Want better strategies? Become a bulletproof problem solver
In this episode of the Inside the Strategy Room podcast , McKinsey senior partner Chris Bradley interviews Rob McLean, McKinsey director emeritus, about applying a disciplined, comprehensive approach to problem solving. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or Google Podcasts .
Sean Brown: From McKinseyâs Strategy and Corporate Finance Practice, Iâm Sean Brown. Welcome to Inside the Strategy Room . As the pace of social, economic, and technological change accelerates, organizations everywhere must make increasingly complex decisions in the face of an uncertain future. This is why the value of creative and strategic thinkers capable of solving complex problems has never been higher.
During todayâs episode, we have a conversation between Chris Bradley, a senior partner in our Sydney office, and Rob McLean, a director emeritus of the firm, a trustee of the Nature Conservancy in Australia and Asia, and director of Australiaâs largest philanthropic foundation, the Paul Ramsay Foundation. Rob, along with Charles Conn, is the coauthor of a recently published book called Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything [John Wiley & Sons, 2018]. Chris and Rob recently met in our Sydney office to talk about Robâs new book and how a disciplined and comprehensive approach to problem solving can be applied to almost any kind of problemâfrom personal decisions through to business strategies and on to some of most complex challenges facing society today. We hope you enjoy listening to their conversation.
Chris Bradley: Welcome, Rob. Itâs just great to have you here on our podcast. Youâve had such an interesting and long career since you graduated in the â60s. How did that lead to this book, Bulletproof Problem Solving ?
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Rob McLean: I had no real plan to write a book, but I found myself at a Nature Conservancy trustee meeting in Washington. I was on a panel with Jim Morgan, a legendary Silicon Valley CEO, and Jim talked about this book that he had written. Then I had the long trip home from Washington and thought to myself, âWhat would I write a book about?â I thought, well, the unifying thing is that Iâve had a problem-solving life and that involved my first real job at RAND in New York, followed by 25 years at McKinsey. Since that time, a lot of the work Iâve done has been with the Nature Conservancy, which is a problem solver in the environmentâand more recently, in philanthropy.
Chris Bradley: It sounds like you got this inspiration to write the book. Tell me about the inception of it.
Rob McLean: It turned out that one of my fellow partners in Australia was Charles Conn, who wrote the original â7 easy steps to bullet-proof problem solving.â I went and saw Charles in his role as warden of the Rhodes Trust at the University of Oxford and said I had this idea that we ought to write a book about problem solving because nothing really existed that shared the way to go about problem solving that weâd learned at the firm.
When I had that conversation with Charles, I talked about some of the things I was doing in conservation and social enterprise. And he talked about what he had been doing with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and with other philanthropic foundations and how he taught the young Rhodes Scholars the seven-step process. So out of that, we agreed that we would have a crack at writing a book on problem solving. We spent a summer at the University of Oxford at Rhodes House together with my wife Paula, who is a book editor, and a team of Rhodes Scholars, who were our case writers and research assistants.
Chris Bradley: Youâve set yourself a high bar, calling this book Bulletproof Problem Solving . What makes you believe that this really is bulletproof?
Rob McLean: âBulletproof problem solvingâ is an expression we used at McKinsey that meant that what you came up with to present to the client was ironclad. It really was a test of just how rigorously youâd gone about defining the problem, breaking it down, and doing the analysis.
Chris Bradley: So itâs about the bulletproof aspect coming from rigor. What is a bulletproof problem solver then? And why do we need them now?
Rob McLean: What weâve reflected on in writing the book is that by almost any measure, the world is more complex and uncertain. To our surprise, we came across some work done by the World Economic Forum that lists complex problem solving as the number-one skill for 2020. Thereâs also work by the McKinsey leadership group that shows that organizations that have problem-solving capability in the top quartile earn something like 3.5 times higher total return to shareholders than those in the bottom quartile. It seems to us that itâs not just an individual skillâitâs also becoming an institutional skill in demand.
Chris Bradley: In your book, you not only explain to us why problem solving is more important than ever and more relevant, but you also go through how to be a bulletproof problem solver. Whatâs your synopsis there?
