Pyramid Principle · IN SHORT
The Pyramid Principle skill reorganises a memo, email or presentation around its main message. It groups the supporting reasons and checks the evidence before drafting a concise final version.
Your brief
A fictional delay memo begins with five paragraphs of history, although the decision needed is an extra week for acceptance testing.
Possible draft
The draft can open with that request, then explain the remaining checks, available capacity and delivery implications. Those reasons need support from the actual project.
01 / THE FOUNDATION
You get an argument pyramid, a concise executive summary and a separate situation–complication–question–answer introduction.
02 / SEE HOW IT WORKS
A fictional delay memo begins with five paragraphs of history, although the decision needed is an extra week for acceptance testing.
The draft can open with that request, then explain the remaining checks, available capacity and delivery implications. Those reasons need support from the actual project.
An orderly structure does not make an unsupported conclusion correct. The recommendation must survive a check of its premises.
03 / GET STARTED
State the recommendation that resolves the reader’s question.
Group three to five distinct arguments at the same logical level.
Support the arguments and write from the central message downwards.
04 / MAKE IT YOURS
The English ZIP contains the SKILL.md instructions and is free to download without an account. The file declares the MIT licence; retain its source and licence notices when adapting or sharing it. Need help applying this skill? Book a call.
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File language: English
Explore the details at your own pace.
You paste a messy text, email or pitch into Claude and you get it back as a pyramid: the core message at the top, below it 3 to 5 arguments that do not overlap, and under every argument the evidence. The method comes from Barbara Minto, who developed it at McKinsey, and the skill enforces her strictest rule: start with the answer, not with the context. What you get back is not a loose block of text but a diagram, an executive summary of at most 250 words and an opening of three sentences, ready to paste into an email, a report or a slide.
the lines above come from the zip on this page · SKILL.md is 5,325 bytes
The governing thought in this example is taken word for word from the SKILL.md: it is the sentence the file itself puts forward as a good example of a core message. The arguments and figures around it are filled in schematically to show how the method works. Watch the order of the six steps: the answer is sharpened first, and only then may anything be written.
The AI Pyramid Principle Writer is a free skill from the TheSEO skill library. A skill is an instruction file, SKILL.md, that gives an AI assistant a fixed way of working for one task. Not software you install, not a subscription, not a template: one text file of 883 words that tells Claude how to rebuild any text into Barbara Minto's structure, in which order the six steps run, and which output format always comes out. You download the zip at the top of this page, put it in your Claude environment, and from that moment Claude structures your texts along this logic. If you are not yet sure what a skill is, start with what Claude skills are.
You recognise the problem the skill solves by one symptom: your text is long, but the core is unclear. The email to the investor starts with the founding of your company. The memo to the board builds three pages of tension towards a conclusion nobody reads any more. The annual plan lists twelve points, three of which say the same thing. The reader has to wade through every side issue before understanding what it is about, and most readers never get that far. This one turns the order around: the answer first, then the arguments, and only then the evidence.
By its own description the skill is meant for anyone who hears: write this more clearly, my message is not landing, my email is a mess, make this pitch ready. It names its strongest uses itself: an email to an investor about a pivot, an internal memo about a reorganisation, the executive summary of a slide deck, a pitch for a new client, an annual plan for the board, or a blog article that has to persuade. It belongs to the library of 100 free skills we make available from our AI and automation service, with no account and no sales email afterwards. All of them sit on the hub skills.
One thing to know in advance: the skill structures, it does not invent. The arguments come from your own material and the evidence has to come from you. If data is missing under an argument, no elegant sentence appears in its place but an open point with a question for you. That is not a limitation, it is the reason the final text survives a critical reader.
Barbara Minto developed the Pyramid Principle in the 1960s at McKinsey, where as one of the first female consultants she had to edit her colleagues' reports. Her observation was simple and has since become the standard for consultants, executives and managers: most people write in the order in which they thought, not in the order in which a reader decides. They start with the background, work through the analysis and end with the conclusion. The reader wants exactly the opposite.
