As you try to apply the Minto Pyramid Principle to a specific writing task, you should on most occasions, with a bit of practice, have little difficulty in determining the overall structure of your thinking. You can generally identify your Subject without much effort, specify the reader's Question, think through the Situation and the Complication, and state your top point and Key Line points. Then, using the question/answer approach, you can relatively easily work out the ideas on the next level below each Key Line idea.

With your pyramid structured to one level below the Key Line, I recommend that you just sit down and write, rather than attempting to develop more of the lower level ideas until you reach that point in the writing. When you have finished writing, however, you are still going to have to look carefully at the structure of the points you have put into prose. Here you are likely to find yourself guilty of making two common errors:

- Presenting lists of loosely related points ("ten steps" or "five problems"), justified as similar because they match the plural noun rather than because they share an internal logic

- Topping off the lists with an intellectually blank assertion ('The company has five problems") instead of a revealing insight.

The tendency to list appears to be universal, and as a technique for getting a rough approximation of your thinking out where it can be looked at critically; it is fine. The trick is not to stop there, but to go further and make sure that the ideas in each grouping actually possess an intrinsic logic, and then explicitly to state the insight that that logical relationship implies.

Looking critically at groupings of ideas requires hard work-indeed it is the essence of the thinking process-which is no doubt why it is so often ignored. But ignoring it means that you never quite say what you mean to your reader and-worse-you never quite grasp the essence of your own thinking. That in turn not only wastes time and resources but, sadly, could mean you don't achieve all of the major insights and breakthroughs in thinking that are possible.

Think, for instance, of how much longer it would take someone to decide the actions needed to eliminate the problems implied in the first list below as opposed to the second:

Original

Buyers are unhappy with the sales and inventory system reports

1. Report frequency is inappropriate

2. Inventory data are unreliable

3. Inventory data are too late

4. Inventory data cannot be matched to sales data

5. They want reports with better formats

6. They want elimination of meaningless data

7. They want exception highlighting

8. They want to have to do fewer calculations manually

Rewritten

The sales and inventory system produces a useless monthly report

l. It contains unreliable data

2. It presents it in an unwieldy format

3. It issues it too late to permit practical action

The techniques for deriving the second set of points from the first are the subject of this section. They are, first, to find the logical framework that holds the ideas together and dictates their order (Imposing Logical Order), and then to tease out the insight inherent in the set of ideas-the so-called inductive leap (Summarizing Grouped Ideas).

Together, they constitute a process I call Hard-Headed Thinking. It is not an easy process either to learn or to apply but it is an essential skill to master if you are truly to know your own thinking. For this reason I urge you to take the time required to make sure you understand the techniques.