Rob McLean: Weâve got some 30 examples that include individual problems, like âShould I have knee arthroscopy?â and âWhere should I live?,â and business problems, such as on competitive strategy, âShould I raise my prices or not raise my prices?,â and âShould we go to court and sue people who are infringing on patents?â What weâve tried to show is that itâs basically the same process that underpins individual, business, and societal problems. Good problem solvers are made, not born. If you want to become an outstanding problem solver, itâs within your grasp. Weâre not drawing a line around only dealing with problems that involve good knowledge of accounting or business. People can find their way into the book and into a range of problems that we think are all addressable.
Chris Bradley: I remember when I joined McKinsey, over 20 years ago now, and encountered the seven steps of problem solving. I remember thinking, âWhere was this my whole university life?â
Rob McLean: I had a similar experience as dean of a business school in Australia. I saw the students picking up fantastic capabilities in finance, marketing, and change management. But what I didnât see was a systematic process for dealing with relatively unstructured problems: the ability to define the problem, particularly in terms of what decision makers were looking for, or the ability to disaggregate the problem. Very few problems can ever be solved at the highest level. Thereâs got to be some way to break the problem down into parts that you can address and then take that into a set of priorities, a work plan analysis, and then recommendations that lead to action. What I saw then, as dean, I continue to see now. College graduates, for the most part, do not know how to solve complex problems that we talk about in the book. And we think thatâs a real gap in education globally.
Chris Bradley: So they have depth in their functional wheelhouse, but if they come across a problem that doesnât fit into one of those taxonomies, we hit trouble, donât we? And youâre right. More and more of the problems weâre encountering, both as you get more senior in your organization but also as the world gets more complex, arenât going to fit in those neat buckets, are they?
Rob McLean: No, theyâre not. One of the things that weâre very pleased about is that Eric Schmidt, the former chairman and CEO of Google, made the comment with our book that, at Google, they always hired for creative problem-solving talent above all else. We think thatâs happening with more and more organizations. It becomes not just a nice to have but a must-have for both business-school graduates and college graduates more generally.
Chris Bradley: One of the things I really love about your book, Rob, is these 30 cases and stories. It really brings it to life, and it allows you to see the common threads there. Letâs start there but perhaps with what happens when you get it wrong. Whatâs at stake here? What are some examples of when problem solving goes off the path?
Rob McLean: Often itâs missed opportunity. We have an example in the book where in the 1980s, IBM paid 20 percent to buy Intel, and it had another 10 percent of warrants in the company. It sold it for $625 million in 1986â87, and that was worth $25 billion a decade later. Similarly, it had the opportunity to buy 30 percent of Microsoft for $300 million in 1986. And ten years later, that was worth $33 billion.
Chris Bradley: Weâre all geniuses in hindsight. What was the failure of problem solving that you saw in those examples?
Rob McLean: It has to be that understanding of the market dynamics and the way that the PC industry was going to evolve. And as you know, IBM was quite a significant player in that business. The amounts of wealth that were created in this case were just quite staggering.
There are also examples from the personal level that we talk about in the book. I talk about whether I should have arthroscopic knee surgery. And then, in the social area and the environment, thereâs a lot of things that can go wrong. We give examples of whether you should trade off the loss of fish stocks in rivers in Southeast Asia, where thereâs huge hydroelectric potential. Thereâs some very, very clever work thatâs being done by the Nature Conservancy and others to highlight that you can get 90 percent plus of the power by having minimal impact on the fish stocks. But if you go to getting 100 percent of the power, you have an enormous impact on the fish stocks and, of course, on the populations that depend on fish for their livelihoods.
Chris Bradley: What youâre saying is that if youâre not a rigorous, bulletproof problem solver, youâre just going to accept common wisdom. That means youâre going to accept a whole bunch of dumb risks, and youâre going to say no to a bunch of really good opportunities. Thereâs something about bulletproof problem solving that allows us to see whatâs not the common wisdom.
For several years, weâve talked about strategy in terms of ten tests that define what a good strategy looks like. And test five says, âDo you have a privileged insight or foresight?â The idea is that too often in strategic processes, we saw common math plus common data equals common wisdom. And therefore, clients were surprised that their strategy didnât lead to a terrifically differentiating or winning position. Talk to us about the problem solverâs knack for getting that privileged insightâthat insight that really makes the difference.
