One Skill That Changes Everything

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick, and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking with Robert McLean. He is a former senior advisor and director emeritus of McKinsey and Company, where he led the Australian and New Zealand practice for eight years and served on the firm's Global Directors Committee.

He was the dean of the Australian Graduate School of Management, and is now an investor in mathematics education and data analytics software, alongside his philanthropy. He's a graduate of Columbia University's Graduate School of Business, and he became a member of the Order of Australia in 2010 for his contributions to business, social welfare and the environment. And of course, Robert, thank you so much for writing the book Bulletproof Problem Solving: The one Scale that Changes Everything.

Robert McLean: Well, thank you, Anita. We feel that the book is timeless now. It's an essential skill.

Anita Brick: So maybe where you could start us off. Share with us what bulletproof problem solving is?

Robert McLean: In McKinsey we used to use the expression that if you had done the problem solving systematically when you went through from defining the problem, disaggregating it to setting priorities, having a work plan that reflected the way you'd use resources well, did the analysis and the synthesis and communicated your findings to the client well, that was bulletproof problem solving. It meant that it was unassailable, impenetrable, that you'd covered all your bases. As a former managing partner at McKinsey, Dominic, there was no greater compliment than to say that problem solving was bulletproof.

Anita Brick: I know that you have seven elements, and you work through them. As we work through the questions, tell us what are the first two?

Robert McLean: The starting point, we feel, is to have a good problem definition and in our case, a good problem definition leads to action, but they also have a number of other elements about them. They're specific, they’re measurable. They're relevant to the problem at hand. They usually have a time frame for things happening. And as I said, it leads to actions. And that's a way to test whether any problem definition is going to be helpful to you.

Anita Brick: One of the students said, and believe me, I sit there too. There's so much information out there, but it feels like there's never enough, and she said, “I find it challenging to set up the problem with incomplete information. What is your advice on how to frame an ambiguous problem where there are conflicting priorities?”

Robert McLean: I don't think I've ever come across a problem in my career that had complete information. That's a reality of the world we're in, and with levels of uncertainty often that are quite hard to make. Coauthor Charles and I say, there's no substitute for getting a whiteboard out, laying out your hypothesis and what the issues are. Having your own little team where you review with a colleague or partner, highlight what the uncertainty and ambiguity is, and then figure out what it is that you can resolve now and what you can only resolve with better information, you know, or with the passage of time.

Anita Brick: It's really interesting because there was another question by a student. I see that this issue of the political nature of an organization comes into play in terms of how you define the frame and even what solutions are acceptable. So he said, “I understand that setting boundaries is crucial in defining a problem correctly. Yet in my organization, boundaries have a very strong political aspect. How would you advise someone like me to navigate the boundaries and the politics that come up, and then create a well-defined problem?”

Robert McLean: That's a really good question. I think it's a really smart way of thinking. You've got to understand the boundaries and the politics. And we typically do that in a problem statement that forces you to work out what the criteria are going to be. You know, to have an answer that will be accepted and implemented. And you also have to work through who the decision makers are, who you have to get on board in order for the problem solving to be put into practice. Some people, maybe naively, think that problem solving is just analysis, and you get the right answer and all is well. That's not the messy world of organizations, you know, that we've spent our time in. And I really think that the way you framed it is that looking at the boundaries and politics is a crucial part of what has to be done in good problem solving.

Anita Brick: But how do you navigate it? I mean, I think it's one thing to recognize that it exists. If you think about this, is this like a problem within a problem? I'm sure that you faced that situation when you were at McKinsey that some wanted you there, some didn't want you there. What were some things that you did that allowed you to navigate politics without being drawn in and having everything derail?

Robert McLean: The starting point is listening and really active listening. We would often, you know, go into an organization and be working on new product development or mergers and acquisition, and within the organization there'd be people that were supportive and others who were not sure, and then others who were just dead against it. And that process of active listening to understand what it is that each of the camps felt, or what the assumptions were that they, you know, were working with that led them to that point of view.

That's the starting point. Then the next thing that we would do is get two groups together and have them talk to each other, then tease out the assumptions that go into one view or another. You know, we would often say, okay, so in order to proceed with this merger or this acquisition, there's a bunch of assumptions here. If you can satisfy that they're robust and they're going to happen, you know, you'd be supported. People would say, well, you know, you’ve understood where I'm coming from and yes, if that turns out to be the case, well, then I'll change my point of view. But in this world that we live in, we've got to listen to everybody. You've got to understand where they're coming from. But you also have to try to find some common ground. You know, what it's going to take to move in a particular direction. I don't see much that ever substitutes for doing it that way.

