The problem-solving trick for the most difficult situations: meditation
Once in a while, you’ll face a tough problem to solve. This post is for MBB consultants who want to learn a counterintuitive trick to solve these problems when everything else fails.
Not all problems are equal.
Once in a while, you’ll face a really tough problem.
But you absolutely have to solve it. There’s no other way around it. The stakes are high, and often your personal career is on the line.
It can be a moment of truth for you. If you solve it, it can propel your career to new heights.
But you try everything, and nothing works.
What are you going to do in this situation?
Here’s an unusual problem-solving trick I used in the most challenging situations.
Use meditation for problem-solving.
I know it sounds strange, but hear me out.
It all started on a project in Australia.
It was a very good project overall. I really liked the topic, the clients, and the leadership team.
But it was my time to transition to an EM role, and I was stressing out about everything like crazy. I was maybe even overreacting a bit.
The first week I assumed the EM role, I received a very challenging task.
The senior client (an ex-McKinsey partner) asked us to synthesize our transformation program into one page. He said he couldn’t make sense of all the disjointed initiatives we had.
Of course, that problem landed in my lap.
It was a fairly high-level conceptual problem. I couldn’t really trust my team to do that. So I had to solve it myself.
I struggled with this problem for a few days. I couldn’t really make it work.
The initiatives were indeed too disjointed and fragmented.
I was really frustrated with this task. I had to make sense of these initiatives even if I didn’t design them in the first place.
Sometimes, we as consultants get these random tasks with impossible inputs and expectations. But clients are clients, and my partners wanted this to happen.
So I had to play along and solve this problem.
I decided to work over the weekend because the meeting with the client was on Monday. Luckily, it was an out-of-town project, so my weekend was pretty free.
During that period of transition to an EM role, I experienced unbearable stress. To cope with this, I regularly practiced meditation.
What I noticed was that it was very hard to calm my mind during meditation. It kept wandering around, thinking about all the random things. A lot of new ideas kept coming to my mind during those moments.
That’s when I thought:
Can I use it to my advantage?
So I decided to experiment.
I wanted to see if I could generate new ideas while meditating.
For that, I started by uploading all relevant information into my operating memory. I spent around 30 minutes reading all the relevant initiatives. There were around 40-50 of them.
Then, I started meditating.
This time, instead of trying to calm down my mind, I let it roam free.
I remember sitting in front of a big window in my room at the Sheraton hotel in Sydney, just opposite Hyde Park. The view was truly scenic.
I don’t remember how much time I spent meditating. But it worked.
An elegant idea came to me on how to structure all the initiatives into a meaningful concept.
Unfortunately, I can’t share that slide with you as it was 7 years ago.
But I remember the impact of that slide.
The client was thoroughly impressed.
After that, multiple times, he had mentioned to my partners that I was the only consultant who actually understood what was happening on that large transformation.
Then, in a few weeks, I was urgently recalled to my home office. The client got so furious. He called the senior partners and demanded that I stay on the project.
One of the senior partners called the managing partner of my office in Kazakhstan and asked him to keep me on the project.
By this, he managed to prolong my staffing on that project for one more month. Then, I was recalled to do a critical project for the home office.
To be honest, that experience was surreal. That was the first time clients demanded that I stay on the project. It was flattering, I can’t deny.
Anyway, enough bragging.
On a serious note, that one trick became a part of my problem-solving toolkit.
Since then, every time I faced an impossible problem, I would use that trick.
I would download critical information into my mind and then meditate to solve it.
It never let me down.
Try it and let me know if it works for you.
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