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46 The McKinsey Mind

Beyond laying out your life for the next several weeks and set-
ting expectations for your team, a good work plan has another fea-
ture: it helps you structure your thinking. As you go through your
work plan, write down all the analyses, and prioritize and prune
them, you’ll quickly see whether there are holes in your initial
hypothesis that didn’t show up during the framing stage. One of
our alumni put it this way:

One of the most important things I’ve learned is that he who
puts it on paper first wins. And the corollary is that if you
can’t put it down on paper, then either you don’t have it clear
in your head or it’s not a good idea. There are a lot of peo-
ple who say, “Oh, I had this idea in my head, I just haven’t
put it down, but I really know exactly what I want to do.” I
say, put it on paper.

Sometimes, just the process of work planning will lead you to
revisit and possibly restructure your analysis. We will examine the
iterative relationship between hypothesis and analysis more in
Chapter 4. In the meantime, bear in mind that your initial hypoth-
esis is a living document, and it feeds off your analysis.

EXERCISES
• In Chapter 1, we laid out part of the Acme Widgets issue
tree regarding the question “Can we implement the neces-
sary changes to utilize the new process?” In this chapter,
we laid out a work plan for the subissue “Does it require
special facilities that we don’t have?” Do the same for the
other subissue in that discussion, “Does it require special
skills that we don’t have?” Remember that if the answer is
yes, you have to answer an additional question.