Most of today I spent on a training course called “Top Down Thinking” being run by a nice chap from PA Consulting who is the project’s workstream leader for technology.
What was most interesting for me was the way it boiled the presentation of just about anything down to a ‘Governing Thought‘ and some key lines that summarised your arguments (no more than five of those). The general style of it was very similar to the Matrix Games format where you say I think x will happen because … and give three arguments to support your case.
Apparently the basis for this approach was a book called Pyramid Thinking written in the 1970s by a woman called Barbara Minto who was the first female partner than McKinsey had. So on that basis I think it could be fair to say that McKinsey invented the matrix games format (actually I wouldn’t be surprised to find that there is in fact a direct link between the two). What is perhaps a little scarier is that this might be how major decisions are made throughout the corporate world…
