Page 35 - The McKinsey Mind

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Framing the Problem 13

able to bounce around the problem and say for each of the
pieces, “How much more money can be expected? What is
the economic benefit? And at the end of the day, what is the
cost of doing all these things?” That’s how I built my busi-
ness case, by breaking down and reconstructing the problem,
figuring out where the pieces were.

The logic tree is one framework among many that McKinsey
consultants use and an especially popular one for them to take
with them when they leave the Firm. Like any framework, it helps
you clear away the clutter of a complex problem and bring order
out of chaos by building a simplified representation of the real
world. Jeff Sakaguchi, who left McKinsey’s Los Angeles office to
become a partner at Accenture, sums up the usefulness of the
frameworks he learned at the Firm:

The whole framework-driven approach is really trying to
think about, “How could you organize this?” Every frame-
work—all the way down to the simple two-by-two matrices
we use day in, day out—are an attempt to frame the problem
around some nifty set of three, four, or five balls or boxes
or triangles or whatever you need to create a simple repre-
sentation of a complex problem. McKinsey was masterful
at that. I’ve really tried to adapt that for my work.

When employing logic trees or any framework, bear in mind
your eventual audience. Tailor your presentation of that frame-
work accordingly. As Bill Ross discovered at GE:

I find that, although frameworks work great internally at
McKinsey, when you go outside McKinsey you have to be
careful about their use. Many people will see a framework
and automatically start getting defensive. We heard it a lot at
McKinsey: “Oh, you’re taking an approach that you used on