Crash course: 3's, Pyramids, and 80/20

I burned the midnight oil 🔥 in consulting for these lessons in persuasion so you didn't have to

I hear consultants chuckling and crickets from just about everyone else. To be clear, I’m referring to three principles: the Rule of 3’s, the Pyramid Principle, and the 80/20 rule.

If you believe a lot of PM is “influencing without authority”, then our colleagues in consulting are masters of this craft. You can apply all three concepts, commonly used in consulting, to help you communicate more persuasively - and more!

How you communicate, from the perspective of the audience, is how you think. How you think is a reflection of your character — your credibility, competence, and leadership. Most importantly, time is precious for each member of the audience and precious for you if you need their input. Therefore, it’s your job as the PM to help the audience clearly and quickly understand what you are communicating.

I’ll review these core concepts first before I dive into how these concepts apply to day-to-day PM life such as in responding to questions, writing a press release, and driving your team forwards.

👑 The Rule of 3

For whatever reason, human psychology just recognizes whenever things come in three’s. It feels rhythmic, memorable, and complete. There are many articles out there (see some of the good ones below) and even a whole TED talk on it:

• How to Hook Your Audience: The Rule of Three

• What is the mysterious ‘rule of three’?

• How to Use the Rule of Three in Writing

Aristotle used it in his ethos, pathos, and logos modes of persuasion; Newton used it in his three universal laws of motion; and Marvel used it for their three groups or “Phases” of movies. Therefore, I’m going to use it (at least 9 times already!) and so should you.

Source: The big three about to battle Thanos

🔺The Pyramid Principle

The Pyramid Principle (pyramid ⇒ triangle ⇒ 3!, anyone?) was developed by ex-McKinsey consultant Barbara Minto as a way to organize and deliver information in a logical manner. It’s a hierarchical structure where you start from the “top” with the main point or the answer, then work your way down to your supporting arguments, and finally dive into the evidence and data points at the “base”. Another way to think about this is “top-down” communication.

Source: McKinsey | Barbara Minto: “MECE: I invented it, so I get to say how to pronounce it”

I’m going to sneak in the concept of mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive (MECE) because Minto also formalized that one. MECE is a grouping principle. You should group elements together in exclusive groups, such that one group doesn’t contain elements of another group, and the union of all groups should contain all elements of the total set. Welcome to set theory! 😳 jk :)

Said another way: your ideas should be distinct from one another, but together should be complete. Yes, it’s hard to group things so cleanly.

🌐80/20

Investopedia beat me to the punch here:

The 80-20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, is a familiar saying that asserts that 80% of outcomes (or outputs) result from 20% of all causes (or inputs) for any given event.

More generally, the 80/20 rule is an example of the power law distribution often seen in nature (e.g., gravitation force as a function of distance, size of moon craters, metabolic rate of organisms as a function of their body mass, etc.) and by extension in human dynamics (e.g., venture capital returns, income distribution, population sizes of cities relative to a region, etc.).

The takeaway for communication is that less is more. A small subset of your words does the majority of the talking. When you communicate, you don’t need to say everything to communicate everything. In fact, cut out the fat and focus only on the words you need.

Cumulative ‘Rule of 3’ counter: 14 times

Before I go on further, note that these rules are pretty general. It’s not just for communication. You can break your schedule into three things to accomplish for the week and further subdivide them into three tasks for the day. Just make sure each of those three things will 80/20 (wow, used as an adverb?!) drive most of your outcomes for the day. Gosh, I almost feel like a consultant again.

Back to PM. Next, I’m going to dive into examples (guess how many?) of how these rules and tools can be applied to day-to-day PM life. I’ll also apply some additional rules (guess how many?) to make my communication pop even more!