what is the best approach to achieve organized structure in brainstorming questions?

Question

I'm coming from an engineering background, and I find it all the time difficult for me to start from top to bottom when it comes to structure. As engineers, we always expect that the main idea is a public knowledge and it doesn't need to be mentioned, this means that we start half way when it comes to structure because we think that you know the main point that we start from.

it'd be helpful to share your experiences of how to overcome such problem

Answer 1

Hi,

Frankly speaking, I am not sure if I understood your question correctly. But if you are talking about the brainstorming (questions on creativity) part of the case, here are some tips:

1) Ask an interview for a minute to think

2) Think of several buckets of ideas (e.g. organic growth / non-organic growth/differentiation). Remember to think as big as possible

3) Narrow down to each bucket and generate as many ideas as possible

4) Present the structure (buckets) and then your ideas

Creativity is in direct correlation with you business judgement that can be trained by solving more various cases with partner / studying various frameworks / reading industry reports / reading HBS cases (google them)

Best

Answer 2

Hey anonymous,

In consulting, you really need to make sure that you're structured at any time (even more if you're applying to MBBs).

Vlad already suggested a way you should apporach it. But adding on top of it, and contrasting with your point around engineering, you need to be sure you speak out loud and contextualize all the ideas/branches, as there is no such concept as public knowledge.

Best

Bruno

Answer 3

Dear A,

in general a good structure can be evaluated by a certain depth and breadth. The “depth” should be at least 3-4 levels while the “breadth” should cover the entire solution space. You can cross-check this with the MECE principles (For details see respective article on Preplounge), but the CE (collectively exhaustive) part is basically defining your breadth.

Finally, make sure to check for inter-linkages in your structure and point them out.

Simon

Answer 4

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Answer 5

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Answer 6

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