Anita Brick: Along with that. And an alum had a sort of a variation of that scene. He said, “I think this is not uncommon. I work in an environment where there are solutions to things we've done before. What ideas and advice would you have that I could use to influence leadership's approach to defaulting to previous solutions?”

Robert McLean: That touches on something that we see time and time again is that, you know, our success is based on some go to solutions out of habit. That's our starting point. But we also know that with so many industries being disrupted and the pace of change in so many industries, that can often be a bad recipe or not the right way to go, and particularly junior team members can very respectfully challenge that go to solution in a number of different ways. And one of the tools that we would often use is to say, okay, we've got this go to solution. What do we have to believe for that to be the best course of action in this setting? Are the other market segments and the other key buying factors similar? Iis the cost of acquisition the same? The long term value of the customer comparable? Is the scaling of our solution similar to what we've seen elsewhere? You just see by asking this overall question of what we've got to believe, breaking it down. And then you can see whether it matches with the go to solution or whether it starts to raise questions that have even the most ardent advocates of the go to solution start to say, well, I can see the nuances here. This is a bit different. Yeah, there's some things about this that we're going to have to do differently.

Anita Brick: Well, I like that because it's not making anyone wrong.

Robert McLean: Just had another example of it. We were looking at a divestment for a company in oil and gas and they had a very attractive offer for one of their major properties. And they were unsure about, you know, whether they should hold this sort of asset or not. And as a team, we went through and said to justify or to hold this asset rather than sell it. You found one giant field in the past decade. In the next decade, you would need to find five. Do you feel that you can find five giant oil fields in the next decade? And they all looked at each other and said, oh my goodness, there's no way we'll do that. And then they proceeded to make the divestment. Again, it was just using a framing around a question, but linking the analysis to it to have people make up their own mind about, you know, how probable or how likely it was that they would be able to come up with a level of value that warranted holding the asset.

Anita Brick: Well, and I love that because what you said is absolutely on point. People will change first of all, if the data shows that out and if there is a narrative that plays well, but if they're on the outside being told that they need to change, people will dig in their heels and they won't do it. Your approach. I love that. What we have to believe for this solution to be a viable solution is a great question to ask, because it makes people, at least in my opinion, it makes people think differently.

Robert McLean: Yeah, the other part about it is that is following from listening, framing the question on the assumptions, and then usually doing just a few back of the envelope calculations. You know, sometimes there's sophisticated analysis, but a lot of the time you can come up with these calculations fairly simply and fairly quickly, you know, to put it in front of decision makers that they get it in and, you know, it can make a decision.

Anita Brick: What we've been talking about so far has quite a bit to do with what questions you ask. It determines how you frame it and how you engage people. One of the alums asked this question, “What advice would you have for someone who wants to know how to ask better questions, which lead to more effective solutions?”

Robert McLean: I think we all want to ask that question. I found that the easiest way to ask a better question was to take a different perspective. We used to do things at times where we would say we were trying to work through an issue with the client where we say, well, let's just spend half an hour and we'll just put the customer hat on and just ask ourselves, how would our customers feel about this initiative? Is this a pricing initiative or a product in a variation? And then we would say, put another hat on. How would our major shareholders react to this initiative? There are examples of how you ask better questions because you take a different perspective.

And then another way that we would often do it is just to probe and say, why is this the best solution? What is it about? You know, what we've come up with means that there's no better way with our resources figuring out how to move forward. There never seems to be any substitute for this question. Why? Whether you're a, you know, a seven year old or a 70 year old. It forces the logic of an answer to be drawn out. It isn't just a matter of sitting there and scratching your head and thinking, you know, how do I ask a better question? Just looking at the problem from a different angle, which I described before, or just pursuing the whys.

Anita Brick: And the whys are good because it gets you out of the whats. Sometimes people want to go directly from, okay, we have this problem so let's implement a solution now. The why seems to be important for coming up with more effective solutions, but also having the platform or the foundation to be able to ride out the challenging times.

Robert McLean: I do, but it also requires organizations, I think, to have a level of maturity about them in opening themselves up to these questions being asked. It's so powerful that it really requires organizations to have mantras, what's right, and getting to the bottom of those issues. That also means you've got to have respect for junior people and people who aren't specialists in an area, and to accept that sometimes these questions are annoying, but they're going to be what gets you to root causes and what gets you to unconventional answers.