Rob McLean: So much of the time, I see it coming from a team leader asking good questions. We had a CEO of a resources company in Australia, Rod Carnegie. His mining company had its most significant asset with these trucks that move iron ore. One of the biggest issues it had was with maintenance and tire changes. Rod asked the question, âWho does this best in the world?â And the answer was Formula 1. So they sent a team off from the Pilbara to the UK to look at the whole procedure, processes, and protocols for changing out tires. It had a very significant impact on the way they thought about it. So thatâs an example of a question that led to a different way of going about things.
More frequently, the insight that I saw for years at McKinsey came from talking to people at the front line and, particularly, talking to customers. We have an example in the book of the Avahan project, which was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, that arrested the spread of HIV in India [avahan means âa call to actionâ in Sanskrit]. The leader of that project, Ashok Alexander, spent something like a year interviewing over 1,000 sex workers in different parts of India to understand what was happening to them, and a lot of it related to violence. Out of that interview process came the Avahan project, which basically meant that the community was engaged. The journalists, the lawyer from the community, and the women were able to send off a mobile-phone message when they were in distress. And that model was rolled out to 673 towns and villages in two years. They scaled it up really quite quickly. But the insight for the solution came from these women at the front line.
Chris Bradley: How did that differ from the more orthodox way of eliminating HIV?
Rob McLean: There was what youâd call a public-health view that said you should stop the transmission. The hypothesis was that it was because of men on the move at truck stops, and you could show that there were hot spots of the spread of HIV. That was the starting hypothesis.
But Ashok had two insights. One was that every sex worker had 20 to 50 clients. So there was a lot more leverage in working with the sex workers than the men on the move. That was one that didnât require much analysis, and he had that very early on with his problem-solving capability and discipline. But the way he describes the solution, he feels it owes so much to the learning he got from the women that he spent time with.
Chris Bradley: Itâs a great example of problem search, isnât it? Because the first problem is, âHow do we reduce HIV transmission?â Then that led to the problem of, âHow do we make sex workers practice safe sex more often?â And that led to the next problem, which was, âWhy is it that theyâre not doing that?â Which came into these things about attitudes and threats of violence, et cetera.
Rob McLean: Thatâs right.
Chris Bradley: Thatâs a fascinating story. Letâs continue in the strategy vein. Some might argue all we really do in our strategy work with clients is just good problem solving applied to a specific business context. What is it about the field of strategy that, in some ways, might bring out the best and the worst in problem solvers?
Rob McLean: Both good strategy and good problem solving involve getting clarity about the problem at hand, being able to disaggregate it in some way, and setting priorities. One of the examples I have is with serving in tennis, which may seem a little bit of a frivolous pursuit. Iâve used a game-theory framework for looking at it: Where do you serve in tennis? You have to think about your own strengths and competitor weaknesses, and you have to bring unpredictability to bear. The way that Iâve laid out a decision tree for where I should serve is based on all of those things.
Chris Bradley: How do you play to win in tennis?
Rob McLean: Iâm a left-hander, so I have the advantage on the ad side of being able to serve out quite wide. However that makes me somewhat predictable about where Iâm going to serve on key points. I have to have the ability to be able to serve down either the tee or the body, and that brings the unpredictability inâand often turns out to be the basis of a winning point.
Chris Bradley: Thatâs interesting because a strength that is truly predictable stops being a strength, and that leads in the game-theory literature into mix-strategy equilibria, where the right answer is to mix it up in a certain proportion.
Rob McLean: Exactly.
Chris Bradley: What youâre saying is when weâre doing strategy, itâs not playing tennis against the wallâagainst ourselves. Thereâs an opponent in there who weâve got to outsmart. I think thatâs one of the first really important insertions in the problem-solving process thatâs important with strategies. Youâre not bowling alone. Youâre not racing alone. Thereâs someone else there, and what you do is going to affect what they doâand what they believe as well.