The core arrives too late. A busy reader gives a document thirty seconds to make clear what it is about. If the answer sits on page three, the reader has already stopped on page one or, worse, started guessing at a conclusion. Which is why the governing thought has to be the very first sentence of the final text, before the opening.
The core sentence is not an answer. Many texts do have something like a core, but it is a description: we have analysed the market. That is not a message, that is an activity. So the governing thought has to be an opinion or a recommendation, fit in one sentence, is concrete and measurable, and answers the question from the opening. Marketing plays an important role is rejected in the file itself as a weak example.
The arguments overlap or are missing. Twelve loose points are not a line of reasoning. So it enforces 3 to 5 arguments that are MECE: they exclude each other and together cover the whole, on the same logical level. Apples next to apples, no half argument that really belongs under another one.
The evidence is thin air. Studies show, everybody knows, it is common knowledge: the skill rejects that kind of support. Under every argument belongs a concrete figure, example or source, and where that is missing an open point appears instead of a guess.
In diff form, with the examples from the file: what goes out and what comes back in its place.
Every output of the skill has the same shape: a top, a middle layer and a foundation. The reader reads from top to bottom and may stop at any point, because the most important part has already been said. The content in the blocks follows the example from FIG.01.
A skill is only as good as its instructions, so we simply describe them here. The file opens with a description of when Claude should pick the skill up: on explicit terms such as pyramid principle, Minto method, MECE thinking or McKinsey structure, but also on everyday complaints such as write this more clearly, my email is a mess, pull out the main message, or when a text is long but the core is unclear. Say something like that to Claude while the skill is loaded and you get it automatically.
Then come the six steps. Step one is the SCQA framing: the skill asks for the situation everyone takes as given, the complication that changed it, the question that follows from it and your short answer to that question. Step two turns that answer into the governing thought and tests it against four demands: an opinion or recommendation, in one sentence, concrete and measurable, and a real answer to the question. Step three has Claude propose 3 to 5 arguments and tests them for MECE: no overlap, covering the whole, on the same logical level.
Step four chooses the form of reasoning: deductive, with premises leading to a conclusion, or inductive, with parallel points carrying the same message, where the file notes that induction is usually faster and stronger for executive communication. Step five demands evidence per argument and rejects vague support. And step six builds the final text along a fixed shape of seven parts: the governing thought as the first sentence, the SCQA opening in at most three sentences, a signpost, three arguments with two sentences of evidence each, and a closing sentence that repeats the core message.
The output format is fixed as well, and for daily use that is perhaps the most useful part. You always get three blocks: the pyramid as a diagram with the arguments and the evidence below them, the full text in executive summary form of at most 250 words, and the SCQA opening of three sentences as a separate block. You paste the diagram into a slide, the text into an email, the opening above a report. Want to build such an instruction file yourself? The structure is explained step by step in writing a SKILL.md.
It closes with a source list of three titles: Minto's own book, the structured communication guidelines from the McKinsey Quarterly archive, and Power Cues by Nick Morgan. More on those below.
MECE is the strictest part of the method and the point where most self built pyramids collapse. Every argument gets tested in two ways, exactly as the file prescribes them: if two arguments overlap they are merged, and if the case does not collapse when you remove an argument, that argument goes. The content below is schematic, the tests are literal.
The SKILL.md names three sources by name, and that is deliberate: it lets you read them and decide for yourself whether you agree with the method.
The method comes from Barbara Minto. The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking was published in 1987 by Pearson Education and is the canonical write up of what she developed at McKinsey in the 1960s. Everything the skill enforces is in there: the answer first, the SCQA opening, the pyramid of arguments, and the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning. The book is not light reading, and that is exactly why a skill that carries out the method is more practical than learning the method by heart.
The working rules come from the McKinsey Quarterly archive. The structured communication guidelines published there over the years translate Minto into daily work: how short an opening may be, how to use a signpost, why an executive summary starts with the recommendation. The fixed shape of seven parts in step six leans on that tradition.
