Practical Problem-Solving

The problem-solving skill has a disproportionate weight in assessing consultants' performance. They cannot afford to have any noise in this area. But working on this skill is extremely challenging.

A Wake-Up Call

I received a Concerns Rating for the problem-solving dimension in my first evaluation. This was a real wake-up call!

I worked on a project where it was hard to showcase my problem-solving skills. It required managing corporate politics and communication.

But leadership reassured me that my contribution was crucial and valued. Imagine my surprise when I learned about my rating. But it was too late to do anything about it.

I learned my lesson—never get into this situation again. I decided to learn problem-solving skills.

I became obsessive. I read every book and completed every training there was. As a result, I was perplexed by how complex and confusing this topic was.

Deciphering Confusing Feedback

To start working on problem-solving skills, I started with my feedback.

But it was cryptic and confusing. Lots of different concepts and sub-skills are merged in this big category.

Feedback is often too generic and does not consider an individual's intrinsics and performance. It often consists of typical tenure-related pain points. In this post, I explain why and how this may happen—How to master your performance reviews.

The main challenge happens when we confuse symptoms and root causes. Leadership provides feedback on the negative behavior they observe. Or the lack of positive behavior they desire. But the root cause of why you are not demonstrating that behavior can be different.

Before starting to work on this feedback, it is helpful to understand precisely what it means. And focus on fixing the root causes, not the symptoms.

Often, consultants have toolkit problems preventing them from demonstrating their true problem-solving abilities. First, they need to get rid of some damaging habits.

I would suggest ruling out these usual suspects.

Slide-Creation

Most of the negative feedback comes from poor slide-creation skills.

Leaders are hesitant to say directly that consultants’ slides are terrible. That is why they send cryptic signals, such as attention to detail, structuring, quality of outputs, low productivity, etc.

In my experience, nine out of ten people have severe problems in this area. Fixing this problem will allow people to see your ideas hidden by all the visual noise.

In this post, I explain how to improve this area - How to Create Great Slides.

The Answer Is Not Insightful Enough

Another common problem is stopping at the trivial answer.

It happens when consultants do not push enough to find unique insights. They do only what they were asked to do. But the expectations are higher than that.

This happens for two reasons. First, they are not aware that is an expectation. Many consultants believe their job is to do what their partners tell them. However, the expectation is that consultants think independently and bring unique insights. I experienced this myself when I was a consultant.

Second, they don't have enough time because they dig themselves into a productivity hole. They survive in a reactive mode, not allowing themselves time for quality thinking.

In this situation, consultants may receive feedback indicating poor conceptual and analytical problem-solving skills, as well as a lack of ownership and personal perspective.

The Right Answer To The Wrong Question

Often, consultants do not fully understand the question or the problem they need to solve. Then, they spend a lot of time on the wrong things and go into too much detail in areas where it is not necessary.

This is a particularly dangerous problem. This problem is the most irritating to leadership. It may result in the feedback of weak intrinsics and gaps in comprehension.

In this post, I describe how to prevent this from happening - Eliminate Work Waste.

Learning is Messy

When I started learning problem-solving skills, I discovered a few unpleasant challenges.

The first discovery was that the standard firm learning was underwhelming and inadequate. All training materials seemed out of touch, too theoretical, and had nothing to do with how we do real projects.

I also realized that many people don’t have a specific definition of good problem-solving, including standards and expectations. Everyone measures proficiency from their own perspective and experience, and these expectations can vary drastically.

Another problem I noticed is that in real life, very few people apply the techniques taught in theory. Almost nobody uses issue and hypothesis trees in their pure form, and nobody applies the 7-step problem-solving approach as it is described in training.

When I suggested using them to my managers or partners, they saw me as a naive baby.

The worst part was that many believe problem-solving is an intrinsic talent—you either have it or you don’t. This is rarely the case. Most often, consultants simply haven’t received sufficient coaching and apprenticeship.

Early on, consultants get bombarded with various theoretical concepts such as the 7-step problem-solving method, the 5 Whys, Issue trees, Hypothesis trees, MECE structuring, the Pyramid principle, deductive and inductive reasoning, and Synthesis. These are all important and valuable concepts.

However, they can be overwhelming, and how to apply them is unclear. While they are created to structure and organize vast knowledge on problem-solving topics, they are not necessarily useful in applying them in practice.

We need a more down-to-earth, practical approach to problem-solving. Once you master it, you can build on top of it, developing your problem-solving style and approach.

Practical Problem-Solving Approach

So, imagine you are given an ambiguous problem to solve. What to do next?

First, don’t panic; you are already trained for this. Remember your case interview prep and how to approach case problems properly—it's already a good start.

The practical problem-solving approach has several steps. Treat them not as sequential but as an iterative process and an important checklist.