On this uncertainty point, thatâs another point where I think strategy differentiates from your more meat-and-potatoes problems. Youâve got to deal with the fact that youâre making decisions now that last a long time. So therefore, 99 percent of the shelf life of your strategies are going to be in a world you donât know much about, because itâs called the future. Talk to me about how great problem solvers bring uncertainty into the mix.
Rob McLean: I think they do several things. They try to calibrate what the level of uncertainty is and whether thatâs going to impact the range of choices they have. For what we refer to as âhigher levels of uncertainty,â we then bring out a tool kit that youâre very familiar with that involves how you think about what the no-regrets moves are that you ought to do. Usually they are about building capability. What are some of the low-cost options that you can pursue that position you in the space and that allow you to learn? And then figure out that timing for when you make a big bet.
One of the examples that illustrates this in the book is we looked at the resources company BHP, which was making a 50-plus-year commitment. Thatâs a long time. It was 50 to 100 years. And we were able to satisfy ourselves the investment looked attractive.
We looked at uncertainty on two major dimensions. One was the iron-ore price, and the second was what happened to the Australian dollarâUS dollar exchange rate. We looked at scenarios where the iron-ore price had an expected level, but then we had levels when it fell by two standard deviations, so weâre covering 95 percent of possibilities, and then when it went up by two standard deviations. And then we looked at the range of possibilities of the exchange rate. That then allowed us to say we had a level of confidence that we had a venture that could both survive and prosper in the most likely scenariosâand even the worst of the scenarios. We were able to calibrate the uncertainty and have a way forward.
Chris Bradley: Putting a box around the uncertainty does two things. The first thing is that often, in the face of uncertainty, our clients will say, âWell, everythingâs uncertain, so itâs an ambiguous world. Letâs just muddle along.â Or they say the exact opposite, which is, âPretend uncertainty doesnât exist, and put it in the corner, and have it as the last page of the pack with risks and uncertainties.â But if youâre bringing it in the center and putting a box around it, what youâd see is that just because the world is highly uncertain, it doesnât mean that the decision should be uncertain, because in this case, what you found was it was worth proceeding under a very wide range of scenarios.
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Rob McLean: But there was something that happened that was quite important in this. We talk in the book quite a lot about having team structures that have diversity and that allow different viewpoints to be brought together. We had one team member who was very bright, but he played the devilâs advocate in the project. We have an expression, which I know still applies at McKinsey, of having an âobligation to dissent.â He took that very, very seriously. That required us doing the work to have a level of confidence about the solution: that even in adverse scenarios, we had a robust solution to this problem. That too often is missing in problem-solving settings.
Chris Bradley: I love that idea. If youâre going to put a box around uncertainty, itâd better be a good box. That means you need lots of conflicting views.
Rob, since leaving McKinsey, youâve continued your problem-solving life. In some ways, youâve graduated from everyday business problems into problems that are perhaps more of a wider global nature in terms of environmental or social problems. And you coined this term in the book: âwicked problem.â Tell us about what itâs like to solve wicked problems.
Rob McLean: There are a lot of wicked problems. Itâs hard to say that theyâre solved. They keep on needing to be re-solved. But there are cases where I think some significant gains have been made.
Chris Bradley: What is it that makes a problem wicked?
Rob McLean: Take social problems, like obesity, which is one that we tackle in the book. Multiple causes is one significant dimension to it. Often, itâs unintended consequences when you seek to solve the problem in a particular way that make it worse rather than better.
Chris Bradley: Or it creates other problems.
Rob McLean: Or sometimes there are just value disagreements among players about whether this is good, or bad, or otherwise. Theyâre the kind of problems you have to find a way to pick apartâfind ways to have entry to have impact, without feeling that youâre tackling the whole thing at once.
Chris Bradley: Those are complex, messy problems where thereâs no benevolent dictator to make everything all right again.
Rob McLean: The example we use with obesity really reflects a quite brilliant piece of work done by the McKinsey Global Institute  where they took the UK and arrayed some 44 interventions that would have the prospect of lowering those with obesity by something like 25 percent in five years. I donât think Iâve ever seen a more ambitious and rigorously set-out answer to a wicked problem.
Chris Bradley: Thatâs a classic multiple-causes situation in which trying to find the right intervention is really, really tough, isnât it?
