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88 The McKinsey Mind

original hypothesis. No matter how good your work plan, how-
ever, it is almost inevitable that you will have to go through
another filtering process once you’ve gathered the data, crunched
the numbers, and interpreted the interviews. Some of your results
will turn out to be dead ends: interesting facts, neat charts, but
nothing that helps you get closer to a solution. It’s your job to weed
out these irrelevancies.
At McKinsey, the shorthand for this process was for someone
on the team, usually the EM, to ask, “What’s the so what?” for a
particular analysis. What does it tell us, and how is that useful?
What recommendation does it lead to? Consultants aren’t in the
business of drawing pretty pictures, and that’s not what their
clients pay them lots of money to do. As Jeff Sakaguchi learned at
McKinsey and continues to preach at Accenture:

Consulting isn’t about analysis; it’s about insights. If you
can’t draw an insight from what you’ve just done, then it’s
a waste of time. Crunching numbers for the sake of crunch-
ing numbers, or doing bar charts for the sake of doing bar
charts, doesn’t help unless it brings to life some insight, some
key finding, that will make your team and your client say,
“Hmm, interesting.”

A consultant must take the disparate messages of his analyses
and synthesize them into insights that will solve his client’s prob-
lem. That happens best when every analysis meets the test of “So
what?”
Perform sanity checks. Obviously, one wants to be as accurate
as possible, but in a team situation you, as team leader, probably
don’t have time to perform a detailed check on every analysis your
team produces. Whenever someone presents you with a new rec-
ommendation or insight, however, you can do a quick sanity check
to ensure that the answer at least sounds plausible. Like the QDT