THE McKINSEY WAY

18 The McKinsey Mind
• An initial hypothesis will save you time.
• An initial hypothesis will make your decision making more
effective.
An initial hypothesis will save you time. Most people, when
faced with a complex problem, will start at the beginning and
wade through all the data until they come to the end—the solution.
This is sometimes referred to as the deductive approach: if A, then
B; if B, then C; . . . if Y, then Z. When you form an initial hypothesis,
you leap all the way to Z, and it’s easier to work your way
backward from Z to A. One simple example of this is a pen-andpaper
labyrinth or maze, the kind you sometimes see in the Sunday
comics or in puzzle books. Anyone who plays with these can tell
you that it is easier to solve the maze by tracing the route from the
finish to the start rather than starting at the beginning. One reason
for this is that by already knowing where your solution is, you
eliminate a lot of paths that lead to dead ends.
Forming an initial hypothesis will allow you to work through
the labyrinth of your business problem more quickly. It saves you
time partly because it allows you to start drawing conclusions
based on limited information—which, at the beginning of the
problem-solving process, is usually what you have. This holds
especially true when you are trying to break new ground where
nobody has the information you seek, as Omowale Crenshaw discovered
when figuring out how to open up Africa to E-commerce:
Sometimes at McKinsey we had the luxury of leveraging so
much data—the whole analysis paralysis—that we didn’t do
anything, nor did our clients. When we were starting our
Web portal, we had to figure out what mattered when we
really didn’t have enough data on one side or the other. We
just had to say, “OK, realistically, what do we know about
the largest three or four or five markets? What are our