The furthest distance in the world is not what I said or didn't say, but what I said but you didn't understand.
The "golden pyramid principle" holds that if someone wants to understand your views on a problem by reading your article, then he is faced with a complicated task. Because even if your article is short, such as only two pages, it will contain about 100 sentences. Readers must understand every sentence, understand every sentence and connect every sentence. If the structure of your article is pyramid-shaped, and the ideas of the article gradually expand from the top of the pyramid, then readers will definitely find your article easier to read. This conclusion reflects some basic findings of the author barbara minto in his way of thinking:
The brain will automatically divide the information into different groups according to the pyramid structure for easy understanding.
Any group of ideas that fall into the pyramid structure in advance is easier to understand.
This shows that any written document should consciously organize its thoughts into a pyramid structure. It is the only most important behavior to put forward the general idea first, and then put forward the specific idea of generalization. Controlling the order in which you express your thoughts is the most important thing to write clearly. The clearest order is to put forward the summarized thoughts first, and then put forward the summarized concrete thoughts.
The reader's (or listener's) brain can only understand the ideas expressed by the author sentence by sentence. They will assume that ideas that appear together are logically related. If you don't tell them this logical relationship in advance, but just express your ideas sentence by sentence, readers will automatically find some similarities and classify your ideas in order to understand the meaning of each combination.
However, because people's knowledge background and understanding are very different, it is rare to interpret your ideas exactly like you. In fact, if you don't tell the reader the logical relationship between a group of ideas in advance. They probably think that there is no connection between ideas in a certain group. To say the least, even if people can make the same interpretation as you, you make their reading more difficult, because they have to find out this unexplained logical relationship by themselves.
When readers ingest information, they are always looking for a structure that can connect the ingested information. In order to ensure that the reader finds the structure you want him to use, you must tell them this structure in advance, so that they will know which similarity to look for. Otherwise, readers are likely to find some unexpected logical relations, or even find no logical relations at all, which wastes both your time and readers' time.
Generally speaking, in order to remember, readers will inevitably classify and summarize the views they have read. If the ideas conveyed by the author to readers have been classified and summarized in advance and expressed in a top-down order, readers will understand the ideas expressed by the author more easily.
Chapter 2: The books recommended by McKinsey's Golden Pagoda Principle Reading Edition have not been studied well because of work reasons. I opened the e-book yesterday and took a cursory look. Discovery is really a very good book to guide thesis writing, especially to improve professional writing and work summary.
So first of all, I would like to thank Yao Yang, the person in charge of the reading edition, and the moderator for finding such a beautiful and practical book for us.
Through vivid examples, the book introduces in detail how the whole writing process came into being, what is the purpose of writing and what we should do to achieve the purpose of writing.
Regarding the logical part of thinking, it takes common sense in life as an example, which is cordial and vivid. For example, if a wife instructs her husband to buy food, he can remember a few things to illustrate. If there are too many items listed, readers can't remember the main points that the author wants to express, and tell us to grasp the key points as much as possible in writing and explain our views concisely instead of listing a series of articles, which makes people confused.
In this article, I especially want to talk about the importance of thinking and top-down thinking. I have some experience in this field. A colleague once asked me how to make my article attractive and not boring. Especially the work plan, debriefing report and work summary. She said that she had written a recent work plan, which took a long time and was carefully prepared for a long time. But after reading it, the leader asked her to rewrite it. She almost collapsed. Although I haven't seen her work plan, I can still guess why the leader asked her to rewrite it.
That is, she didn't make it clear that the current leaders are most concerned about the problem, the biggest difficulty that enterprises are facing at present and the solution. Where is the leader? After reading her report for a long time, I still don't know what she really wants to say.
How can we clarify the key issues? The Golden Pagoda Principle tells us that if you intentionally force yourself to "think before writing" by using the methods introduced in the book, your writing ability will be greatly improved, so that you can: reduce the time usually required for finalizing; Increase the organization of the article; A clear-headed article;
So we must first learn to think for ourselves, make clear the purpose of writing, and then start thinking about how to write. Generally, a colleague with a good writing style will have this experience. To write a question, he will not start writing at once, but think and sort out the materials first. He may also go to the library to read books, or take out his usual work notes to sort them out, or he may do nothing but think. When he is doing this series of actions, he is actually doing one thing, that is, organizing these materials in an orderly way through his own thinking, whether he is looking for it at present or after long-term accumulation.
Part III: Interpretation of McKinsey's golden pyramid principle. I saw the golden pyramid principle these two days.
Books give us a way to think about problems, and we can think of some problems at ordinary times. It just sums them up and systematically writes them in written form according to certain ideas. However, it did inspire me a lot.
According to this book, the idea of writing/speaking preface is background, conflict, question and answer. When we study English at ordinary times, we often hear teachers give lectures. Our idea of learning English is to concentrate and so on. I think this view is similar to that in the book.
Thinking about problems should be considered from the aspects of space, time and importance. Logical order is the order of induction and deduction. The thinking angle written on the napkin is similar. It is only described in the horizontal direction, and there is little analysis in the vertical direction. This will make people feel more relaxed.
To solve problems, we should solve problems through logical trees. I think my company or others also advocate this view, and try to make things comprehensive at once. In this case, he is unwilling to do information collection. That is, the thinking of leaders. I feel confused. Should all leaders spend most of their time on these tasks? I have to follow them. After all, they are more experienced than me.
There is also the starting point of the problem, the difference between purpose 1 and purpose 2. What should I do? Do you have to do it? What's the best way to do it? Are there any alternatives or improvements? Find the best solution to the problem of right and wrong. I think we can try it in real life.