Welcome, luminaries.

We're so glad you joined us, and thank you for supporting the show and joining our premium tier.

Absolutely.

It's great to have you with us.

Now, back in our main show, we've been talking about what makes a perfect consultant.

And pretty quickly, Mike, we identified a paradox which is that rather than choosing between either analytic skill or creativity or prioritizing one over the other, actually, consultants seem to need to be able to exhibit a mix of both of those things.

So here's what's coming up in this episode.

We're going to be talking about recruitment, interview case studies and brain scans.

We're going to be talking about intuition and instinct.

We're going to be talking about thinking fast and thinking slow and thinking laterally.

We're going to break down some of the examples of why both skills, individually and together, might be important for you successful consultants.

Right.

And as human consultants, what can we do to grow a little bit of these attributes for ourselves?

Mike, let's get into it.

It's fascinating.

We've been talking about analytics and creativity like they're two different things.

It seems to me our big question.

Well, one of our big questions here could be are they really innate and different from each other, or are they just kind of places on a spectrum really interested in this idea?

I'm really interested in whether people have got innate characteristics that help them be a good consultant or whether they've learned and part.

I guess my prejudice is that most people have learned most of what they're good at, with some exceptions of the real, real deep core of your personality.

And I had put this creativity and analytics thing in the learned, kind of culturally acclimatized kind of bucket.

My thought was that whatever it is, there's going to be something that's a mix of personality and talent and life experience, job expectations and education and cultural conditioning.

And you and I have both been doing some reading for the show, and one of the first things that I stumbled across tells me that I might actually be wrong about this idea, that it's just a messy bunch of skills and culture.

I came across a really fascinating paper from Drexel University, and we'll put the link into our show notes.

These guys studied the brainwave patterns of people solving anagram puzzles, and they found two things, Mike.

It's really fascinating.

First of all, they found that there were two distinct groups of puzzlers in terms of the way people solved anagrams.

There was one very consistent cohort that solved puzzles in a linear way by trying combinations and going through in order.

And there was a distinct other bunch of puzzlers, what you might call intuitive or instinctive puzzlers who have a flash of aha, I see where this word fits.

And that the pattern just comes to them right away.

So they discovered that there were these two groups and then they discovered that the brainwave patterns are distinct and different and stable.

So people who are linear and processy about the way they solve puzzles have a distinct pattern of brainwaves that's different from the pattern of brainwaves, from people who are, who are intuitive and quickly find their way to the patterns.

That's really interesting.

It says that there's something probably quite innate about the neurology of how our brains are doing this.

The article also says that humans and brains are adaptable.

So therefore it's not fair to say that if you're analytical, you can only ever be analytical, nor vice versa.

And I do think that we've probably ended up in consulting with rather more of the analytical types.

If there really are a type.

I bet that selection of various kinds biases a little bit towards getting hold of those analytical people.

That goes a fair way, Mike, to explaining some of my kind of jaded jokes about watching bunches of consultants standing around a whiteboard with pens in their hands trying to come up with ideas.

Those are people whose first puzzle solving approach is going to be the slow, methodical, analytical version, not the flash of inspiration.

There's also.

While we're thinking about traits and adaptation, there's a nice summary article and again we'll put the link in the show Notes from Penn University says it's possible to train and develop both traits.

Whatever your starting point is, practice and adaptation of being both analytical and creative is a great way to learn to be a better communicator and a great way to learn to be a better problem solver.

So Mike, it sounds like we may have a particular starting point as humans, but it's also something that can be learned and built on and adapted away from a little bit.

So Mike, analytical thinking, what is it and where does it come from?

Analytical thinking is needed to break down complex problems into manageable components, clearly to identify patterns or trends, and to develop logical evidence based solutions.

Along the path of doing that.

We need analytical thinking to evaluate options objectively and make sound recommendations.

Very good.

I like the breakdown there, Mike.

And I'm already noticing that in our main episode we talked about analytical thinking and I think I sort of very cruelly reduced that to being good at spreadsheets.

