Triangles, MECE, and the Pyramid Principle
The film producer Robert Evans famously said there are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth. When it comes to stories about triangles at our Firm, the sides may be a little different, but you can believe there are still three of them. And here, triangles work their way into more stories (and decks) than you’d think, either in chart form or the topdown way the information is structured.
So, we at McKinsey News wanted to understand, why does our Firm love triangles so much? For answers, we turned to Paul, our Firm Archivist Paul and the custodian of our nearly century-long history.
Three things on that
“It begins with our love of threes,” Paul told us. “That’s been core to our DNA since the days of James O. McKinsey who considered respectability, reputation of expertise, and professional exposure to be the three core ingredients to a successful consulting practice.”
Managing Partners’ terms run for three years. We are collectively supported by our three guiding principles: our Purpose, Mission, and Values. When we make an argument, we use three supporting points.
It would then follow that our favorite shape has three sides. Triangles in our Firm go back at least as far as 1957, when they appeared in the form of a Firm Philosophy diagram presented by then-Global Managing Partner Marvin Bower.
Marvin, who helped to establish the field of management consulting, used this pyramid to outline his vision for what would make us a distinctive, impact-driven, united Firm.
“This may be the first time that someone presented our philosophy in a codified visual,” Paul says. “That type of visual communication didn’t happen before Marvin but was essential to unify colleagues as the Firm grew.”
Tip-top shape
As a Firm, we’d been talking about the visual aspects of presentations as early as the 1940s, but it took until the 1960s for what Paul calls our “chart mentality” to take hold. In 1961 we hired our first visual graphics professional, Gene Zelazny, who spent nearly five decades honing our visual approach to presentations and written reports. Gene recalls being told as a new joiner, “We do a lot of presentations. We do a lot of charts. We’ve never had anyone here to worry about it, so create your own position.”
And create he did. Beyond helping define our Firm’s visual style, he went on to publish the acclaimed book Say it with Charts, which standardized charts for the entire consulting field.
“What I was to charts,” Gene says, “Barbara Minto was to structured writing.” He’s referring to the progenitor of one of the most defining triangles in our history: the Pyramid Principle.
Getting to the point
Familiar with this approach, Barbara Minto joined our Cleveland office in 1963 before transferring to our London office several years later. There, she was assigned editorial tasks, where she tired of making the same corrections to document after document. “We produce lots and lots of reports that are full of the latest catchwords,” she said, “but never clearly state the points they are trying to make.”
Minto saw an opportunity to adapt the Pyramid Principle to a consulting environment, and in doing so, she reshaped the entire process by which consultants could develop and express their thinking.
The principle instructs that when communicating, start with your answer first, followed by a group of supporting arguments so that the answer above is a summary of the ideas below, but sub arguments are not redundant with one another.
This structure of thinking necessitated the term “MECE”—meaning argument groups were mutually exclusive of each other and collectively exhaustive in terms of the whole. This structure continues to shape our publications, power point decks, and even our ways of speaking.
We must admit, our articles on McKinsey News aren’t always MECE. But we’re fun, so we hope you stick with us anyway.