top-down-commslisted

# Top-down client communication Tone skills tell you how it sounds. This one tells you what goes first, and why. A perfectly-voiced document with an inverted argument still fails. ## The failure this exists to stop A reviewer, on a proposal page that had already passed three visual rounds: *"This is better now, but fix the storyline. Why should we start with this? Think about this from the perspective of a McKinsey consultant, a BCG consultant, and top-down communication."* The page opened with **"No automated analysis of the source imagery"** — a scope exclusion. It was there for a good reason: the recipient's own experts had beaten a machine benchmark, and liability was their live objection. But a reader's first impression was a disclaimer about something the document was not, and they had to reach section three before learning what was actually being proposed. **Defensive openings feel responsible and read as weak.** The instinct to front-load the caveat is exactly the instinct to override. ## Rule 1: the governing thought goes first Minto's pyramid. The first substantive sentence is **the answer**, not the background, not the topic, not the caveat. Everything below supports it. | Opening | Verdict | |---|---| | "No automated analysis of the source imagery." | Exclusion. What it is not. | | "Ranking incoming orders by contribution margin" | Topic label. Names a subject, asserts nothing. | | "At full capacity the question is not how many orders you accept but which