This word analytical is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

You're talking about the ability to use numbers, the ability to use analytical tools and software to do reasoning, to see patterns and communicate.

Communicate to an audience.

All of these skills are mixed up in this one word.

And I'm sure I've been guilty of conflating them a little bit.

The Excel challenged analyst I was talking about in my story in the main episode and dragging the formulas across.

He was probably actually a great analytical thinker in all respects except for his competency in the user interface of Microsoft Excel.

Anyway, Mike, maybe we'll come back to what that means for junior consultants later on.

But Mike, let's stay with analytical thinking for a second.

Is there anything in books that might shine a bit of a light on what analytical thinking means and does for us in consulting?

Well, if you Google somebody who wants to get into consulting, what should they be reading?

Well, a lot of this comes right back to all of this myriad books about how to crack the case study interview.

In other words, how to appear to be a really good analytical.

And that message is if you really want to get even at the top strategy jobs, particularly at the top strategy jobs, if you want to come in new to that firm, you've really got to crack that interview.

I went back even to one like Victor Chang's case interview secrets.

You know Chang, former McKinsey consultant.

His includes as we talk through quantitative analysis, clear communication of reasoning and breaking down problems as well.

But it occurs to me that some of this mastery, as you point out, is the mastery of what you need to do well in an initial set of interviews, not necessarily the mastery of what you need to do well in actual consulting work if you land the job.

I mean, just as a quick snapshot, we can think that case based interviews focus on speed, not necessarily depth.

It's quickly structuring thinking and rapid problem solving under time pressure, working with more simplified scenarios, using perhaps more general business concepts and problem solving frameworks.

But the job itself includes a lot more than that, including working with a team and other things and the complexity and ambiguity things.

However, you can take that idea and start thinking about, well, could I supplement that?

So one example would be critical thinking, your guide to effective argument, successful analysis and independent study by Tom Chatfield.

And Tom's book really helps develop critical thinking skills by looking at things like evaluating arguments, understanding reasoning types, recognizing cognitive biases, assessing evidence, engaging opposing viewpoints, identifying fallacies, questioning sources and questioning reasoning.

Yours and others.

Yeah, and it's really useful, I think, to get Away from the just kind of blindly competitive, do it fast and do it as speedily as you can.

I can think of a few people in my career I've met who haven't really escaped from the interview candidate model of being rather over analytical and trying to do it too fast.

So it's not just I think here about the difference between in interview case books and approaches and analytical skill books and approaches.

If I think about how people have evolved their skills over time in their careers as consultants, in my career as a consultant, you have to learn how to deal with deep analysis of complex problems.

You have to learn the wide range of tools and resources.

And I think also you have to learn not to get too attached to any one tool or any one resource as I can remember doing dealing with messy data, you know, partial, incomplete, slightly contradictory data, which is not generally the kind of data that you suppose is available in interview case type situations and doing that collaboratively.

Right.

And it's certainly true that if you, if you go and interview to get hired by a self respecting consulting firm, they will test your analytics, but they'll also test your teamwork, sometimes more successfully than others.

I think this conversation is taking us towards a point where we have to own up and say, yeah, analytics are important, but analytics means more than just being good at spreadsheets.

It interacts with creativity.

It also interacts with teamwork, which isn't really a theme for today.

Ian, I'm fascinated.

Earlier you talked about the articles you found about different brain waves and different ways of thinking.

Yes, thank you.

This gives me the chance to talk about one of my favorite recent pieces of popular science and behavioral economics.

Daniel Kahneman if you're listening to this podcast, it's 5050 that you'll already have heard about and read Daniel Kahneman's really great book, Thinking Fast and Slow.

He has another book as well called Noise, which takes the topic further along.

He's explaining and exploring how we think and how we make decisions.

Mike earlier on we were talking about biases and fallacies and he's really unpacking features of the way the human brain works and how that drives biases and fallacies.

