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As you are creating your presentation, you need to be thinking about how you are going to present to your sponsor. You will most likely be presenting to the decision-makers and executives of your sponsor. This type of presentation should be given in a way that will keep top executives’ attention and will be easy for them to understand. To do this, you will need to present using the pyramid principle.
The pyramid principle of presentation goes like such:
Have you ever sat through a presentation that went something like this: data for point A is given, supporting arguments for point A are given, data for point B is given, then supporting arguments for point B is given, etc...? If you have, you might not remember it because presentations like this are usually exceedingly dull.
In Pyramid Principle presentations, things are ordered a little differently as follows:
In other words, you tell them what you are going to tell them, you tell them, and then you tell them what you told them. This is a classic way of driving home your point in a professional and memorable manner.
The Pyramid Principle was created when a consultant realized that executives hated traditional presentations. They were wastes of time because oftentimes they cared less about the data and more about the critical, actionable takeaways.
In the following videos, Professor McCarty explains what the pyramid principle is and why top executives prefer to be delivered recommendations and information in a top-down manner.
Roger McCarty: So this presentation style is different than anything else that you've probably done in the past, so it takes a little work to get to understand it. There was a lady named Barbara Minto, who developed the pyramid principle, is what she called it. Others call it the Minto method. Barbara Minto was the lead professional at McKinsey Consulting, the largest strategy consulting company in the world, and she developed a standardized process of creating commercial-style presentations. She taught this to all the people at McKinsey and she realized that executives liked this process so much that she could make a lot of money by teaching this to all the other consulting companies. So she made her own company and has taught that and wrote a book called The Minto Pyramid Principle.
Now, in this, she says you start a presentation by reminding them what the presentations are about. So, if you look at the slide, you can see that you're going to cover things like the situation, the task, what it was that you were asked to do. Remind them of the purpose of the project. Then, following the inductive approach, you immediately go to the answer. What is the answer and what supports what inferences are there that support that. And then provide information that supports all of the inferences, the conclusions, that drive the recommendation. As you can see, on the right side of the slide she has the deductive approach which basically follows the journey style of having findings, conclusions, and recommendations that drive to the answer. She does not recommend using the deductive approach in her book and emphasizes the importance of using the inductive or the pyramid top-down approach presentation for executives.
This content is provided to you freely by Ensign College.
Access it online or download it at https://ensign.edtechbooks.org/projectbasedinternship/the_pyramid_principle.
