The pyramid principle
One answer, three reasons.
Lead with the decision. Hold it up with three reasons that do not overlap. Put your numbers under each one.
Thursday, 10:00. Fifteen minutes at the engineering review: why the team is shipping late, and the ask to fix it.
Sixty seconds, tier by tier
Five sentences, in the order they leave your mouth. Everything else you brought answers a question nobody asked.
Why these three
The setup Setup
Situation · complication · question
What each line does
Situation: a fact nobody argues with. Complication: what changed. Question: the one your answer answers.
The answer Level one
Governing thought
Then say “there are three reasons” and stop.
Finding or answer
“Merge time went from six hours to three days” is a finding: the room nods, nothing happens. An answer says who does what, by when, for how much.
Where the time goes Level two
As a slide headline
Evidence beneath it
The objection it kills
“Is the team distracted?” Human time per PR is 4.3 hours, against 4.1 in May. Only the queue grew.
A narrow cause Level two
As a slide headline
Evidence beneath it
The objection it kills
“Then buy bigger runners.” July already answered that: parallelism broke the nineteen, and more of it makes them worse.
Already proven Level two
As a slide headline
Evidence beneath it
Name the risk yourself
Our nineteen all cover the same fixture database, so the rule leaves that path untested for six weeks. Say the sharp risk before anyone asks: volunteering it buys you the rest.
Steal the skeleton
The same five lines, waiting for your numbers.
We fact nobody argues with. Since when, what changed: what it cost. So the question is the one your answer answers.
Who does what for how long, and the metric hits number by date. Three reasons.
Why change: where the cost actually goes, and the number nobody has seen.
Why this: the cause, narrow enough to name, and the number that kills the obvious alternative.
Why believe you: where it already worked here, and the number from your own org.
Sort the numbers you already have into three piles. The answer is whatever they add up to, price included.
Where it fails
When nobody has agreed there is a problem. Lead with the answer and you defend a fix to a complication the room never accepted; agree the complication first.
Minto calls the setup’s three sentences the SCQ Framework: barbaraminto.com.
If your first sentence could be true and change nothing, it is not an answer.