1. Understand the Problem

Ensure you understand the problem well. Many people have action bias and jump straight to execution.

You will be amazed how many consultants skip this step and rush to solve the wrong problems, wasting hours and days.

Don’t be shy about being difficult and not easily accepting unclear problems. It is better to be uncomfortable now than to feel stupid later when you realize you were doing the wrong things and wasted your time.

Ask your leadership for the context, scope, challenges, constraints, and other relevant information. At this stage, relying on unclear assumptions will cost you dearly.

When accepting the task, ask clarifying questions, playback and summarize what you understood, discuss any unclear points, and spell out your initial plan to approach the problem. Ask your leadership how they would approach it.

Understand how your problem fits into the project's overall objectives. What is the definition of done, and what are the success factors? What is the timeline, and when do you need the answer?

When you understand the bigger picture, you may devise a more elegant way of solving the problem. Don’t deprive yourself of that opportunity to overdeliver.

One consistent characteristic of high-performing consultants is that they are difficult to give tasks to. They strive to fully understand what they are asked to do and whether it is truly needed.

The best task is the one you don’t need to do. So, identifying unnecessary or stupid tasks early on and eliminating them immediately will be best for your productivity. Partners often generate many such tasks.

2. Check the internal knowledge library

Sometimes, junior consultants neglect to check the existing knowledge library. Typically, all firms have their own knowledge database of sanitized documents from previous projects.

Now, firms have launched their own ChatGPT versions to help consultants. Please leverage those resources; don’t start from scratch.

Scan the database and select a few relevant documents. You will find several conflicting documents with different frameworks. Select one that is more reasonable and suitable to the problem.

Feel free to reuse some of the pages from that document. However, remember to customize them to your current client's situation. Leadership hates it when consultants copy-paste without adjusting to the client's context.

Another life hack is to find an internal expert in this field. Sometimes, a good expert can save you weeks of wasted work. Ask your leadership who are the best experts to engage and how to do it most effectively.

3. Create a physical platform for problem-solving

It's important to create a physical space for problem-solving. Typically, this is a slide or several slides with all relevant information collected.

Clients and leadership often discuss issues, thinking they are on the same page, but in reality, they have radically different understandings in their minds.

Don’t let those ideas float in the air for more than one discussion. Ground these conversations in a physical space, such as a drawing board, notepad, or, eventually, a slide. This helps clarify things and avoid misunderstandings.

Also, clients often have difficulty discussing conceptual problems but react well to something tangible, like a slide. This way, you accelerate the data gathering and syndication of early ideas and hypotheses.

After each client interview or team problem-solving session, quickly jot down key findings, numbers, and insights on the page. Then, playback these findings to clients.

To avoid creating multiple slides and wasting your time, try to consolidate all your initial insights on one Diagnostic page describing how the current situation works and the key challenges.

4. Understanding the problem is half of the solution

Spend a significant amount of time understanding the current state of affairs. How does the client work right now? What are the important numbers and metrics that describe the situation? What works well? What are the key pain points?

Be numbers-driven and ensure that you have the right facts. Any mistakes at this stage may lead to incorrect recommendations later.

Collect client perspectives from different sides. For example, the commercial team may have different perspectives from the technical team.

For example, as a consultant, I used to fear showing incorrect data on slides. Later, I learned that presenting some incorrect information triggers clients, prompting them to share all the necessary data and evidence to ensure that you accurately represent reality. However, you need to be able to stomach clients’ negative reactions.

Stress test your diagnostics with clients and playback to them. Ensure that it represents reality. Early hypotheses and solution ideas will often form during the diagnostics phase.

5. Structure everything

Structure any information you are working on in a MECE way. It stands for Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive.

This was one of the most counterintuitive concepts I couldn’t understand initially. In real life and industry, we rarely pay attention to MECE-ness, which is very important in consulting.

Many clients don’t care about MECE-ness, but partners typically care a lot and notice un-MECE-ness immediately.

This is one of the professional deformations in consulting. They can’t stand any un-MECE-ness. After thousands of slides, they have developed this X-ray vision, noticing the slightest irregularities on the pages. Don’t trigger them.

There is a trick you can use to learn how to structure well. Place all your information about the subject on a page, in any form and at any level of depth.

Our brains are wired to structure any information we see, so by doing this, you'll be leveraging your natural brain capacity.

Once you are done, check for MECE-ness through two questions.

1. Do my buckets overlap (Mutually Exclusive)? Check if any subordinate elements cannot be placed in another bucket.

2. Does this structure accommodate all possible variations (Collectively Exhaustive)? Check if any elements are not added to this structure.

Then, once you have your first structure, back-test it with random facts and information about the subject to check if they fit neatly into your structure. Try to destroy your structure and see if it withstands the test.