The receiving end comes from Nick Morgan. Power Cues was published in 2014 by Harvard Business Review Press and is about how messages come across: what a listener or reader picks up in the first seconds and why the order of information weighs so heavily. It underpins the thirty second demand the skill puts on the final text.
Even without installing the skill you can improve your own text with these principles: write down your conclusion in one sentence first, cross out every argument the case does not need, and put a figure you can show under every argument that remains.
If the trouble is not the order of your argument but whether you understand the subject well enough to explain it plainly, the AI Feynman Technique Coach is the skill that finds that out. And once the structure is right, if the message itself still has to stick, the measure for that is in the Made to Stick Coach skill, and if you want to train breaking problems apart as a separate craft, start with the MECE Issue Structure Coach skill.
The SKILL.md has no separate list of prohibitions, but the six steps themselves are full of hard rejection rules, and those matter at least as much as what the skill does do. In a conversation they play out like this: every line is a request or a piece of material you might hand over, with the response the skill gives according to its own instructions.
The zip contains one folder with the SKILL.md in it. Installing is a matter of putting the file in the right place, and that place differs per environment. SKILL.md has been an open standard since December 2025, so the same skill also works in Codex, Cursor and Gemini CLI. You are not downloading a Claude file but a working instruction any modern AI assistant can read.
~/.claude/skills/ (or .claude/skills/ in your project)./ai-pyramid-principle-writer.AGENTS.md in your repo.AGENTS.md.After that, using it is simple: paste your messy text, email or notes and say what it has to become, for example a memo for the board or an executive summary. It asks the SCQA questions it needs to sharpen the answer and then builds the pyramid. If you get stuck installing it, the full route per environment is in installing Claude skills. The wider explanation of working with AI is in the knowledge base.
At its strongest it is on texts that ask for a decision: the email to the investor, the memo about a sensitive change, the annual plan, the pitch, the executive summary above a long report. Anywhere a busy reader has to understand in thirty seconds what you want from them, the pyramid pays for itself immediately. It works well as a thinking tool too: anyone who cannot get their own plan into one governing thought with three load bearing arguments knows straight away where the plan itself is still shaky. That is often the biggest gain: the structure exposes what is missing in the substance.
There are also situations where you are better off leaving it alone. Texts that depend on tension and build up, a story, a case study working towards a reveal, a speech with a climax, lose their force if the answer sits in the first sentence. For descriptive documentation without a message, a manual or a report, a pyramid adds little: there is nothing to argue there. And the method orders arguments, it does not make them true: a governing thought that is wrong on the substance is only punctured faster by a tight structure, because the reader now sees it straight away.
The most honest limit sits in the evidence. Figures are demanded and gaps are marked, but nothing here can check whether your figures are right. The open points it hands back are homework, not a formality: a pyramid on unchecked evidence is a risk with a nice structure around it.
This skill is the free do it yourself version of work we also deliver as a service. It stays complete and without catches, but understand what a skill is: it teaches your AI how to do something, while every new session starts empty. A skill is not the engine and not the memory. You prompt, you supply your figures and your context again every time, you check. If you want that differently, there are two next steps: hand over the engine, or sort out the memory.
Step 3 deserves more than a paragraph, because this is the difference between a clever chat and a system you can build on. Jarvis is the organisation brain: it remembers what your AIs need to know, divides the work and keeps track of what happened. With structured writing you notice that immediately, because a pyramid stands on evidence, and the evidence, the earlier decisions and the house rules for board documents are exactly what you otherwise supply again every session.
We have been running on this system ourselves for months, and that is the only reason we put it on this page at all. Every agent session, every task and every decision is logged in it and can be read back. A new session therefore does not start blank: it first fetches the recorded decisions, the running projects and the latest changes, and carries on where the previous one stopped. So we are not describing a promise but the way we work every day.
Amounts are in euros and include Dutch VAT. All plans are listed at jarvis/prijzen (in Dutch). You choose your own plan. Paying online opens once the last checks are finished; until then we set your account up on request. For business arrangements and bespoke work there is a conversation.
