The Minto Pyramid
When communication gaps seem obvious & hurt really bad across teams & more so in product, the need for imposing a structure over it becomes mandatory & the Minto principle does come in handy...
Structured communication – a mandate
Given the culture followed around the corporate set-up in the IT / Tech / Product space, there has been a crucial importance allotted to communication as individual silos mostly seem phased out for good and collaboration / collaborative style of work and leadership seems to have taken over.
Also, the advent of Covid and how teams have had to work from home (WFH) and have adapted to live and function harmoniously in a post-Covid world has a lot of onus on communication.
And yet, here are some stats depicting the exact opposite:
Which ought to bring one to a question:
→ Why does communication become a big problem for everyone?
→ What’s the main reason for this?
During interviews it is very evident that one gets thoroughly judged (could also be read as vetted) over whether or not there is fitment, then how is that 50% increase in delivery times owing to communication problems justified?
It is only but fair to presume that especially in the large corporates where there is such a lot of emphasis on the culture (cultural fitment) bit it ought to be possible to install a protocol of some sort garnering the fresh ones, the newbies to get into the groove and adapt / adhere to the standard benchmarks set thus fostering a culture of great communication which is how the phrase “structured communication” seems to have come by.
Minto Pyramid & MECE Principle
When one talks of structured communication one just can’t ignore the work of Barbara Minto, a Mc Kinsey Corp employee who coined the MECE principle which underlines her Minto Pyramid Principle back in 1987 which broadly focuses on improving the manner in which people communicate representing it over a pyramid housing the central idea / summary and the supporting elements / facts.
“The Minto Pyramid is effectively an enhancement to general communication that suggests leading with the [KEY MESSAGE] following it up with [SUPPORTING ARGUMENTS] & [SUPPORTING FACTS]”
Given the focus and its preciseness, it could end up being more insightful and complete thus making it more actionable to the counterparty it was originally intended for.
“The MECE on the other hand is a grouping principle which suggests that sets of similar items ought to be classified or logically grouped into 2 broad subsets - ME & CE so as to allow each section to hold nonrepetitive items making it feasible & straightforward to understand, remember, reproduce”
Why use Minto?
Given how teams today largely function as a close-knit unit the adherence to which seems to have only multiplied manifold over more teams getting into the Hybrid / WFH modes, the onus is all the more on communication and its effectiveness seems to have taken center-stage, and for a good reason too.
Just like the definition itself covers a bit of the use, it is all about making communication more effective and doing one’s bit towards contributing to building healthy teams and culture.
So, here’s a list of things that you ought to watch out for to get impacted positively over using or incorporating the Minto pyramid across teams and org. wide:
Improves effectiveness of communication
Conveys complex ideas by breaking it down granularly to its elements
Makes it all more actionable as it could start off with the “action item”
Builds interest with the supporting stubs and facts getting quoted
Clears or helps smoothen out execution path as it may address blockers
Improves throughput as it fosters better alignment
Could also be used to provide extended clarity as the pyramids could get nested or extended as needed and on demand
Applications
1. Team Management:
Managing teams often starts off with knowing your teams and knowing them well, where the MECE could come in real handy.
Say it’s the first day of your work as a product leader and the entire office of 20 people has been invited over to an in-house event clubbed with your onboarding and address. Supposing everyone stands up taking turns to introduce themselves, how many of them are you likely to remember post the event wrapping up?
→ 3 or 5 at the max?
→ Ok, 7 if you have an elephant’s memory?
But, let’s suppose you built some sort of a tabular representation placing each of the stakeholders and the teams in their respective column. Like so:
Nothing could be more straightforward, could it?
Now, estimate the time you’d save over any doubt you had over the who’s who of the teams. Not only would you be referencing that table over and over again, it could help you channelize your efforts over making official communication more effective.
That right there is one practical application of MECE:
mutually exclusive given the role each and every team member plays &
collectively exhaustive as the table houses all 20 team members
2. Official Comms.:
There are tons of interfaces one may have over their jobs irrespective of the org. type and level they are operating at. So, be it interviews or internal comms like e-mails or presentations, the Minto pyramid is great approach to get the point across effectively, after-all productivity is a collective deliverable as much as an individual one, given any team’s set-up.
Consider this for a main subject of an internal e-mail communication with internal teams:
“we seem to have severe problems in our workflow currently that’s attracting many negative reviews and with a bit of analysis we have led to establish our pricing model as largely the problem for the performance of our product and it calls for some real quick solutions”
It conveys that there may be problems with pricing and the burning need for some quick-fix solutions, although “quick-fix” itself may be spurious here in this instance, also not discounting how it could be a case of “too little too late” given that it has begun to attract negative reviews.
Now, let’s try and modify that by plugging it into the Minto Pyramid.
We’d now have something like:
Now, that looks more actionable alright, not to mention the onus it has on structured communication.
3. Application to the PLC:
Given how the actionability is a prerequisite for product people, the application of the Minto principle seems more like de-facto, not denying the fact that it could also feel like a Godsend at times operating over the PLC.
Case Study: “A step closer to SUSTAINABILITY”
“Say a global retail giant stocks a huge number of perishables and wants to do initiate work towards overturning that primarily and also exploring if they could better it on a secondary vein if the first outcome doesn’t look feasible for some reason”.
Leadership
Any initiative ought to start with getting a buy-in and that obviously defaults to leadership in product-based organizations. And, it is only but fair to assume that the PM would have to get down to drafting a proposal of some sort following the norms of the org. which could be anything from a short 1-page proposal or a pretty elaborate one covering each of the goals, outcomes, impact, effort, budget, timelines over an exhaustive write-up.
But that often starts out with an objective (outcome) which is a classic case to put the Minto Pyramid to use. And, that could be something on these lines:
Strategy
The strategy would just orchestrate ways & means towards helping achieve those objectives stated above.
1) Optimize order quantity to reduce wastage
It is very possible that the quantity being stocked in the storefronts is a root cause, in which case one could think of targeting the optimization of the very quantity of stock.
And, here’s the strategy depicted over the Minto pyramid:
2) Optimal usage of perished goods
Now, it is quite possible that even after implementing the strategy that targets optimization of order quantity tailored to demand not discounting the reliance on prediction and some reinforcement learning working with some training data and AI / ML algorithms here, it could still be possible that food and other perishables don’t point to an ideal “0.0 stock”, which makes a suitable and strong case to propel the org. forward to contribute towards environmental causes.
So, here goes the representation of that over the Minto pyramid:
And that pyramid framework could just be good enough to pass on to all the internal stakeholders, XFN teams as well, given that it is abundantly clear that there are 2 strategic initiatives feeding off the strategy at the top and the outcomes that are considered important as listed.
To Conclude & Repeat:
Structured communication is a given in product orgs and the manner in which things get communicated and given how there is a high percentage of all that being more insight driven and actionable, remember how the habitual use of the Minto Pyramid is more of an expectation and it does indeed start much earlier than your joining the teams. It starts off with you, your résumé and your social fronted profiles. Make sure you work towards getting that right in the first place.