Issue trees are a more advanced way to structure your problems. From my experience, issue trees are extremely helpful but rarely used extensively in real-life situations.

The key to creating the best issue trees is to write them as specifically as possible. If you can apply your issue tree to another client, then it is not specific enough.

Many leaders skip this step and jump into solutions right away. Nevertheless, I have found practicing issue trees extremely helpful. They have often helped me clarify the problem I am solving and come up with unique angles of attack.

6. Secure sources of insights

The first drafts of everything you do are often very obvious and trivial. I used to be shy about showing my first drafts because I knew they were not very good.

I intuitively knew I needed to strengthen my outputs by enriching them with unique insights. To do that, I was looking for sources of insights.

Many consultants make a huge mistake here, thinking that their job is to create slides. No, creating slides is just a medium for representing your ideas. Your main job is to find insights that make your solution better.

You can leverage various sources of insights, such as client interviews, client data, research teams, internal knowledge and analytical databases, and internal and external expert inputs. Be creative here.

If you utilize multiple sources of insights and apply them to your work, your outputs will become of very high quality after just a few iterations.

The best and fastest way to do that is to show your slide to working-level clients. They will tell you what is wrong with it and how it can be improved.

This is where you can stand out and showcase your creativity and resourcefulness.

7. Develop hypotheses early

Now that you better understand the problem, its pain points, and shortcomings, you need to enter solution mode.

Form your hypothesis early, even when you don’t have enough information, much like a scientist develops a hypothesis and then tries to prove or disprove it.

Even knowing about this concept, many consultants often struggle to apply it. This happens due to the chaotic nature of our work.

If you catch yourself doing something without a clear hypothesis, you are most likely working in a reactive mode. Nothing good will come out of this.

Having an early hypothesis will give you the discipline to take a deliverable-focused approach and consider how you can progress problem-solving further through specific actions and analysis.

This one is very counterintuitive. In normal life, we don’t usually work in a hypothesis-driven way. You need to practice.

Building elaborate hypothesis trees is a rather advanced tool; you shouldn’t worry about this too much in your first months of consulting.

This tool is rarely used at its full scale in real-life situations. However, you can practice this skill on your own problems and bring this capability to fruition when you become a more tenured consultant or project manager.

A practical approach is to structure your hypothesis in a MECE way, ensuring you cover the full universe of solutions. Exclude obvious non-relevant solutions early on, but have a good explanation.

8. Co-create with clients

Bring clients on a problem-solving journey with you, and let them contribute. If you do this, they will have a higher buy-in and less urge to resist your recommendations.

Don’t be afraid to take someone else's ideas and integrate them into your outputs. Initially, I had a mental block about doing this.

It doesn’t matter if you didn’t come up with these ideas. Consultants get praised for integrative work, not for developing new ideas.

You can strengthen relationships with your clients by crediting them for their contributions. Consider even asking them to present their ideas.

By doing this, leadership will praise you for your true integrative ability to bring different complex components into a coherent solution and build stronger client relationships in the process.

9. Synthesis and communication

Once you have your first recommendations, you will need to communicate them concisely and compellingly to clients and your leadership.

Here, many consultants fall into one common trap. They try to dump on people all the intricate details they have learned, showing how much work they have done and how deeply they know this topic.

Although it is very helpful to be very deep in details, it is not helpful to communicate them all at once. People get overwhelmed and provide feedback that you need to be more top-down.

Synthesis is a very important part of both oral and written communication.

There is a simple approach to synthesis. Consider all your information and determine the most important conclusion or implication you can derive.

If you have only 30 seconds, and the call or meeting could be interrupted, what is the most important information you need to deliver? Use the Minto pyramid principle for effective synthesis.

Additionally, creating clear and compelling communication through slides will be important to your success.

I force consultants to create a one-pager that synthesizes the whole problem and solution in one simplified communication. That one page will most likely get to the CEO meeting with some backup for illustration.

The earlier you force yourself to that 1-page synthesis, the more effectively you will work solving the problem.

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As you can see, problem-solving is a complex skill with many components. Mastering them and orchestrating everything coherently, clearly, and positively takes time and practice.

Once you do this, you start improving and are recognized for your outstanding problem-solving skills.

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P.S.

I feel your pain.

As a consultant, I struggled to perform and faced an impossible situation with extremely high expectations and minimal support.

My life turned into relentless stress, pain, and anxiety. But I always suspected that there should be a better way.

All that pain was not necessary with the right support.

Nine years later, I designed the coaching program I desperately needed back then. Its sole focus is helping you excel and achieve high performance.

Only then can you build strong sponsorships, find great projects, and become confident.

If you are an MBB consultant and want to achieve high performance, please
Book a 1-1 Discovery Session.

Learn more about the Hero Journey coaching program.

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