I want to talk about getting the conditions right for solving a problem well. In our book Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds [John Wiley & Sons, 2018], we talk a lot about the social side of strategy. What is it that gets in the way of the purest answers to strategy? And itâs often got things to do with competing interests, and different perspectives, and a lot of bias to the status quo in existing power structures, and so forth. What are the big hacks you have in your book for getting the conditions right for problem solving?
Rob McLean: We do spend quite a lot of time talking about alerting people to biases. Theyâre not dissimilar to the biases you list around confirmation, loss aversion, availability, and so forth. We also put great weight on team structures. What we might have said more loudly is that you have to have leaders who are prepared to look at sometimes quite-radical choices and real alternatives.
One of the examples we use is the case of mineral exploration, where a CEO agreed to anchor outside rather than anchor inside. In that case, it meant looking at the practices of the best companies in mineral exploration as well as the worst. And that turned out to provide a major insight to us about where exploration reported to the CEO, the level of science in the organization, and the culture that supported it and shifted it to a much more successful strategy. But if you donât have leadership that is prepared to look at the redefinition of the problem statement, your chances of getting great problem solving are much reduced.
Chris Bradley: Strategists today have more analytical tools at their disposal than ever before. I donât want to age you too much, Rob, but you started with a slide rule, I think. Then you had the trusty Hewlett-Packard calculator, which people my age just canât use, because itâs backward to us. And I started in Excel spreadsheets. But now thereâs thousands of times more analytical problem-solving horsepower and data to apply to it. How does a problem solver cope with all of that? How do you use these tools well?
Rob McLean: We say to teams that you always should start with heuristics and rules of thumb. For example, say we had a merger or acquisition, and there were three conditions for success that might involve the cost reduction and customer acquisition and retention. Now if each of these three conditions had an 80 percent chance of success, weâd say that if they were independent, thereâs only a 50 percent chance of success of the merger. Thinking that way around joint probabilities is where you start.
Chris Bradley: So have good priors.
Rob McLean: Have good priors. Then just start looking at the data.
Weâve got an example in the book about London air quality. Iâd read a piece saying that 3,000 people had died in London seven or eight years ago because of PM2.5 [atmospheric particulate matter with diameter of less than 2.5 micrometers], the small particles. So I asked one of our researchers to pull down two data sets. One was on PM2.5, and the other was on asthma hospital admissions in London. I gave him an hour, and he produced this diagram that showed these hot spots. There was enough in that diagram that showed there was something youâd want to explore more closely.
So before you jump into machine learning or major regression analysis, look at the tailsâlook at where the mean, median, and mode are. Those things then help you with the hypothesis that you want to set for a major piece of regression analysis or machine learning.
Chris Bradley: And somehow through that, youâve even managed to link obesity to how good the footpaths are in a city. Talk to me about that.
Rob McLean: We know that obesity is a major issue. And we thought, as a team, âHow would we start thinking about it?â The first thought thing was, âHow would you compare caloric intake with caloric use in the US and Japan?â The team quickly got the numbers on that. It didnât take more than a half an hour. What we found in Japan was that they had lower caloric intake and that they had substantially more caloric use. And it was like, âWell, why is that?â Well, it was the structure of their citiesâwalking to the train station, walking to the office. So suddenly, we had this variable of walkability that we needed to explore.
We then asked one of our researchers to take a look at whether we could look at the US and look at differences between obesity in different US cities. He pulled together data on 68 US cities. We were able to determine that thereâs an enormous difference in obesity. Some 82 percent of the variance is explained by three variables: income, education, and walkability.
Chris Bradley: And walkabilityâs the new thing no one was talking about.
Rob McLean: So just kicking around different ways to break down the problem, we came across something that was quite interesting that we think presents a major opportunity for cities to rethink their design in a way that aids walkability.
Chris Bradley: So far from replacing the way you might do problem solving, these new analytical techniques are just allowing you to go deeper and faster. What hasnât changed, though, is that classic, almost Sherlock Holmes exploration of, âWhy?â
We are getting to a world where these algorithms are getting fiendishly good. And theyâre getting fiendishly better than humans are at doing certain things like, for example, spotting tumors. What are the chances that our strategists could eventually be made redundant by an algorithm? And what are some of the opportunities and the traps that exist for strategists around this world of machine learning?