Anita Brick: It dovetails with Alan asked this question, he said, “With a novel or seemingly impossible problem, what advice would you have? Should I be using existing frameworks or should I be creating a new one?”

Robert McLean: That's something I think we all come across. I’ll give an example that we use in the book, where we had a team brainstorming session and we started tackling a number of major social issues, and here's one that is significant in advanced Western economies. And that's this issue of obesity. We started working for a couple of hours in our team. We started off by saying, well, other places where this isn’t a problem, and we said, well, it doesn't seem to be much of a problem in Japan. So if we looked at caloric use and caloric intake, does that tell us something? Well it did. It told us that not only did Japanese consumers have less calories per day, but they used a lot more calories per day. Why do they use a lot more calories today? Well, the structure of the cities is very different. And then they just do a lot more walking. They have walkable cities. So we started to get some insights in quite a short period of time, but it didn't take us far enough.

So then we started to take some other disaggregation frames and we just kept working at it. This is the pattern of good problem solving: you take something that you think is a good way to start. You see how far it takes you. If it's the best frame, you stick with it. If not, then you tend to shift it around, bring other frames into it, and see which ones do a better job of helping you come to grips with breaking down a particular problem. This is one of these things where the advice of people like Eric Schmidt, the Google chair who has written a testimonial for the book, is saying, learn it, test it, practice it. That's what you've got to do to really feel that you've mastered the problem solving process we lay out.

Anita Brick: When you step into the situation, you have to be willing to potentially, if it's a seemingly impossible problem, to define it differently. You can't solve the problem with the mind that created it. So part of it is what you just talked about and the way that you process that. The other part seems to be having the right people on the team or having well, I'll just ask this question. So students said, “What are a few things you would look for when forming a team that requires breakthrough thinking and courageous action?”

Robert McLean: We almost always, at McKinsey, sought to put together cross-disciplinary teams just to bring different perspectives and we also sought to bring expertise together, of course, so that you're not reinventing things that don't need to be reinvented. There's been some terrific work that's been done by Philip Tetlock about, you know, what's the nature of these perspectives and people who really do come up with unconventional thinking and particularly good forecasts. But there's a couple of other things that go on besides the composition of the team that also relate to things like the team norms.

You know, if you don't set high aspirations for a team, you're unlikely to get a fantastic outcome. If you don't allow a team to think about relaxing the constraints on the problem, you know it's going to be hard to get an out of the box outcome. Similarly, if you don't allow challenges of the status quo or the power structure, you know, once again you're largely bound to keep on doing what you have and what you've been doing. If you really do want the unconventional thinking or breakthrough ideas that you've described, you've got to set yourself up for success with it.

Anita Brick: Okay, so I know that people stand on very different sides and have very different opinions about this, but in the context of breakthrough thinking, courageous action, where do mistakes come in? Because some organizations don’t allow for a lot of mistakes. A mistake gets somebody fired. So then people become risk averse. How do you work in some free passes from mistakes, when you want to create this breakthrough?

Robert McLean: That varies very much from organization to organization, and of course, some firms have resources that allow and almost encourage mistakes. And it's that ethos that we're dealing in a world of probabilities, and we're not going to get everything right. Therefore, it's okay. That fits with organizations that have very, very strong cash flows, very, very strong core businesses need to be defining the, you know, uncertain future. And, you know, we're seeing so much of that now with the nature of the investments in things like autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles and so forth. Nobody knows quite the way that's going to evolve, that people are putting bets and some will work, others won't. But then there's other organizations where the financials bind them so much more and they just can't afford to make these sorts of mistakes.

You've talked about if you're in an organization that is, you know, much more bound with tolerance for error, any team working on a problem, there's just got to get those parameters agreed with the senior management. What we can risk, what the tolerance is for failure. You know, before driving too far down the road, we're going to find that it leads to a chasm.

Anita Brick: That's a really good point. Going in, when someone is selecting a company that could be part of the criteria for where one chooses to work, I would guess that people where there's a very low risk tolerance and maybe this is a generalization, but they may miss certain opportunities that could be lucrative and it could compromise their competitive position.

Robert McLean: And I would certainly encourage people doing what you described, really do the due diligence and come up with your own assessments of risk tolerance and desire to follow a new path. And you can test that out in the recruiting interviews. But we all know that organizations change as their fortunes change, and sometimes those fortunes change quite quickly. So you can have entered an organization, you know, when it was looking particularly strong and rosy.

