Page 44 - The McKinsey Mind

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22 The McKinsey Mind

of your fact gathering yet) and more on instinct or intuition. Take
what you know about the problem at hand, combine it with your
gut feelings on the issue, and think about what the most likely
answers are. This does not mean that the most likely answer is nec-
essarily the correct one, but it’s a good starting point.
If something leaps out at you immediately, congratulations;
you’ve just formed a hypothesis. At this point, whether you are
alone at your desk, standing under the shower (alone or other-
wise), or in a brainstorming session with your team, you should do
the Quick and Dirty Test (QDT) of your hypothesis. The QDT is
simply this: what assumptions are you making that need to be true
in order for your hypothesis to be true? If any of these assumptions
is false, then the hypothesis is false. Much of the time, you can
knock out false hypotheses in just a few minutes with the QDT.
This is especially useful when you need to choose from a few
options quickly, as Ciara Burnham, now a venture capitalist at
Evercore Partners, can attest:

So much of my job involves triaging potential investment
opportunities to figure out which ones are worth spending
time on. At the outset of any deal evaluation, I ask, “What
do I need to believe in order for this to be a good investment,
and what are the ways in which this investment could blow
up? Therefore, what analysis do I need to do to support/
reject the investment and to dimension the risks?” Sounds
like a simple approach, but frankly one that many people
trained in the deal execution side of the business don’t take.

As an example, let’s go back to Acme Widgets. Yesterday, the
board told you and your team to figure out a way to lower the
marginal cost of Acme’s venerable line of thrum-mats. Today, in
the first few minutes of your brainstorming session, you’ve come
up with a few options that might make the cut: (1) You might pres-