How to learn problem-solving
Problem-solving is the most important skill in MBB consulting. But learning it is extremely difficult. Let's discuss how you can radically upgrade your problem-solving skills.
‘I struggle with problem-solving,’ an MBB consultant shared her pain.
‘What if I am not smart enough for this job?’ she continued.
Unfortunately, it's a very common problem.
Consultants often doubt their intellectual abilities.
They work really hard at their maximum capacity, but it’s never enough. They struggle for many months without scoring any meaningful wins.
For insecure overachievers like all of us in consulting, this feels like never-ending torture and a living hell on earth.
Even the most confident people will start doubting themselves in this harsh environment.
But often, it’s not a ‘YOU’ problem. It’s not about being gifted and talented. If you got into an MBB firm, you are already smart enough to do the job well.
It’s the ‘SYSTEM’ problem. A lack of structured coaching and mentorship leads to gaps in problem-solving.
Unfortunately, MBB firms haven’t cracked how to coach consultants effectively at scale. They resort to a ‘sink-or-swim’ approach. The best consultants survive. It’s an okay approach for a corporation, but not a good one for you individually.
How do you improve your individual chances?
Actually, I believe it’s lazy thinking to attribute all problems to a lack of intrinsics and talents.
Please understand one thing.
Problem-solving is a very complex skill.
It’s like an onion with many layers.
If you have noise in any of these layers, it will prevent you from demonstrating your problem-solving abilities.
I see it time and time again: when consultants fix the noise, they discover that apparently they are intelligent and creative problem solvers.
Let's discuss these layers one by one:
1. Reputation and Gravitas
Reputation and gravitas greatly affect how people perceive information. Often, the same words can have an absolutely different impact depending on who and how they are said.
Unfortunately, these things take time to build. But understand this: Don’t get upset too much when people don’t take you seriously when you are new or junior on the team. It’s a normal situation. Take it into account when planning your communication strategy. That means you need to compensate in other areas of your communication and problem-solving.
2. Presentation skills
Presentation skills are an important part of how people see and perceive you. If you don't communicate well, they will get a negative impression of you.
Then, they will label you as struggling, or even worse, ‘not so smart.’ Then, they will look at everything you do with a negative bias. And if they look with prejudice, they will find what they are looking for.
Read this post on how you can improve your communication in leadership meetings: Do you struggle to speak up in leadership meetings?
3. Slide-making
Whether we like it or not, we communicate our ideas through slides.
If your slides are messy and unclear, people will think you don’t have worthy ideas.
If your productivity is low, you won’t have time to think and problem-solve. If you work in a reactive mode, you are always behind and rushing things. It’s not a very conducive environment for deep thinking.
As a result, the quality of your ideas will be poor. Basically, you don’t give yourself any chances to win in this game.
Read this post on how to create great slides: How to create great slides?
4. Logical thinking
Untrained consultants don’t have a solid thinking and problem-solving process.
They can make sloppy assumptions, illogical conclusions, and suboptimal solutions. These are ‘deal-breaking’ mistakes. They will render your solutions incorrect. You will be forced to redo your outputs. You will embarrass yourself and waste your time.
Spotting these issues is challenging because they manifest as random mistakes later on. You will struggle to understand where these problems originated, and fixing them will be nearly impossible.
Consultants assume that making many iterations is the normal way of working in consulting. That’s why they never challenge this logical layer. But in reality, it’s killing your productivity.
5. Intrinsics
Yes, intrinsics play an important role in problem-solving.
There is a black box in your brain that solves problems. It can be good, bad, or exceptional. But we often overestimate its role. We tend to mystify things we don’t understand.
For example, there were times when I thought I was the dumbest person in the world. But then, there were times when I felt so smart, like Neo in The Matrix. I could see the source code and anticipate things.
That is why I stopped trusting feelings and focused on objective signals.
It’s hard to judge whether you have intrinsics issues until you remove the noise in other layers.
Many times, I have worked with consultants who have believed they were not smart enough, only to discover that they were exceptional problem-solvers.
In my opinion, the only intrinsic traits that really matter are resilience, grit, and the desire to learn.
How do I clear the noise?
I hear you asking, my skeptical reader.
Well, learning problem-solving skills is a complex process. It takes a lot of time and practice. But you can accelerate your learning.
Here’s the thing.
In MBB firms, we like to mystify problem-solving.