Rob McLean: It seems to me that thereâs some terrific ways to use machine learning. You may be familiar with Kaggle, which crowdsources machine-learning problems. If you can put a data set of borrowers on Kaggle, something like 500 or 600 teams would come up with predictions for bankruptcy in the next two years from that data set. And the client will choose the algorithm that works best. So that seems to me a good use of algorithms.
Chris Bradley: Yes. And the idea that one very smart team sitting in an office building can beat 500 teams is laughable, isnât it?
Rob McLean: We also see it in the example weâve got about using drones for beach safety. Having a drone with a camera and attaching machine-learning algorithms, weâve shown in Australia that you can have something like 90 percent accuracy in distinguishing a shark from a porpoise and from a human. But you still require that lifesaver on the beach to see people in trouble. So youâre coupling human capability with machine-learning capability to get a better outcome. Weâve gone a step further. I talked earlier about problem solving being an institutional skill thatâs being valued in the share market with total returns to shareholders. We think weâre going to see a combination of mental muscle, which is the cognitive problem solving, and machine muscle that will distinguish the better companies going forward.
Chris Bradley: So itâs almost as though these tools are forcing us, in some ways, to be more fundamental problem solvers because a lot of our brain load used to go in making the calculations, which are now happening automatically.
Robert McLean: Let me give another example. Thereâs an enormous temptation now to just run algorithms over data sets and âboil the ocean.â That was always something when I was learning problem solving that was anathema.
Take another example thatâs on Kaggle, which is the Titanic problem. The question they asked the machine-learning team, and I think it was close to 2,000 that had a crack at it, was: âWho survived the Titanic ?â What came out of the algorithm was, people who werenât called âmister.â Itâs amusing because you know that you could take a human, and you could ask, âWhat were the priorities to put people in the lifeboats?â Of course, the answer was women and children. So you can get there in a fashion with machine learning.
Thereâs no question that there is this scope for better identification of disease and to save a lot of labor. But we see the same value in doing problem solving, with defining a problem, breaking it down, having hypotheses, and testing them initially with simple data before you go on to run these algorithms.
Chris Bradley: Rob, thank you so much for your time on this podcast, and all the best with your terrific book, Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything.
Sean Brown: Thanks to Chris and Rob for joining us inside the strategy room. If youâd like to learn more about the strategic problem-solving techniques discussed in this episode, Robâs book Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything is published by John Wiley & Sons and widely available.
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Chris Bradley is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Sydney office, Sean Brown is the global director of communications for strategy and corporate finance and is based in the Boston office, and Rob McLean is a director emeritus in the Melbourne office.
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Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything
- Charles Conn, Robert McLean
- John Wiley & Sons (US)
Complex problem solving is the core skill for 21st Century Teams
Complex problem solving is at the very top of the list of essential skills for career progression in the modern world. But how problem solving is taught in our schools, universities, businesses and organizations comes up short. In Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything youâll learn the seven-step systematic approach to creative problem solving developed in top consulting firms that will work in any field or industry, turning you into a highly sought-after bulletproof problem solver who can tackle challenges that others balk at.
The problem-solving technique outlined in this book is based on a highly visual, logic-tree method that can be applied to everything from everyday decisions to strategic issues in business to global social challenges. The authors, with decades of experience at McKinsey and Company, provide 30 detailed, real-world examples, so you can see exactly how the technique works in action. With this bulletproof approach to defining, unpacking, understanding, and ultimately solving problems, youâll have a personal superpower for developing compelling solutions in your workplace.
- Discover the time-tested 7-step technique to problem solving that top consulting professionals employ
- Learn how a simple visual system can help you break down and understand the component parts of even the most complex problems
- Build team brainstorming techniques that fight cognitive bias, streamline workplanning, and speed solutions
- Know when and how to employ modern analytic tools and techniques from machine learning to game theory
- Learn how to structure and communicate your findings to convince audiences and compel action
The secrets revealed in Bulletproof Problem Solving will transform the way you approach problems and take you to the next level of business and personal success.
