Product managers are inseparable from communication and expression in their work, and the question is, how can they have good logical expression skills to help communication and promote it?
Communication is one of the important soft skills of product managers, and in the daily work of product managers, there are a lot of tasks that rely on good communication skills to improve the efficiency of work or achieve a certain goal. So how can you improve your logical expression skills? This article will introduce one method: pyramid expression.
1. Expression is an important means to improve communication efficiency
As social animals, human beings rely on their interaction and cooperation with each other to meet various needs and achieve individual survival and development. In this process, communication has become an important means for everyone to earn a living. It's not just a way to deliver information, it's a way to express ideas, build relationships, solve problems, and achieve goals.
Choosing an appropriate and clear logic to express the transaction can improve the efficiency of communication. The expression logic of the pyramid structure is one of the most effective ways to improve the ability to express oneself, and it is very suitable for work.
2. What is the logic of expression? What is a pyramid expression?
Expression logic, sometimes we also call it "article structure", it is a way to describe things, it is a method of assembling information, reasonable expression logic can make it easier for the audience to understand what we are expressing.
Sometimes some people say that our expression is not clear and the article is not coherent, and that is because the order of our expression is in conflict with the reader's comprehension process. For the audience, the most understandable order is: the main abstract and then the secondary, that is, the central idea (conclusion) first, and then the concrete idea (argument).
A pyramid is a logic that describes a transaction in the order that the audience can best understand. This form logic has its own structure, which is called the "pyramid principle" because the structure is shaped like a pyramid.
3. The structure of the pyramid
If you want to express yourself through the logic of pyramid expression, you need to understand what the structure of the pyramid looks like.
To put it simply, the pyramid is composed of "preamble" + "horizontal relationship" + "vertical relationship", from the preamble to the central idea, with the central idea as the starting point, and the middle line and horizontal unfolding at the same time to form the final structure.
Here is a brief explanation of the "Preamble", "Horizontal Relationship" and "Vertical Relationship", and the next chapter may introduce them in detail.
- Preface: It is a foreshadowing to elicit the central idea and attract attention, and is generally divided into background, conflict, question, and answer.
- Vertical: The vertical unfolds in a "question-answer" manner, and there is a causal relationship between the top and bottom.
- Horizontal: Horizontally is carried out in an inductive or deductive way, so as to achieve no duplication or omission.
4. How to express it through pyramid expression?
Understanding the composition of the pyramid structure just lets us know that we can use this structure to present and illustrate the final information when we encounter anything. For a specific thing, we only need to follow the following 3 steps to get the pyramid used to express this transaction:
1. Build pyramids
The process of building a pyramid is the process of analyzing things and assembling the structure of information. Depending on whether we know what the problem is that we need to explain, there are two ways to build a pyramid:
Top-down approach:
When the transaction described is very certain, that is, the question we need to answer, we use a top-down approach to build the pyramid. The questions are answered from top to bottom, and the answers to each question are horizontally divided into different arguments until the nodes are already in consensus and do not need to be explained.
Bottom-up approach:
Sometimes we're not sure what the final problem is, we just have a bunch of information that we need to rephrase from that once cluttered information. This is our bottom-up approach, listing all the main points→ finding the logical relationship (cause and effect) → coming to a conclusion.
2. Prepare a preamble
A preamble, also known as a preface, introduction, or introduction, summarizes what the target audience already knows and links that information to the questions that need to be answered. The most common preamble structure is divided into the following three parts:
- Context: Content that your audience already knows or will recognize.
- Conflict: Illustrate the contradiction based on the analysis of the context.
- Doubts: Questions and solutions based on contradictions, which are also the arguments – central ideas of the whole text.
The above three parts are the basic components of the preamble, and depending on the situation, the preface of the three parts can be adjusted when writing the preface, for example, if you need to get straight to the point, you can put the questions first, and if you want to highlight the worries, you can put the conflicts first.
If the article is long, you can add "key sentences" at the end of the preamble, which is a summary to explain the general structure of the article, so that the audience can understand all our ideas within 30s.
3. Writing subject (horizontal relationship + vertical relationship)
If the structure of the pyramid has been constructed, then the main body of writing becomes very simple, and it is nothing more than an explanation of the different points in the structure.
The two ways of building the pyramid mentioned in 4.1 are only at the strategic level, and for the construction of a complete pyramid, it is not enough to stay at the strategic level, but also to the tactical level, that is, to complete the construction of vertical and horizontal relationships through deduction and induction.
- Deductive: A linear way of reasoning that ends up reaching conclusions through cause and effect, e.g.: birds can fly, I am birds, therefore I will fly.
- Induction: Categorizing a group of facts, thoughts, or opinions that have a common denominator, summarizing their commonalities, e.g., I eat a lot and I don't work out, these two points can be summarized as I am fat.
Deductive reasoning is a way that people use more in the thinking process, because deductive reasoning is easy to understand, but the disadvantage of deductive reasoning is that it may be necessary to list all the reasoning processes, and the whole link will become very long. Therefore, do not use it too much, you can use it in the main body of the article or the key argument, and use the inductive method in other parts instead.
Inductive reasoning only needs to define an argument (idea) and then find out the specific arguments that can be corroborated.
Through the above content, you can continue to exercise in your daily life and work, and you will definitely be able to improve your expression skills.
Bibliography:
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