Many partners believe that it’s an intrinsic trait.
As a result, we don’t have good tools to teach problem-solving other than ‘learning on the job’ and banging the wall again and again.
Consultants are expected to re-invent the wheel themselves.
But it doesn’t make sense. The consulting industry has existed for a hundred years, and these things have been invented and re-invented many times.
But imagine getting the best tools and techniques instead of wandering in the dark.
Here’s the thing.
Problem-solving is definitely a coachable and learnable skill.
Let me explain.
First, let’s discuss how we normally learn.
Normally, we learn through trial and error.
You make mistakes, get slapped, feel pain, and remember the lesson. There is nothing wrong with this approach. We learn this way from our childhoods.
The only problem is that it’s time-consuming and not effective. Unfortunately, in MBB consulting, you don’t have time.
Furthermore, every mistake you make damages your reputation. Unfortunately, people don’t have patience for mistakes and underperformance in the current economic environment.
MBB firms are too unforgiving for you to learn at a comfortable pace.
Is there a better approach?
Yes, there is!
The best approach is to learn with an experienced coach.
Yes, I know it sounds obvious, but it’s tough to execute in practice.
Great coaches and mentors are rare. Your managers and partners are preoccupied with their own survival. They don’t spend time coaching you, at least not at the level and intensity you need.
Not so encouraging news for you.
But there is an alternative solution.
Get external help.
For example, in my Hero's Journey coaching program, consultants do practical exercises to learn problem-solving.
This way, I can see them at work, and with my pattern recognition, I can quickly diagnose where they have gaps and help to fix them.
Basically, I coach consultants on 3 main fronts:
1. Raise the quality bar
Consultants often don’t understand where the real quality bar lies. The quality of outputs when you can excite and impress your partners.
Consultants often have this mental cap, limiting themselves in what they can do in the first iterations. They stop at obvious or incomplete answers. They do exactly what they were asked to do, not more. They don’t push to the next level of insights and implications.
They often think, ‘This is good enough’.
But they must change their thinking to ‘How can I win this time?’.
This is where I show them the best outputs for the exercise they just did. It’s probably the first time someone has shown them what a great output looks like.
They realize that it’s not about spending more time on slides. It’s about thinking differently to push for higher quality and insights.
2. Implement the robust process
Untrained consultants often don’t have any robust slide-making processes.
They work intuitively and haphazardly. This often leads to serious logical mistakes. These logical mistakes render their output incorrect and useless. As a result, they make countless iterations to create something decent, killing productivity.
But with a solid process, consultants can improve speed and quality at the same time.
Then, at times of high stress, they can fall back to this robust process that helps them produce outstanding outputs.
When working on exercises, we analyze every mistake they make and why and where it happened. We discuss how they can fix them for good.
As a result, they make far fewer mistakes. Their productivity radically improves.
3. Learn from others
Finally, we use my secret weapon - we leverage our community in the coaching program.
There are more than 50 MBB consultants in the program. All of them complete the same exercises.
After consultants complete their exercise, I ask them to review the outputs of other consultants.
Because they have already internalized the problem, they can more easily learn from others’ mistakes and best practices.
They also understand how managers see their work. When they look at other people’s slides, they naturally feel negative and positive emotions. This makes them appreciate how their work influences their managers’ perceptions.
Often, it has a sobering effect on consultants. Many are shocked at how much they had hurt themselves by sending bad slides to managers in the past.
What are the practical exercises?
Practical exercises simulate real-life tasks you may receive from your managers and partners. I used some of the real tasks I once gave to consultants I worked with (of course, sanitized).
They are difficult enough to see your problem-solving level. I usually require you to create a few slides to communicate your answer. On average, they should take 1-2 days of work.
But they are not too complex, so executing them doesn’t require too much time (days, not weeks). I understand that consultants are busy, and we need to be time-efficient. We must get maximum results with the least time invested.
There are around 10 exercises consultants can complete. Each exercise is designed to test a particular aspect of your problem-solving skills, such as structuring, research, analytical, conceptual, top-down communication, insights, and storylining.
For example, a company plans to enter a new market. The partner prepares for an initial client discussion and wants to learn more about the topic. Can you help research the market quickly and develop early insights and hypotheses?
How do you coach consultants?
Initially, my potential clients worry that I won’t spend enough time coaching them.
It’s a fair question.
