Good morning. Your reader gives you thirty seconds. Most documents spend them on background.
Communication.
SCQA
When you sent the last document that actually mattered — the proposal, the board note, the case for more budget — could your reader have found the answer inside thirty seconds, or was it buried under the story of how you got there, and if you already know it was buried, why are you about to open the next one the same way?
Barbara Minto was McKinsey's first female consultant, hired in 1963 and later moved to London with an unusual brief: improve the firm's writing. What she codified in The Pyramid Principle became McKinsey's standard for structuring documents and spread across the consulting industry, and its opening move is SCQA. Start with the Situation — something the reader already knows and accepts. Introduce the Complication — the change or threat that makes the document necessary. That tension raises a Question in the reader's mind, and your Answer is the whole point of the piece; everything after it is support. The trap is writing in the order you did the work — context, then process, then findings, with the answer arriving somewhere on page four. Readers decide in the first thirty seconds whether to keep reading, and SCQA spends those seconds building the question your answer resolves.
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