In this episode of The Entrepreneur to Author Podcast, your host Scott MacMillan sits down with Chris Harrop, former Senior Partner at Bain & Company with over three decades of experience helping leaders solve complex business problems. Chris shares the challenge of translating a lifetime of hands-on expertise into clear, accessible guidance and reflects on what it really takes to solve hard, never-before-seen problems. His book, The Problem Solver’s Playbook, teaches readers to “tame” problems by narrowing scope, digging to the root cause, and navigating the messy realities of stakeholder alignment and execution. As business challenges grow increasingly dynamic—accelerated by AI—Chris underscores why strong, foundational problem-solving skills have never been more important.
GUEST BIO
CHRIS HARROP is a former Senior Partner at Bain & Company with more over three decades of experience helping leaders solve complex business problems. He has advised clients across industries and continents on strategy, transformation, and execution. Chris lives in Sydney, where he continues to work with senior executives and leadership teams.
CONNECT WITH CHRIS
Book Website: problemsolversplaybook.com
Website: bain.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chrisnharrop
Instagram: instagram.com/egmonty
CONNECT WITH SCOTT
LinkedIn (@scottmacmillan): linkedin.com/in/scottmacmillan
Instagram (@scottamacmillan) instagram.com/scottamacmillan
Medium (@scottamacmillan): scottamacmillan.medium.com
ABOUT GRAMMAR FACTORY:
Grammar Factory is a Canadian self-publishing company that helps business leaders and entrepreneurs write, publish, and market non-fiction books to boost their credibility and business results. Their expert team guides clients from idea to professionally published book, offering editorial services to ensure high-quality, compelling content. Serving clients globally, Grammar Factory focuses on transforming manuscripts into industry-leading books that attract clients and enhance brands, with a strong commitment to supporting authors throughout the publishing process.
Episode Transcript
Please note: The transcript is produced by a third-party company from an audio recording and may include transcription errors.
Scott MacMillan:
You're listening to the Entrepreneur to Author podcast.
Announcer
Welcome to the Entrepreneur to Author podcast, the podcast that brings you practical strategies for building authority and growing your business. And now, here's your host, Scott MacMillan.
Scott:
My guest today is Chris Harrop, the author of the Problem Solvers Playbook, your field guide to solving hard business problems. Chris spent more than three decades with Bain & Company, one of the world's leading strategy consultancies, where he helped leaders across the globe tackle hundreds of complex, high-stakes challenges. His new book distills those lessons into a practical, story-driven guide that helps leaders and teams think more clearly, act more decisively, and deliver better outcomes on their hardest problems.
Chris, welcome. Thanks so much for joining us.
Chris Harrop:
Thank you, Scott. It's great to be here.
Scott:
I shared a little bit about you in the intro, but it would be really helpful for our listeners if you could give us a bit more detailed overview of your background and the kind of work that you do.
Chris Harrop
Thanks, Scott. Look, I've really spent a career solving problems, working with my clients and my teams at Bain to work on difficult problems. As a strategy consultant, that is literally your job description.
You come to work each day and there's problems that you are being paid to solve. I guess I've been a professional problem solver for decades now. I'm still doing that.
I'm still working with clients and leaders in various ways. I'm also, these days, sitting on the boards of some non-profit companies. I'm very interested in early education, in particular, and also in tennis, where I'm the incoming chair at Tennis Australia.
That's a whole different set of experiences and problems to solve and opportunities. I love having a variety of things in my life and that's what I'm doing right now.
Scott:
That is a lot of variety and a really fascinating body of experience to bring to your book, which you've recently published, The Problem Solvers Playbook. For those who haven't read it yet, could you share a little bit more about what it's about, who it's written for, and what you hope that those readers will take away from it?
Chris:
Well, Scott, it strikes me that problems really are the joy of business. The reality of any leader in business is that every day they come in to work and there are problems to deal with. Some of them are challenging problems.
Some of them are just opportunities that lie ahead, but every day you're trying to make a difference through working out how to do things better. As a result, problem solving is maybe the most fundamental skill of any business leader. Problems come in all shapes and sizes.
They might be to do with leading your team. They might be to do with growing your business. They might be to do with reducing costs, but they're all some version of a problem.
And so the best business leaders are really the best problem solvers. And what I've tried to do is write a book that provides some advice on how do you think about solving business problems, particularly hard business problems, without just relying on the school of hard knocks, just on your gradual accumulation of experience. But can you skip a few steps?
Can you learn from some of the experiences I've had over 30 odd years? I think I've worked on about 300 different assignments over those years. So I've tried to share some practical advice for business leaders and business problem solvers, not textbook or academic theory, but advice from the front lines, from someone who's been doing this for real for a long time.
And I'm hoping people will find it useful, actually, particularly for people that are already pretty good at this and would just like to get better. And I'm sharing some approaches and tools that I think can do that.
Scott:
You mentioned hard problems, those messy, multidimensional challenges that don't have clear answers. What is it that makes those problems so tricky and how do the best leaders approach them differently?
Chris:
Hard problems are interesting. They are messy. They're not like Lego blocks with the neatly clicking into place. They're more like plasticine. The edges are not clear.
