Pyramid Principle for Data Analysis

As Anand explained in the previous lecture, we would be focussing primarily on the content of communication for this module. Now, that does cover a lot of ground. You need to be precise in your communication, your message needs to be good- that is both interesting and useful and also the message should persuade people into taking actions.

But, even when we have all those checkboxes ticked, there is one thing that would differentiate the way you should be communicating your insights. And that is by getting to the main point first and then drilling down to the details. Without much ado, let’s take a look at the following lecture and try and understand the motivation behind one of the most prevalent methods of business communication- The Pyramid Principle:

The structure of the Pyramid Principle looks like the following;

The Pyramid Principle is crucial in business communication because of 2 specific reasons:

1. You save time: You get to the point immediately thereby not wasting people’s time. This is crucial because executives have a limited time-span to devote to anyone and hence it is important that you feed them information that they need to know. If required, do drill down to the finer details, and this technique ensures that we do not spend time explaining stuff which they already know.
2. Your message is concise: Similar to the newspaper headlines, the structure of the insight should be such that you are able to pass on the most useful information in the most economical way possible and the pyramid principle helps you achieve just that.

Let's listen to Anand again as he demonstrates this principle using the following example:

"West Side Plant is a mining company that has been incurring some losses due to malfunctioning of machinery at Mine 7. The CEO of the company wants to know whether the plant's assets can be relocated or not."

So to summarise, the pyramid principle is very effective in communicating insights and should be ideally using it in your business communication. Let's see how we can implement this technique to different forms of communication.