It's not really a book about how to be analytical, but I think it is a book about how to understand your analytical thought process, the processes that all humans go through.

Namely, he says we have a fast route through problem solving which our brain tries to follow using intuition and shorthand and heuristics.

And we have a slow route where we're more deliberate and more Explicit about reasoning and thinking things out carefully.

And I think besides learning these processes for ourselves, it's going to be useful to understand them so we can spot which brain pathway we're typically using, spot which brain pathways our clients and our colleagues are using, and understand the limitations, understand that the biases and the errors.

Because the big takeaway for me from lots of this behavioral economics and sort of neurobiology is we can learn about these errors and biases.

And it's really good to know in advance what biases we and also our clients might be prone to.

So, Mike, if folks out there haven't tried Dan Kahneman yet, I think he's well worth a look.

I love the ideas about why analytical thinking might be required.

Let me try and break down why creativity might be important for somebody in a consulting job.

Even though the thought makes me roll my eyes a little bit, I guess it is true that clients sometimes come to us asking for innovative ideas and novel approaches.

They'll say, we've tried the familiar thing and we need you to help us find the new or unfamiliar thing.

Falling a little bit into what sounds like a cliche to think outside the box.

Now we have to talk later on about thinking outside the box.

It's a real thing, but thinking in a way that gets us outside of what conventional wisdom brings.

Because again, being familiar or being one dimensional might be a risk for us, for our clients.

And I think also creativity is going to be about adapting, adapting to the different situations that clients are faced with.

Taking what we've learned in one place and adapting it for another place and to be able to communicate.

I think lots of communication also has an element of creativity to it.

If I think of the people I've known at work who are engaging in the way they communicated to me, I would say.

I would say they were.

They were creative.

I would say they had some imagination as well.

Yeah, I think this.

We've talked about why creativity is required and whether a client is coming for innovative ideas and novel approaches, or whether they're asking us to think out of the box.

And I certainly have some that directed it that way.

We found that this was always a really important thing to think through when even when we were just dealing with a client first coming to us.

What's the question they are asking or the problem they're teeing up, and what's the problem that they should be asking?

We've made the case for each of these individually.

What about the case for both of them together?

Well, I can certainly see, I think I might need some more persuading, but I can certainly see that being able to communicate complex ideas is going to require both logic and intuition, as you might say.

I still think, though, and I include myself in this because I don't think I qualify.

I think it's very rare to find consultants who are excellent at both analytical and creative thinking.

And already the hypothesis of can you get a perfect consultant.

For me, I think it's still not proven, but still I've seen plenty of people who I really admire who are at least strong, have some capability in both areas.

People who've designed user experiences and, you know, digital tools for clients that combine data and analytics with design and people in marketing engagements.

Right.

Trying to leverage insights about consumers and customers and turn that into value messages or narratives for a brand or for a campaign.

That's quite often the everyday work of people that I would call consultants as well.

Yeah.

And I think for me, you've.

You've kind of put the spotlight on this, too.

Even strategy consultants who are oftentimes, you know, I mentioned, I think in the radio show, the Firm where the Rubber Meets the Clouds.

I mean, not necessarily, as you say, in the same person, but a team that can do both and people who can work together, especially when, and I think this applies for every consultant, unless you're incredibly good at one or the other so good that you can, you know, kind of play that alone, you better at least have some facility in the other.

It's interesting.

It reminds me of Herbert Simon's work on grandmasters in chess.

And I can't help but wondering as I'm sitting here, if perhaps we've got this bias in consulting to bring in analytical types, but over time, as they develop and start seeing patterns again and again and again, what seems like that puzzle solver who has that flash of insight, in fact has developed a repertoire of patterns and they can see that pattern.

I want to come back to the idea of repertoire and exposure in a couple of minutes because I think there's something else on creativity there.

Now, if you've got a question or a comment about anything to do with the podcast, if you've got a topic that you'd like to hear us discussing in one of our deeper dives, you, our luminaries, are really welcome to contact us.

Easiest way is by email.