And then within five years, that outlook changed quite significantly. So there's not going to be any foolproof way of addressing that.

Anita Brick: That's a very good point. We've seen that so many times. Companies come and go at a rate that is a little startling, actually.

Robert McLean: It is indeed.

Anita Brick: Do you have time for a couple more questions?

Robert McLean: Yeah.

Anita Brick: Okay. Good. So a student asked, and I really like this because I think this is a challenge for people, “When you think about active empathy, which you talk about in the book, how do you advise others to manage the tension between active empathy and profit?”

Robert McLean: Well, earlier in the conversation, we talked about how important listening and engaging is. To me, that's what empathy is all about. And that's crucial to problem solving. So I don't really see a tension between profit and empathy. In fact, I think the better you are at empathy, the more you're going to understand the capacity of an organization to change. That's more likely to lead to outcomes that produce higher profit.

Anita Brick: Empathy seems to be something that people find challenging. In addition to listening, is there anything else that you would advise someone to do to amp up their empathy?

Robert McLean: The best advice I've got on this is from my wife, Paula, who is a great reader. Her recommendation is if you want to amp your empathy, read novels. You'll see that advice in a number of different places. You know, reading novels takes you into characters and takes you into characters interacting with other characters. That's what empathy is really all about. I have to be honest and say I have not followed that advice as well as my wife would like me to, but I think it's a really interesting avenue to explore.

Anita Brick: I've never heard of it before, but I'm going to plan to borrow it. I like that a lot. Well you shared a lot with us, I really liked Bulletproof Problem Solving. I think it actually could help a great deal with people who are prepping for cases, but it gives you a framework, whether it's a small company or a big one. But when you think about it, what are three things that you would advise someone listening to right now to do to make a bulletproof problem solving their way of life? So it will help them be more successful?

Robert McLean: Well, I think you've helped me, Anita, by suggesting that I read the book. What we would say in addition to that is trying a number of the cases is really important. And we've taken cases that we used at McKinsey with people who were applying for jobs. This is a learned behavior. Good problem solvers are made, not born, but we're also very conscious that it doesn't happen, you know, just in 15 or 20 minutes. You've got to work at these things. You've got to practice them. You know, if you've got a problem in your job, stop to think about, you know, how you go about a different, better problem definition or a different disaggregation, how you use the big guns, you can get there, but you've got to work at it. There hasn't been an area of expertise, you know, whether it's music or golf or whatever. You know that you don't get there with a lot of practice.

Anita Brick: It's true. Do you see people who become better problem solvers start small? This feels like a leading question that I guess maybe it is a leading question. It's hard to experiment with new things when the risk is high. Have you seen people work through from lower risks, more contained, smaller problems to bigger ones to get better at it? It feels like trying to do something too big to start could end up not so great.

Robert McLean: Oh, I've seen people right now where I've helped people look at the most significant social problems in Australia, and I'm just really excited about the ability for people to read the book, take on the frameworks, start trying to figure out how they break down the issues and how they put a work plan together, you know, to address them. So it's a learnable skill. You can creep up on it, as I say, with some fairly simple ones. Or you can just start in your own setting, your own organization. Just take the next big problem you're dealing with, and start to use the process and the framework to start on that path.

Anita Brick: Great. Any other final words of wisdom you'd like to share with us?

Robert McLean: The thing we talk about a lot is that we think of the process as being not something that, you know, goes on for months at a time. You can run through those seven steps in a couple of hours with some problems, but then in others, you can take months to work your way through it. Not to feel you've finally got to wait for those settings where you've got the big team, you've got the budget, you've got a 3 or 4 month runway, you know, to work on a problem. You can make a lot of progress in just a few hours. Working on problem definition, working on how you going to break down the problem, working on how you set priorities, how you can come out of a meeting, you know, as I plan to do in next week on a major problem where we'll have a sense of what priorities we want to follow after a two hour meeting.

Anita Brick: Wow, that's pretty awesome. Thank you so much. It is a very smart way of looking at problems, which doesn't surprise me coming from you. I am so glad that you wrote the book, and I'm really glad that you made the time today to chat with me so that many people can learn from you and your insights, and have a new way of looking at problems that maybe hadn't been that easy to solve and now with a different perspective, can jump into it again.

Robert McLean: Well, thank you and never having to have the conversation.

Anita Brick: Great. Bye bye. Thanks again and thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brook with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.