Issue Trees: Best place to begin the consulting

Consulting staffs can be sub divided into three groups on the grounds of responsibility they carry:

Finder: They basically look at the business, find out the naked eye problems, and talk to the organization in regard of the consulting service and convince them that the consulting service will make the business better. They are the bringers of the business and have a big picture of the company who is seeking the service.

Minder: They are the manager of the consulting service. They develop frameworks; build hypothesis and plan on how to move things ahead. They are responsible for the strategy development and management of the project.

Grinder: They are the doers of the project who actually collect data, make charts, analyze them and present their findings to the minder of the project. They move within the organization and deal with the management, employees, customers, and stakeholders to get to know what is happening in real. They are the one to test and find “what worked/ what didn’t worked & what works/what doesn’t works”.

As a minder/ grinder consultant, you are going to take charge of a business that is messed up from every angle. There are issues/conflicts in almost every step in the value-chain. So, where to begin? Here I suggest, begin with building the issue trees.

Issue trees breakdown the activities in an organization/ business aura and structure the ‘big-picture scenario’ that consulting works on. Issue trees are the collection of issues and sub breaking of those issues with a working hypothesis. As the finder of the project got basic ideas about the company, sit with the minder of the consulting project to discuss key issues happening in and around the organization. Together, then develop issue trees to make the consulting road-map. The Issues trees can be built on two aspects:

1. Diagnostic issue trees: Diagnostic issue trees are focused on finding out what key thing is happening in the business and what are the possible causes of it. It deals with the key constraints of the business and build out hypothesis on what may have led it to happen. Diagnostic issue trees are developed with a “Why” question and branches/sub- branches with the same.
   
   
2. Solution issue trees: Solution issue trees are focused on finding out what key thing is happening in the business and what may be the possible remedies for it. It deals with key constraints of the business and build up hypothesis on what can be the probable solution. Solution issue trees are developed with a “How” question and branches/ sub-branches with the same.

As suggested by MECE McKinsey consulting model, while developing the issue trees, look at the issues in a Mutually Exclusive way and then in a Collectively Exhaustive way to find out the problem. Once you have the clearly defined sets of problems look forward for the data gathering to get more insights.