Consultingforhumans31-consulting.com we'd love to hear from you.

We'd love to make this a show about you and for you.

Now, Mike, let's get back into creativity.

Well, Ian, we've talked a lot about analytical, we've talked a bit about brain processes.

So how about this creativity thing?

Some of our analytics listening might be going, yeah, that's all smoke and mirrors.

That's a little bit of voodoo or something.

Well, it's funny, it's easy to think that, especially if you're happy with the world of saying my analytical skill is innate and it's my core and it's where I'm going to stay.

I suspect that we're going to find that creativity is something that we can learn besides just being innate.

The natural place where I think of as having a role for creative thinking is whenever consulting and professional services strays into design or anything that involves kind of creating new stuff.

Mike, I think you've been doing some reading there.

Well, Ian, a really nice one here on creativity, a book called Creative Confidence by Tom Kelly and his brother David Kelly.

I think those of you who know these folks, they work closely together at the innovation design consultancy ideo, who's worked from everything from product design to big global problems.

They talk about the fact that you have to break through some myths here that creativity is not limited to artistic types.

It's a universal human ability that can be developed.

This is not something you're born with or not born with that you have a brain that has, that's wired for this or it isn't wired for this.

So they use, not surprisingly, design thinking, which includes steps like empathizing with users, defining the problem, coming up with a number of different prototypes, ideation you might call it, and then testing.

So the required skills are not completely separate from analytical ones.

But they underscore that doing this well requires that empathy that we talked about.

And this creativity evolves.

The more somebody goes through these kinds of processes, it develops with practice.

So they suggest that consultants who want to build their creative capacity should view their own lives and careers as design projects and constantly be experimenting and iterating.

They also suggest that it's more than just us as individuals.

They talk about a creative culture fostered in teams that maintain a sense of humor.

And it comes to my mind that on some of the high pressure consulting engagements that I've been in, especially those who were led by people schooled in kind of the confidence, arrogance thing that we'll talk about at another time sometimes might not be the best environment for, for this.

Yeah, it's good.

It's reassuring as well that there are kind of team answers and process answers to how do you get more creativity out of teams?

Yeah, Very good, thank you.

So I can remember looking into the idea of techniques for creative thinking way back at the beginning of my consulting career.

I guess partly with the idea in my head that I think I'm a fairly literal and sort of linear thinker.

I've studied engineering in college.

I worked in fairly quantitative, fairly numbers, heavy versions of consulting in quite a few different times.

And I looked into an old favorite and which I'll share with everybody right now.

And I want to mention as well something new that I came across.

An old favorite is Edward de Bono and any of his books.

The most famous one, the one I wanted to think about today, is lateral thinking.

And Mike, this is one of those moments where an old geezer says, kids these days.

Kids these days know nothing.

Kids these days haven't heard of Edward de Bono.

Or they think that that's kind of.

That they've heard the phrases, phrases like lateral thinking, like brainstorming, like thinking outside the box.

These are just turns of phrase that are in everyday modern language.

But they all originated back in the 70s and 80s with the psychologist Edward de Bono.

Lateral thinking, for example, is a technique that he described as a way to get people to stimulate their brains to work in a non analytical way.

So he describes very traditional analysis, you know, gathering of data and stacking up of facts and influences.

He calls that vertical thinking.

And he's using the visual metaphor and saying lateral thinking is to kind of go at right angles to that and look at the world in a new way.

Now I already knew about the ideas of lateral thinking.

It was great to get a reminder.

I found a really interesting technique for creativity.

Further down in the book he talks about the reversal principle.

And I really like the reversal principle.

It basically says you flip around the problem that you're looking for a creative answer to.

So for example, the problem is that you want to go on holiday this summer, on vacation this summer, but you don't know where.

You're finding it hard to generate some creative answers.

So start with some reverse creative answers.

Where's the worst place you could possibly go?

Which, by the way, is a creative brainstorm.

I'd have lots of fun with.

Where's the worst place you could possibly go on holiday?