My approach is very hands-on, and my involvement is much higher than they expect. Consultants often underestimate the time and effort required to learn problem-solving skills. But I know that we must have a very intense and high-touch approach.
There are six steps we do for every exercise.
1. Accepting tasks well
First, you learn to accept tasks in a way that you understand the problem and your leader’s expectations. Because if you don’t know that, it doesn’t matter what you do afterward.
How do we do it?
We role-play conversations between you and your partners.
You practice the framework and questions that help you to get maximum information without triggering your partners. You learn these techniques from the Playbook video lessons (also part of the program).
Each task has hidden information (unknown unknowns) that you must discover. You don’t know what questions to ask. That is why you will need to employ more advanced active listening techniques. So I can spill the beans myself and volunteer this information.
Then, after the role play, I will provide feedback on your performance.
What was good, and what could be improved? I will provide a best-practice video of another consultant who has completed this exercise. Seeing others do the same task will boost your learning experience.
2. Execute task
After accepting the task, you will execute it.
Unfortunately, I can’t observe how you work. That is why I will ask you to journal each step you take in problem-solving and slide-making.
You will learn the best-practice process from video lectures. Then, you will attempt to execute it and capture your learnings. The next time we talk, we will discuss your reflections, wins, and struggles.
3. Present outputs
On our next call, we will role-play you presenting your outputs like it’s a real meeting with a partner. Sometimes, I play the role of a difficult partner. I throw curveballs and ask difficult questions.
This way, I see how you come across when presenting your outputs. I provide feedback on your performance and suggest improvement techniques.
4. Reflect and learn
After the presentation, we will discuss what you learned from executing your process (step #2). We will review your journal and reflect on what worked and what didn’t.
This is a crucial step because this is when we fix the process and improve your productivity. The more reflective you are in your thinking process, the more effectively you learn.
5. Calibration and feedback
At this step, I show you the best outputs for this exercise. Each exercise has a champion consultant with the best-in-class output.
I will ask you to reflect on why you think I believe this is the best output and what you would coach yourself to get to a similar level of output next time. I teach you how to coach yourself.
Then, I also provide my calibration score, which shows where you stand with the global cohort of MBB consultants (>50 MBB consultants). Then, I provide detailed feedback and improvement points. We discuss where and when these problems originated and how to fix them for good.
I provide my Exercise report with all information captured for future analysis and reflections.
6. Homework
The final step is the most important. This is where the majority of your learning will happen.
I will ask you to analyze all the slides created by other consultants before you (outputs of 40-50 consultants doing the same exercise).
I will ask you to look for positive and negative points. You will need to comment on each slide using two dimensions: Content and Formatting. Only then can you compare your comments with my notes.
Basically, I want you to learn from additional learning data points without doing extra work. This way, you can learn not only from your mistakes but also from the mistakes and best practices of others.
You will be surprised by the variation of mistakes and best practices that consultants make. What is obvious to you may not necessarily be obvious to others. And vice versa.
Because you have already internalized the problem, you will quickly grasp and absorb new data points.
An additional benefit of this approach is that I put you in your manager's shoes. So, you can understand how managers review slides and see your work.
This is particularly important if you are preparing for a manager promotion.
That’s it. This is the approach to learning problem-solving. We repeat these six steps for each exercise you do.
You can radically improve your problem-solving in a matter of weeks, not months. For example, in the program, I often see consultants improve their problem-solving in two to three exercises.
And coincidentally, that's precisely what you need to kickstart your positive momentum and improve your performance. Suddenly, your leaders will start liking your work and provide positive feedback. This will improve the whole working environment around you and make your work even easier.
In my opinion, this is the most effective way to learn problem-solving.
But as you can see, doing it alone is extremely difficult.
You need help.
That is why I developed a coaching program for MBB consultants to help you improve problem-solving, achieve high performance, and become successful.
If you are an MBB consultant and need help improving problem-solving, I’d like to speak with you.
Book a Free 1-1 Consultation to discuss whether I can help you through my coaching program. There is no commitment, and you can ask any burning questions in a risk-free environment.
Read this post to learn more about the Hero’s Journey coaching program.
P.S. Problem-solving is the holy grail of the consulting profession. If you learn to work at a level when your leaders are impressed and excited, then all your issues will go away. You can build strong sponsorships, get exciting career opportunities, and become confident and less stressed. But learning problem-solving is difficult. The best way to accelerate is to get help from an experienced coach with a battle-tested system.