going on since March, and eventually, several minutes later, arrives at the road you live on. Everything in it is true and relevant.

The second is: take the toll road, exit 4, twenty minutes. Then, if they want it, the detail.

Only the second one respects the fact that the listener is trying to decide something. Nobody wants the story of your route. They want to know whether to set off now.

Almost every document written at work is the first answer. It reconstructs the order in which the writer discovered things, which feels honest and is nearly useless, because the reader has to hold all of it in suspension until the end to find out whether any of it matters to them.

What Minto argued#

Barbara Minto was McKinsey’s first female consultant, hired in 1963, and she spent her career on the observation that consultants were smart people writing documents nobody could follow. Her answer, set out in The Minto Pyramid Principle, is that ideas on paper should form a pyramid.

One governing thought sits at the top: the single sentence you want the reader to be able to repeat back. Beneath it sit the few arguments that support it. Beneath each of those sits the evidence. Every level summarises the level below it, and the groups at each level are MECE and deliberately ordered.

The reader can therefore stop at any depth and still have a complete, correct answer. That is the property that matters: a busy reader takes the top sentence, an interested one takes the three arguments, and the person who has to implement it reads to the bottom. Same document, three depths, no rework.

the answer because because because evidence
The reader can stop at any level and still hold a complete, correct answer. That is the whole design: one sentence for the person deciding, three for the person interested, everything for the person implementing, out of one document.

SCQA: how to open#

Minto’s opening structure gets you to the governing thought in four sentences, and it works because it earns the answer rather than announcing it cold.

  • Situation. Something the reader already accepts as true. No argument yet.
  • Complication. What has changed or gone wrong, which disturbs that situation.
  • Question. The question the complication raises, usually left implicit.
  • Answer. Your governing thought.

For example: we run payroll for three companies on the 24th (situation). Two of those runs needed a manual correction last month (complication). What is causing it, and can we stop it (question, usually unwritten). The corrections both came from data entered after cut-off, so making cut-off a real state in the product removes the class (answer).

Four sentences, and the reader now knows whether to keep reading and what they are being asked to decide.

BLUF#

The military arrived at the same conclusion independently and with less patience. BLUF, Bottom Line Up Front, is the standard for US Army writing: the conclusion and any required action go in the first sentence, before background.

The reasoning is worth carrying because it is sharper than the business version. In an operational context the reader may stop reading at any moment, and a document that hides its instruction in paragraph four is a document that will get someone hurt. BLUF is the Pyramid Principle with the politeness removed.

Use BLUF for anything short and operational: updates, incident notes, requests, messages. Use the full pyramid for anything long enough to need supporting structure.

Writing it backwards is the default#

The reason almost nobody does this naturally is that the order you discovered something is not the order somebody needs to receive it. You investigated for three days, so you narrate three days. It feels like showing your work.

But the reader is not marking your work. They are deciding whether to act, and every paragraph before the answer is a paragraph they spend guessing where this is going. Worse, a reader who cannot find the point usually assumes there is not one.

the answer how you found it the answer how they need it
Identical content, identical length, one thing moved. On the left the reader spends three blocks not knowing whether any of this concerns them. On the right they know from the first line, and everything after it is optional.

How to tell#

Hand it to someone and let them read only the first paragraph. Then ask what it says. If they cannot state your conclusion and what you want from them, the opening is wrong, and rewriting the body will not fix it.

Check whether your first sentence could survive alone. If the document were truncated after one line, would the reader still have something true and actionable? BLUF says it must.

Look for the word “background” as a first heading. It is almost always a sign the answer is somewhere in the second half.

Read your supporting points as a set. They should be MECE, they should each independently support the top sentence, and there should be few of them. If one of them only makes sense after reading another, they are a sequence rather than a group and belong one level down.

When it goes wrong: the most common failure after adopting this is a confident opening sentence that the body does not actually support, because leading with the answer makes a weak answer much more visible. That is the framework working, not failing. The fix is a better answer, not a softer opening.

Where this stops#

It assumes you have an answer. Genuinely exploratory writing, where the point is to think in public, is not improved by inventing a conclusion to lead with. Say up front that this is exploratory and what you are trying to resolve. That is still BLUF, it just has a different bottom line.

Bad news sometimes needs the reasoning first. Leading with a conclusion someone will reject can cause them to stop listening before the argument arrives. This is a real limit and also the most abused excuse for burying a point, so hold it to a high bar: if you are softening because the reader will be upset rather than because they need context to evaluate it, you are protecting yourself.

It structures, it does not think. A perfectly pyramidal document built on a wrong governing thought is a well-organised wrong answer, and its structure makes it more persuasive rather than less. The structure is downstream of the issue tree.

How we use it here#

Every document written to be decided on opens with its answer: two-pagers, weekly reports, the checkpoint memo, PR descriptions, incident updates, and any message asking someone for a decision. Diagnosis already calls the top sentence a governing thought, and holds it to the same bar: specific, evidenced, falsifiable.

The short form is the one to build a habit on, because it applies dozens of times a day. Before sending anything that asks someone to act, check that the first line says what you concluded and what you want. Everything else is support.