And where would you go if it was winter?

So he's kind of trying to fill in other bits of the creative space by using this reversal idea.

I think it's really great.

And if you've never read any of Edward de Bono, there are books and blogs and, you know, articles all over the Internet about Edward De Bono.

He's very widely published and very widely summarized and plagiarized from as well.

You know, I've always loved De Bono because I think you can get a handful like build your own Swiss army knife of approaches that it never ceases to amaze how useful they are in various situations, personal and professional, for thinking differently about a problem or an opportunity.

Yeah, and the new reference and the new set of ideas that I came across, actually it turned my brain on because it related to something more personal.

There's a book called the Creative Curve by Alan Gannett.

And actually lots of his examples are from the.

What you might call the creative arts, writing and music.

And music is a big passion of mine.

And some of the book is interesting, but not directly related to consulting because it talks about where artistically creative ideas and impulses come from.

But he does have some really good insights into the origins of creativity.

First of all, he points out that there's been some research that says that high IQ above a certain level doesn't correlate with creativity.

So getting more smart people in a room doesn't generate more creative ideas or answers or solutions.

Instead, he says that creativity is associated with purpose and experience.

The purpose one, I think is pretty familiar.

It's the idea that you'll do a better job with summoning up creative ideas if you could have a really kind of crystal clear, almost provocative definition of the problem.

So being good at defining problems is a great way to stimulate people's creativity.

Much more important than simply having people around who've got crazy ideas or wear purple hats or sit on bean bags.

The second component was the idea that experience drives creativity, which is interesting because I often see people kind of trying to be creative and scratching their heads, thinking of things that have worked before.

But in that kind of thinking, your experience is used as a reason to shut down creativity.

But Gannett says actually people who are very creative are the ones who have read and consumed a huge amount of content.

So have read or been around or understood or analyzed many, many, many different versions of the thing that you're thinking about.

So, for example, if you want lots of ideas for solutions of, say, how to develop an IT system for a chain of fitness gyms, you need in the team not only smart people, but more importantly, people who have seen or read or done a lot to do with fitness gyms and people who've seen or read or done a lot to do with it.

So we can enhance our creative potential by making sure that we read a lot, that we Just feed our brain, feed our curiosity and let it build up a mental data bank.

Not a structured database with query terms, just a mental data bank.

A collective memory of all the things that you've seen and thought about.

Even if it was somebody else's situation or somebody else's solution that you've read about.

And I think that's a great reason for us to keep reading blogs and newspapers and articles and industry news.

Not only because we find out what's up to date, but we're feeding our data bank of what's possible as well.

Yeah, and I think it's a great reason for the exchange of knowledge across consultancies and across individuals.

Not just in the structured what can we go query this database, but again building on that, if you will, pattern recognition and that big set of content of things that we have.

I was talking about Simon and pattern recognition and I think this is part of getting to the same thing, this idea of saying there's lots of experience in that data bank.

You know, it's interesting because a book I read called the Hidden Habits of Genius by Craig Wright kind of deepens and democratizes what's needed to develop creativity.

There's this idea that breakthroughs are often the result of complex thinking processes combined with lengthy gestation periods.

They're not these eureka moments that we sometimes think, oh God, I wish I could do that.

Well, you know, that's kind of like that 20 year over overnight success that you have sometimes here.

One day, Mike, I'm going to wake up and it'll turn out I've been a 55 year overnight success.

But exactly, exactly.

So.

Right, exactly.

That instead that success comes from cultivating specific habits like curiosity and really kind of reinforcing what you just said, Ian, a real obsession to enhance creative thinking by learning from diverse examples.

I mean, I remember Roger's arrangement, original kind of foundational book on innovation, you know, clearly pointing out that about 80% of innovation is the diffusion of innovations.

80% comes from real well known practices in other industries and cultures just being shed around.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

This other point that's, that's often been helpful to me is focusing on people in groups that are different, that are often overlooked but successful.

What you might call a positive deviant.

