Page 47 - The McKinsey Mind

01 (001-030B) chapter 01 1/29/02 4:48 PM Page 25

Framing the Problem 25

Dan Veto found issue trees especially useful when defining a set
of initiatives for the E-business arm of Conseco, one of America’s
largest diversified financial services companies:

In problem solving, a lot of people try to be uniformly com-
plete. The fact is, you don’t always have to be. You want to
think of everything as MECE, but you don’t need to investi-
gate everything to the same depth. For example, we were
thinking about our E-business strategy, as we had just
formed a new business unit, eConseco. This would be a
stand-alone business with a real P&L, so we had to ask our-
selves, “What are the key levers of profitability and growth?
Which things matter, and which things don’t?”
We were inundated with ideas. Somebody on the rev-
enue side would say, “Well, we could sell books.” Being able
to figure out quickly that that option is never going to make
you any money is critical. Being able to snip from the tree the
branches that don’t matter so that we’re focused on the
branches that do matter is just an unbelievable problem-
solving and problem-framing skill that is not necessarily
intuitive but which can really speed the problem-solving
process.

Going back to your team room at Acme Widgets, what would
an issue map look like for reducing the thrum-mat curing process?
As you and your team discuss it, several questions arise: Will it
actually save money? Does it require special skills? Do we have
those skills in the organization? Will it reduce the quality of our
thrum-mats? Can we implement the change in the first place?
When laying out your issue tree, you need to come up with a
MECE grouping of these issues and the others that arise. As a first