Getting to “Yes”
How can you and your team get more people to say Yes?
That could be:
“Yes, I will buy your product or service.”
“Yes, I will approve your budget for the project.”
“Yes, I will follow your recommendations.”
“Yes, I think your report is really insightful and just what we need.”
Pyramid Thinking Plus
For nearly 40 years high performing organisations have used Pyramid Thinking (sometimes called Top-Down Thinking) to get their audience to say “Yes”.
It all started in McKinsey and Co, with Barbara Minto , who discovered that using documents based on one page logic frameworks focused on a single message and a few key reasons why that message was true were much more likely to elicit the answer “Yes” than bombarding the audience with a multitude of facts and assertions that they had to make sense out of. She also developed a series of tests to make sure that such logic frameworks were as robust as possible – thus maximising the chance of getting Yes as the answer. Her approach is called the Pyramid Principle and is documented in her book of the same name.
Practitioners over the years have added in a focus on audience benefits, and the purpose of the communication, to create an even more powerful methodology – Pyramid Thinking Plus.
The approach has been proven to work for any of the “Yes” challenges outlined earlier, and works across industries, functions, and geographies. Indeed, its adoption across an organisation gives the organisation a common language, and way of collaborating on communications, which is second to none.
Because it works so well it has been adopted by major consultancies across the globe, large corporates, and smaller firms such as ours as well.
It can be learned in a day – although becoming an expert practitioner takes practice. However, practicing is a virtue since every time you put the approach into practice not only is the quality of your communication improved, your own capability in the science and art of Pyramid Thinking Plus improves as well.
What should you do?
Grow your success by enabling your team to become Pyramid Thinking Plus practitioners.
How can you best achieve this?
1. Do the ROI calculation to verify that your return on Pyramid Thinking Plus training investment will be >1000% within a year.
2. Make sure Pyramid Thinking Plus is firmly in your training budget for 2024/2025.
3. Seek out a provider who can empathise with your team to make it as easy and enjoyable as possible to adopt Pyramid Thinking Plus.
What might you do as a next step?
Take a look at the enstra.com website to learn more about other organisations who have benefitted from adopting the approach. We are both expert practitioners and experienced trainers in the discipline – get in touch and we can answer any questions you may have.
Make this year, the year you unlock “The Power of Yes”.
(if you would like to see the Pyramid Thinking template used to create this post you can download the PowerPoint file below.)