About the Authors
Charles Conn is CEO of the Rhodes Scholarships in Oxford. Previously, he was a Partner at McKinsey & Company, led a technology start-up to its IPO, and was an early team lead at the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation in San Francisco.
Robert McLean is Director Emeritus at McKinsey and Company. He led the Australian and New Zealand McKinsey practice for eight years and served on the firm's global Director's Committee.
In this Book
- IntroductionâProblem Solving for the Challenges of the Twenty-First Century
- Learn the Bulletproof Problem Solving Approach
- Define the Problem
- Problem Disaggregation and Prioritization
- Build a Great Workplan and Team Processes
- Conduct Analyses
- Big Guns of Analysis
- Synthesize Results and Tell a Great Story
- Problem Solving with Long Time Frames and High Uncertainty
- Wicked Problems
- Becoming a Great Problem Solver
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Bulletproof Problem Solving by Charles Conn, Robert McLean
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Chapter One Learn the Bulletproof Problem Solving Approach
In the 1980s, when Charles was at business school, he wanted to understand the thenâascendant Japanese business practices better. He wrote to dozens of Japanese companies to see if they would host him for a summer internship. Most never replied, but just as he was thinking he might be unemployed for the summer, Charles received a letter from a Dr. Utsumi at Canon, the camera and printer company. Canon was prepared to hire Charles as its first western intern, and soon he was winging his way to Japan.
It sounds like a fun adventure, and it was, but it was also a huge shock. Charles was seconded to the production planning division in a distant Tokyo suburb, and assigned to a Canon men's dormitory, three train lines and 90 minutes away. He couldn't speak or read Japanese. He was assigned what seemed at first an impossible task: develop a model for how to site factories. He despairedâwhat did he know about where to put factories? It seemed like a specialist problem.
But, with the help of a translating colleague, he began to interview the team about their experiences in different factory location decisions around the world. Patterns began to emerge in his findings. He learned which variables were involved, from local authorities' incentives, to local taxation rates, wage levels, raw materials transportation cost, and so on, ...
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Case studies from Bulletproof Problem Solving
The book has more than 30 case studies. we show two simple ones here to pique your interest in learning more..
Exhibit 1.5
The company also evaluated whether it could achieve the same result by reducing its fixed overheads or taking manufacturing in-house. With few costs other than a lean staff and rent, the first was not an option. With limited current cash resources, investing in its own extremely expensive manufacturing presses and assembly also didnât make sense (step 3). On balance a small price increase to restore unit margins was worth the risk (step 6 and 7).
This kind of financial tree is particularly useful for solving problems that involve monetary trade-offs of alternative strategies. You can use it to track almost any kind of business problem.
COMMENTS
Bulletproof problem solving is a great one if you want McKinsey style Edit: since this got traction, I'll add why it's a great book. It takes you through the 7 steps McKinsey uses (other forms would use something similar) and shows you the options of frameworks/ approaches in each step with worked through examples.
"Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything" was the second one. ... ETA: I typed this on phone, so it may have grammatical errors. I don't do sanitary check on my reddit comments, so pardon me lol đ That being said, your plx fix requests are noted and i have made the changes.
I would recommend: Strategic Thinking in Complex Problem Solving (Arnaud Chevallier) To start off with. Ignore the strategic thinking part of the title, it is actually a really practical book about how to methodically go about creating high quality issue trees and accompanying solution trees.
Reading books by itself does not build your skills. You have to practice. Bulletproof problem solving. Creative Confidence by Tom and David Kelley is a great read, not directly related to consulting, but very helpful in the creative problem-solving area, which is indirectly related to consulting. the wiki lists some.
There's another good book, "Bulletproof Problem Solving" by some McKinsey partners that shows how MECE is used in the broader problem-solving context. ... The official Python community for Reddit! Stay up to date with the latest news, packages, and meta information relating to the Python programming language. ...
Add your thoughts and get the conversation going. I am currently reading up on the best ways for solving problems. It looks like there is a number of pretty defined steps to follow. I am reallyâŠ.