Structure is one link: a message goes into the pyramid and somebody has to be convinced by it. These skills from the same library each take on a different part of that work.
The pyramid orders the argument. These three give other kinds of text their fixed shape, or test whether the argument holds at all.
AIDA CopywriterBuilds adverts and sales copy along attention, interest, desire and action.SKILL StoryBrand WriterPuts the client in the lead role of your story, for texts that do need tension.SKILL Feynman Technique CoachTests whether the explanation under your pyramid actually holds, by making you say it in plain words.SKILLMECE is one step here. These two turn it into a full thinking discipline.
MECE Issue Structure CoachTrains breaking problems apart without overlap and without gaps, separately from the writing.SKILL Persuasion AnalystTests whether your reasoning also convinces the reader who disagrees with it.SKILLA tight pyramid with a forgettable core stays forgettable. This is the next step.
Made to Stick CoachScores your governing thought on the six SUCCESs principles and makes it memorable.SKILL Writing a SKILL.mdBuilding an instruction file like this yourself, explained step by step.DOCWhere this skill comes from and what else there is.
What Claude skills areThe explanation under all of it: what a SKILL.md is and why it became an open standard.DOC The whole skill libraryAll 100 free skills in one list, sorted by subject.HUB AI and automationThe service behind it: from separate skills to automation that works in your business.SRV AI trainingIf your team wants to learn to set up this kind of work themselves.SRVNothing. The skill is free, falls under the MIT licence and you do not have to create an account or leave an email address. You download a 2.7 KB zip containing one folder and a single file, SKILL.md, and that is the complete skill. There is no paid version and no sales email follows.
Yes. SKILL.md has been an open standard since December 2025, so the same file works in Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI and other tools that follow the standard. In Codex you unzip it into .agents/skills/ in your project, or into ~/.agents/skills/ for all your projects; Codex has supported SKILL.md directly since the open standard of December 2025. Pasting the contents of SKILL.md into your AGENTS.md still works too. The instructions are plain readable text, so any AI assistant that accepts instruction files can handle it.
The sentence at the top of the pyramid: your core message. The file sets four demands for it. It has to be an opinion or a recommendation and not a description, it has to fit in one sentence, it has to be concrete and measurable, and it has to answer the question from the SCQA opening. Marketing plays an important role is rejected as too vague. Raise the Google Ads budget by 40 per cent in Q3 is a real one: you can disagree with it, and that is exactly the point.
MECE stands for Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive: the 3 to 5 arguments under your core message may not overlap and together have to cover the whole line of reasoning, on the same logical level. The skill tests that actively. If two arguments overlap, they are merged. And if the case does not collapse when you remove an argument, that argument was not needed and it goes. What is left is only the reasoning that really carries.
Then the skill invents nothing. Vague support such as studies show or everybody knows is rejected by the file, and an argument without data is marked as an open point, with a question for you to supply it. That feels strict, but it is the reason the final text stays upright when somebody digs into it: every argument carries evidence you can show.
The skill knows both forms from Minto's work and chooses whichever fits your message. Deductive is premise, premise, conclusion: three steps that work for logical proof. Inductive is three parallel points supporting the same message, and that works for business cases and for persuasion. The file adds the rule of thumb that induction is usually faster and stronger for executive communication, because all the arguments sit at the same level.
Always the same fixed format, in three parts. First the pyramid itself: the governing thought with the arguments below it and the evidence per argument, as a diagram. Then the full text in executive summary form of at most 250 words, built along a fixed order of seven parts. And finally the SCQA opening of three sentences you can put above an email or a memo. You can paste the diagram into a slide and the text into an email, with no rework.
A pyramid makes sure your message lands with whoever reads it. In an email you pick that audience yourself; on your website the search engine has a say in who comes in. Use this structure on pages that are barely visited and you write the sharpest core message for nobody. The free SEO scan shows in seconds which pages are in the running and which stay silent. In the guide writing models compared you can see how this model relates to the others.
