%20MAIN_edited.png)
Critical Thinking Training
What makes top consulting firms so good at entering a new industry, finding the issues, and communicating them such that the CEO implements the recommendations? A team of highly experienced consulting partners believe they have distilled the answer, and have run a course to teach this to senior managers more than 100 times, across SA’s top companies.
This is the key to converting intelligence into action
Companies hire intelligent people, but their lack of confidence in their own decisions paralyses them, and their inability to sell a decision results in a cycle of undermined confidence
We see this particularly with people who did not have a C-Suite-level parent; they have never been guided in structured thinking and communication, and their strong storytelling skills struggle in corporate SA
When a corporate ingrains this methodology into all levels of management, then managing becomes way easier in that problems arrive pre-structured and ready for approval, rather than as a blank sheet.
The program addresses two primary and core consulting skills, which all managers in any business should have
Problem solving: how consultants solve any problem, in any environment, despite not having the same deep insight as tenured managers
Pyramid communication: how consultants win an executive's mind, whereas employees fail on the same message (1-day course excludes this portion)
The course has been designed and road tested to quickly move from theory into application
The genesis of the course is client demand for training that “teaches our managers the skills that top consultants display”
The course is fundamentally based on McKinsey’s problem-solving methodology and new-associate training, but has evolved substantially
Starting with conundrums, and moving onto real life problems, and ultimately a McKinsey case study, the course proves that the theory solved real problems incredibly quickly, using pure logic, and yet ensuring creativity in a method that may well be a world first in marrying logic with creative problem solving.
It has been road tested more than 100 times, over 15 years, in corporate clients such as Alan Grey, SBSA, ACSA, and MBA programmes at GIBS, UCT, Henley, and Deloitte.
It has proven valuable for graduates, through to the most senior managers in SA. It does not work for non-graduates (they love it, but rarely get to apply it)