A great podcast on a seven step process to problem solving. For those practicising case studies, you should listen to the emphasis put on understanding the problem before going into solving it and focussing on levers of which you can control. ... The McKinsey forward program does well enough too & the book - Bullet Proof problem solving ...
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Complex problem solving is the core skill for the 21st Century, the only way to keep up with rapid change. But systematic problem solving is not taught in most universities and graduate schools. The online course covers the seven-step approach to creative problem solving developed in leading consulting firms. It employs a highly visual, logic-tree method that can be applied to almost any ...
Rob McLean: "Bulletproof problem solving" is an expression we used at McKinsey that meant that what you came up with to present to the client was ironclad. It really was a test of just how rigorously you'd gone about defining the problem, breaking it down, and doing the analysis.
In Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything you'll learn the seven-step systematic approach to creative problem solving developed in top consulting firms that will work in any field or industry, turning you into a highly sought-after bulletproof problem solver who can tackle challenges that others balk at.
The 7 Steps of Problem Solving : Define the Problem -> Disaggregate -> Priotize -> workplan -> analyze -> synthesize -> communicate đ. Solving problems is the fundamental skill for the twenty-first century, and at last, there's a comprehensive guide that anyone can easily follow to do it effectively. Like.
The online course provides insights from the Bulletproof Problem Solving authors, Conn and McLean. The online course is a self guided, highly interactive course with 4-6 hours of content. The course is designed for people to work at their own pace and develop the problem solving skills employed at leading management consulting firms. There are ...
Bulletproof Problem Solving is chock-full of case study after case study, as well as a bevy of tools and techniques for you to try. Some of my favorites involved the various approaches to logic trees and the great "one-day answer" tactic. As the world becomes more volatile, uncertain and complex...a more agile and adaptable approach to business ...
Title: Bulletproof Problem Solving. Author (s): Jonathan Cowley, Charles Conn, Robert McLean. Release date: April 2019. Publisher (s): Ascent Audio. ISBN: 9781469072265. Complex problem solving is the core skill for twenty-first-century teams Complex problem solving is at the very top of the list of essential skills for career progression in ...
The important first step is to describe the context and the boundaries of the problem that is agreed upon by those involved in making the decision. A weak problem statement is a common problem. "Rushing into analysis with a vague problem statement is a clear formula for long hours and frustrated clients.". Step Two: Disaggregate the Issues.
Follow Bulletproof Problem Solving now on YouTube. Co-authors Charles Conn and Robert McLean have completed a series of content pieces for YouTube where both authors discuss their professional experiences, the importance of problem solving, the 7-step Bulletproof Problem Solving process and leading example cases from the book.Follow us on YouTube for more problem solving discussion with the ...
Video Library Take a look at our Bulletproof Problem Solving explainer video with the Bulletproof Problem Solving authors Charles Conn and Rob ...
The problem-solving technique outlined in this book is based on a highly visual, logic-tree method that can be applied to everything from everyday decisions to strategic issues in business to global social challenges. The authors, with decades of experience at McKinsey and Company, provide 30 detailed, real-world examples, so you can see ...
Bulletproof Problem Solving is chock-full of case study after case study, as well as a bevy of tools and techniques for you to try. Some of my favorites involved the various approaches to logic trees and the great "one-day answer" tactic. As the world becomes more volatile, uncertain and complex...a more agile and adaptable approach to business ...
Chapter OneLearn the Bulletproof Problem Solving Approach. Chapter One. Learn the Bulletproof Problem Solving Approach. In the 1980s, when Charles was at business school, he wanted to understand the thenâascendant Japanese business practices better. He wrote to dozens of Japanese companies to see if they would host him for a summer internship.
and uncertain problems. The Bulletproof Problem Solving Cycle The bulletproof problem solving process is both a complete pro-cess and an iterative cycle. This cycle can be completed over any timeframe with the information at hand. Once you reach a prelimi-nary end point, you can repeat the process to draw out more insight for deeper understanding.
Step 1: Define the Problem. This kind of problem sounds quite complex at first, a jumble of unfamiliar terms like feed-in tariffs and avoided carbon. A logic tree helped Rob see the structure of his problem in one picture, and helped him break up the analyses into manageable chunks.