James Arthur's personal blog.

How to Write a Proposal

If you trade on your ideas, you need to know how to write a good proposal.

It’s not easy. Every situation is different. There’s no golden structure or template. Seven headings to rule them all.

There is, however, a method. It’s based on visual thinking and the Pyramid Principle.

To write a good proposal, use post-it notes and bullet points to construct a logical argument:

• focus on what you want to say
• follow the pyramid principle
• build your pyramid with post-its
• transcribe into bullet points
• write up into minimal prose
• typeset your document once

Focus on what you want to say

Start by writing an introduction that covers the situation, complication, question and answer. When you’re writing a proposal, this pretty much writes itself. Your client (the target of the proposal) has objectives. You’re writing to explain how to achieve them.

The situation is a uncontroversial statement of their context and objectives:

You’re a high street music retailer. Your sales have dropped. You want to recapture your market share.

The complication is an equally simple, uncontroversial statement of facts. This time, facts that make it hard to deliver the objectives:

The online music marketplace is dominated by iTunes. Your management team have all just left.

The question is then:

So, what do we recommend?

Or, in this case more explicitly:

So, how can you recapture your market share?

Your proposal must then focus exclusively on the answer to this question.

Follow the pyramid principle

Following the Pyramid Principle means making your answer logical. A logical answer is a rigorous logical argument. Explicitly, it must be:

• a valid argument
• mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive

Identifying a valid, mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive argument is both trivial and taxing. It’s trivial because you can just see it. Is this next statement valid?

I like elephants. Elephants have tusks. Therefore I like fruitcake.

It’s taxing because it takes mental effort. Assessing whether the premises of your argument make both separate, non-overlapping (mutually exclusive) points and together cover all of the possible points (collectively exhaustive) requires actual, stop checking your emails every two minutes thought.

If you’re a G-Star Raw model you may be able to do this in your head. For the rest of us, this is where visual thinking comes in.

Build your pyramid with post-its

Find a quiet room with a clear table. Write down all of the points you want to make on individual post-it notes. Arrange the post-its into a logical structure.

Some of the points will be straightforward statements of fact. These go into your situation and complication piles. Other points will be part of your argument. These you arrange into a pyramid.

Your argument will start with a key line of points. These points will together summarise and provide a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive logical argument for the point of your proposal. For example, say your answer is:

Re-classify your retail stores as an social / entertainment destination

Your key points must explain precisely why this is a good idea, e.g.:

• your retail stores are your key asset
• your customers don’t want to buy music in-store
• your customers do want a social / entertainment destination
• reclassifying as a social / entertainment destination is manageable
• any other response is going to drive you out of business

Each one of these points is an assertion. If the assertion is uncontroversial and requires no supporting argument, you’re done. If it’s reasonable to question them, you need to support each point with a logical argument, just as they support your answer.

Hopefully it’s now clear how the pyramid grows. You start with a point. You support it with an argument made up of individual points. You take each point in this argument and, if necessary, support it with its own argument. Visually, this means creating a pyramid of post-its that looks a bit like a christmas tree. Your answer, the point of the proposal, is at the top of the pyramid, with the key points below it and their supporting points below them and so on.

A key insight of the Pyramid Principle is that the exercise of evaluating your own logic provides an opportunity to evaluate what you are saying. Stand over your pyramid of post-its. Is your argument logical? Is it true? Is it actually what you want to say?

Transcribe into bullet points

You build your pyramid using post-its because:

• writing a point down removes the cognitive overhead of keeping it in mind
• the size of post-its force you to write succinctly
• you can move them around easily

Swapping out a post-it is simple. Rewriting a paragraph is time consuming and irritating. Work in post-its for as long as possible. However, there comes a time when you’re satisfied with the argument you’re making and need to turn the thing into a document.

Start in a text editor. Not your word processing software like Word or Pages. A simple, no fonts, no formatting text editor like TextMate or Edit Pad Pro. Write up your points as bullet points. Nest (indent) them, e.g.::

# Proposal Title

Situation: 

... facts ...

Complication:

... facts ...

Question: so, what do we recommend?

Answer: ... your point ...

* key point 1
* key point 2
* key point 3

## Key Point 1

* supporting point 1
  - sub point 1
    - sub sub point 1
    - sub sub point 2
    - sub sub point 3
  - sub point 2
  - sub point 3
* supporting point 2
* supporting point 3

This step essentially translates your pyramid of post-its into nested bullet points. When you’re done, I’d suggest taking a break to clear your mind. You could also, at this point, send the outline proposal to colleagues / collaborators for their feedback.

Time passes. A dog barks. Lawnmowers hum in the distance.

Remember the key insight that evaluating your own logic provides an opportunity to evaluate what you are saying. Re-read your bullet points. Is your argument logical? Is it true? Is it actually what you want to say? If and only if you’re happy with the meaning and structure (forcing yourself to make sure everything is mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive) then move on to prose.

Write up into minimal prose

Create a second new document in your text editor (not your word processing software) and setup your screen so you can see both side by side. Now, working section by section, copy over and do the absolute minimum required to turn the bullets into coherent grammar.

This can mean turning bullets into paragraphs, or they can stay as slightly expanded bullets. For example, clear but ungrammatical bullets points (literal transcriptions of the scribbled text on your post-it notes) like:

• market tiny
• opportunity???

Could become:

The potential market is tiny, so the opportunity is questionable.

Or could remain as bullets:

• the potential market is tiny
• the opportunity is questionable

Try to write the absolute minimum. The closer to the original bullets, the fresher and more to-the-point the prose will seem. The fewer words you use the better. Whatever you do, do not obfuscate or flesh out the language: say “printing money” not “quantitative easing”. Reading prose out loud can be a good test: would you actually speak like that if you were talking to a friend over coffee?

You’ll need some syntax to mark headings of specific levels. Use any such micro-syntax you like. As you may have seen from the bullet points example above, I use markdown:

# Heading 1

## Heading 2

### Heading 3

I also use simple placeholders for media elements, e.g.:

... screenshot goes here ...

Once you’ve written up the document in prose, you have another candidate for a draft to circulate for feedback and a draft to review yourself after enough time has passed.

Typeset your final document once

Finally, when you’re sure the meaning, structure and wording is right, typeset the document using a word processor. For me, this means pasting the text into Pages, applying pre-set styles, dropping in media elements like images and budgets, hooking up hyperlinks and, where the proposal is more than a couple of pages, adding an auto-generated table of contents.

If you’ve followed this method and really internalised the Pyramid Principle, you’ll have a document that communicates your ideas succinctly, with clarity and force.