THE INTRODUCTORY FLOW

We saw earlier that the pyramid structure permits you to carry on a question/answer dialogue with your reader. This question/answer dialogue cannot be counted on to engage his interest unless the statement that starts it off is relevant to him. The only way you can be confident of its relevance is to make sure that it directly answers a question you have identified as already existing in his mind.

I also said earlier that you write primarily to tell people what they don't know. But a reader wants to find out what he doesn't know only if he needs to do so. If he has no need, he will have no question, and vice versa.

Thus, you make sure your document is of interest by directing it toward answering a question that already exists in the reader's mind, or that would exist if he thought for a minute about what is going on around him. The introduction identifies that question by tracing the history of its origin.

Since this history will be in the form of a narrative of events, it should follow the classic narrative pattern of development. That is, it should begin by establishing for the reader the time and place of a Situation. In that Situation something will have occurred (known as the Complication) that caused him to raise (or would cause him to raise) the Question to which your document will give him the Answer.

This classic pattern of story-telling-Situation, Complication, Question, Answer permits you to make sure that you and the reader are "standing in the same place" before you take him by the hand and lead him through your reasoning. It also gives you a clear focus for the point at the top of your document, and thus a means of judging that you are conveying the right message in the most direct way.

To illustrate, here is an introduction of the kind normally seen in business:

The purpose of this memorandum is to pull together some ideas for further reflection and discussion in such questions as:

1. Composition of the Board and its optimum size

2. A conception of the broad roles of the Board and the Executive Committee, the specific responsibilities of each, and the relationship of one to the other

3. Making the outside Board member an effective participant

4. Some principles dealing with the selection of Board members and their tenure.

5. Alternate ways for the company to get from where it is to where it wants to be in Board and Executive Committee operations.

Note how much more easily you comprehend the memorandum's purpose and message when it is forced to fit the narrative mold:

The new organization installed in October places full authority and responsibility for running the day-to-day activities of the two divisions squarely on the shoulders of the managers of those divisions. This move frees the Board to deal entirely with the broad matters of policy and planning that are its exclusive responsibility.

However, the Board has for so long oriented itself to dealing with short-term operating problems that it is not presently in a position to focus its attention effectively on long-range strategy development. Consequently, it must consider the changes needed to permit itself to do so. Specifically, we believe it should:

- Relinquish responsibility for day-to-day operating matters to the Executive Committee

- Broaden its composition to include outside members

- Establish policies and procedures to formalize internal operation.

In summary, the introduction tells the reader, in story form, what he already knows or could reasonably be expected to know about the subject you are discussing, and thus reminds him of the question he has to which he can expect the document to give him an answer. The story sets forth the Situation within which a Complication developed that triggered the Question to which your document will now give the Answer. Once you state the Answer (the point at the top of your pyramid), it will raise a new question in the reader's mind that you will answer on the line below.

The existence of these three substructures-i.e., the vertical question/answer dialogue, the horizontal deductive or inductive logic, and the narrative introductory flow-helps you discover the ideas you need to build a pyramid. Knowing the vertical relationship, you can determine the kind of message the ideas grouped below must convey (i.e., they must answer the question). Knowing the horizontal relationship, you can judge that the ideas you bring together convey the message logically (i.e., form a proper inductive or deductive argument). And most important-knowing the reader's beginning question will ensure that all the ideas you do bring together are relevant (i.e., exist only because they help to answer that question).

Naturally, you want to go about applying these insights in an orderly way, and that's what we will tell you how to do.