Brainstorming is one of the most misunderstood parts of the consulting interview and among the most challenging aspects of the job for fresh consultants. This article of our expert Cristian aims to give an overview on what brainstorming actually is, how experienced consultants use it in their day-to-day life, and how to best prepare for the brainstorming part of management consulting interviews. The article is structured along a set of questions, reflecting the most common concerns that have been addressed to the expert by former and present mentees.
A structured set of ideas that are responding directly to the question asked, have a clear hypothesis behind them and are ideally prescriptive (i.e., they are giving the client an indication of what they should actually do).
Brainstorming does not mean responding with a long string of random ideas, one second after the interviewer or client asked their question. Instead, it is a structured answer that aims to be insightful and provide value to the conversation.
In many ways, framework questions (usually at the beginning of the case) and brainstorming questions (usually in the middle of the case) resemble each other because they are both structuring questions. The main difference is that while the former is investigative, aiming to provide the back-bone of core questions that will guide the analysis throughout the case, the latter is prescriptive, aiming to offer ideas of what the client should do. In practice, when a candidate answers a framework question, typically the bullet points in the structure are questions themselves, whereas in a brainstorming question, the bullet points are ideas or statements.
Let’s assume you are a consultant participating in a client discussion that is relevant for your particular work stream. The client suggests you dig deeper into what could be some of the features that would improve customer experience. The meeting finishes and your manager suggests you take the lead on this new topic. What happens next?
In the interview, however, answering to a brainstorming question is a much simpler affair. Basically, the candidate needs to focus only on the first step that a consultant would go through, i.e., coming up with ideas and structuring them – the minimum viable product.
Typically, it consists of the interviewer asking a question and the candidate immediately starting to shoot answers in no particular order or structure, taking breaks once in a while when they run out of ideas. There is no structure, no depth, few to none insightful or creative ideas, and little confidence in communication. Needless to say, it’s not recommended to do this. ‘Shooting from the hip’ is what Partners do in senior meetings after they had at least ten years of experience in a particular industry. It’s not something to be attempted by an aspiring consultant during an interview.
To begin with, that requires clarifying what the interviewer is looking for in the candidate. In short, they are trying to assess the following:
So, what you need to do as the candidate is the following:
The content of the ideas is what candidates most often struggle with. Realistically speaking, the volume and quality of the ideas you are likely to come up with depends significantly on your experience and knowledge of the industry. However, this can be improved with time through practice.
One tip you can use is to try and approach the brainstorming process both bottom up and top down (bottom-up was explained above). Top-down would mean thinking of what could be some of the relevant areas you could structure the answer in, then thinking deeper of what other ideas could fall within them. For instance, if you are asked about ideas to improve profitability, one easy top-down structure would be to look at ways to increase revenue and ways to reduce cost. So you’d want to dive deeper into each of these and try to think of additional points.
However, don’t be too stressed about it. Unless you’re applying for an expert role, there are no expectations that your ideas should be mind-blowing. What matters more is showing that you have at least a basic business sense and the ability to think through a problem in a structured way, connecting the client’s pain points with a potential solution and communicating this in a clear, effective way.
There are different schools of thinking. Some claim it is better to come up with the areas and then just generate ideas. From my experience as both a senior consultant and a coach, I’ve come to believe the opposite – that you should think of the ideas first, in a list format, then bucket them. The reason is that this approach will both lead to more creative buckets than the overused ones all interviewers are bored with, and it will also ensure that you are thinking outside the box. Plus, unless you have a lot of experience in that particular field of the case or the structure is an obvious one (like profitability being divided in revenue and cost), then you cannot know what the best buckets are anyway.
Hopefully this provides you with a starting point towards improving your approach to brainstorming questions. The most important point is to approach interview preparation with the confidence that with practice you are going to get better and getter. I know you will! Feel free to reach out with individual questions to Coach Cristian.
Cristian
#1 rated and most recommended McKinsey Coach | 97% success rate
After graduating from Oxford, Cristian gained several years of experience at McKinsey. Until today, he was working in eight different countries and nine different industries and founded his own consultancy, Writer & Entrepreneur.
With his 5-star rating, the expert has the highest recommendation rate of the coaches. None of his candidates failed their case interview after 4 coaching sessions with Cristian.