Right, exactly.

As you had said, argues you have to look beyond just what we normally think of in a successful consultant.

It's not just talent, IQ and grit.

There's a more holistic approach to creativity and to becoming an exceptional consultant as well as an exceptional individual.

So Mike, we've got some themes coming out of these books here.

Creativity is a skill that can be developed, and I think we've always known all along that analytical skill and reasoning is a skill that can be developed.

But creativity is not just a flash in the pan like you say, it can be developed.

There's deliberate practice that we can work up.

There are mindset shifts that can help us.

We do still need structure.

Like we said, structured definition of a problem stimulates us to produce creative answers to the problem.

Understanding context helps with that.

Getting a deep understanding of needs and a deep understanding of the canon of things that you've seen and expert, experienced, all really important for us as consultants, I guess, as well as thinking about ourselves and the consulting team that we're working in, we should think about our clients and our customers as well.

There's a whole other context there.

There's a whole range of experience that they've had.

And I know, Mike, you and I have exhorted consultants many times in the past to turn to their clients when it comes to creating new ideas and not just to sort of stay in the bunker and hope that ideas come to them.

And for me, and we've worked on this together in projects and stuff, it also includes not just your client, but this broader set of stakeholders that create and divide value in any situation.

Who are the people interacting here that I can understand more about?

See that bigger picture more creatively and analytically in order to get to a better solution?

Yeah, I see.

It's a really good tangent into the power and the importance of understanding stakeholders, which I'm sure we'll talk about at some other point.

It's really tempting for consultants to say, well, I'm going to work for the person who's giving me the facts and setting my objective and paying my bill, and to treat that as just one person and one perspective, which is great, but you don't learn very much.

And lots of what we've learned is from the broader range of people standing behind our clients.

So working for big, complex client organizations isn't just a pain in the ass.

It's actually a chance to learn as well.

If you can.

If you can find a way to listen out for it.

Absolutely.

So, Mike, it feels like we're making good progress through this story about analytics and creativity.

Give us some final thoughts here.

What kind of things do we need to be on the lookout for as professionals to keep honing our analytical and our creative skills?

It's not about being the best.

It's about being better than I was yesterday.

So in that spirit, there are lots of things, as you say, Ian, we can be doing on the job.

We can practice both convergent, I.e.

analytical and divergent creative thinking.

When approaching problems, we can seek out diverse project experiences that require different skill sets.

So again, you know, stepping a little bit out of our comfort zone sometimes to expand and learn, we can collaborate with colleagues who have complementary strengths and actively solicit feedback on both the rigor and the innovativeness of our work.

Those are on the job things we can do and I think they're off the job things as well.

Yeah, it's funny, I've taken a lot from this about off the job and it's inspired me to do a bit more thinking for myself.

Keeping your brain fresh, continue to read and reflect and learn and keep exposing yourself to new cultures.

I mean, one of the difficulties about working in our profession is that we, we stay in a particular part of a particular kind of, kind of post industrial, relatively comfortable, relatively privileged western culture.

And that's, that's going to, for all sorts of reasons, going to be bad for us.

But one particular reason could be that it might lead us to have a narrow range of experience.

Couldn't agree more with you, Ian.

Well, I think clearly by consciously developing and integrating both analytical and creative capabilities, consultants enhance their problem solving skills.

And I think the same translates for humans.

Listen, it's been a great show.

I want to thank the listeners for being with us today.

If you've enjoyed your first time as a luminary, then thank you for being here.

Please give us a like, please give us a review, maybe even tell a friend that you've enjoyed the show.

We've got our next regular episode probably out there already for you to enjoy.

If not, it'll be there very soon.

And coming up in our next Luminaries episode, Mike, we're going to be talking about the balance between humility and confidence and talking about self knowledge and life skill and how they might relate to consulting, how they might help us to maybe take baby steps towards this idea of a perfect consultant.

Thank you then for being a luminary with us and we're looking forward to shedding a little bit more light together next.