The boundaries are not clear. It's just not obvious where to start. You've got so many angles, so many issues.
And sometimes you can feel a little bit like a victim when you're facing one of those problems. It's hard to know what to do. And so my focus has been on that kind of problem.
There's no obvious roadmap or formula or recipe to use. How do I tackle something like that? Without just feeling I'm lost.
The best problem solvers in those situations feel actually that they are in control. They're not a victim. They're actually in charge.
And we'll perhaps talk later about this concept of taming a problem because that's a very important shift, I think, in how you might feel when you face a problem like this rather than feeling like the problem's in charge and you are at its mercy. It's quite the other way around. And so the best problem solvers say, well, I have agency here.
I can change how I frame the problem. I can even decide whether or not I want to tackle this problem or something else. But once I'm into it, I can also spend or apply some effort to shape the problem so that I'm really only solving the piece that I need to solve.
And often people will skip that step and go straight into solving as best they can whatever turns up on their desk. And you can save yourself a lot of heartache by spending more time up front before you dive into solving.
Scott:
Yeah, that really is a different way of thinking about problems. I think a lot of us just assume that the problems themselves are immutable and that there's nothing we can do about the problem. It's our job to find the solution.
And so I'm happy that you brought up that idea of taming the problem before you solve it. I think that's likely a concept that most people have never considered. A lot of people, in fact, probably equate the concept of taming the problem with having solved it.
Could you talk a little bit more about what you mean by tame the problem before you solve it and why it's such a powerful way of thinking?
Chris:
Yeah, I'd be happy to because I think it's actually a critical part of this whole approach is that a lot of the leverage you have as a problem solver comes at the start of the process, not the end. And so it actually even starts even upstream of taming is what I call choose your attitude. And I don't know about you, but when I sit down at my desk or I'm working with a team, some days I feel like I could do anything.
I'm in a great frame of mind and I could tackle the world. There's nothing too hard. And there's other days I come and I think, oh, my goodness, I don't even know what I'm here for.
I feel like nothing, nothing can be achieved. And so attitude matters a lot, funnily enough, even on problems that may turn out to be quite technical or difficult. What are you bringing in your own attitude?
And what I've said is that you really have this luxurious human superpower of being able to choose your attitude. Even when you're not feeling at your best, you can say, you know what, I'm going to lean into this and I'm going to be at my best. And so we talk a bit about that and the need to be really present so that you're bringing your best self.
You're not just sort of multitasking and only half focused. You're feeling a willingness to be fresh, to think in new ways about the problem, not just follow old paths. And you're willing to be bold to really tackle, try something new, take a risk because that opens up a lot more options.
So that's even before you get to taming. But assuming you've now, you're in the right frame of mind, you're feeling focused and fresh and you're willing to be bold, then the opportunity comes to tame the problem. And that concept of taming really is about you being in charge.
The problem solver is the most important tool in the problem solving toolkit. It's not a methodology or algorithm. It's you.
And so you should feel agency. The problem is not in charge. You are.
And so to actually then tame the problem, there's three dimensions that I talk about, so-called 3D taming. The first one is something I think most people are familiar with, which is just scope or breadth. You know, what am I going to include?
Am I looking at some of my customers or all my customers? Some of my branch officers or all of them? Just the breadth and scope.
That's a pretty natural thing for people to think about when they solve a problem. But the other two dimensions are different, and I often feel that people overlook them or don't even really know they have the luxury of narrowing the problem in those ways. So the first one is what I call depth, which is really about whether you want to focus on root causes or symptoms.
Often problems present through a set of symptoms. My customers are really unhappy or my staff are all leaving. You know, that's a symptom.
But what's the root cause? Is it that I'm a difficult leader or my product is not very good, or is it something far more fundamental? How far down that chain of causes and effects do you want to focus your effort?
Because the more superficially you focus, then you can probably solve that symptom quickly, but it may not have much lasting benefit. If you go really deep into the root causes, you might really make a difference, but it could be quite hard to do. And so you have a choice as to how deep you want to go.
And I provide a few tactics for how to think about that. The last dimension is what I call altitude, which is really all about the level of abstraction that you want to apply to the problem. What's often true, particularly in large businesses, is that people love to abstract problems to make them bigger, actually, rather than smaller.
And I think we should think really carefully about trying to reward simplifying problems, not making them harder, but making them easier. So, for example, if you're finding customers are complaining about your prices, maybe you're running a national or even a global business, you could say, well, we need to do a global strategy review of our pricing and do a big piece of work on looking at all of that. But maybe before you do that, you could just talk to some customers and look at the specific pricing problem you've got.
Is it one product in one channel? Maybe we can make that a really small problem and start with that. So this question of whether you want to look at something very conceptually or very specifically, it's a really big choice you have.
And so those are the three dimensions, the breadth, the depth, and the altitude.
Scott:
Chris, what I love about that is it really gives one permission to grab onto that problem and sort of give it a shake, right? Not take it as a given. And I think for a lot of us, we didn't realize that we had that option to make the problem smaller rather than bigger.
I think the first reaction is it's critical to get to the underlying root causes of a problem if you're going to solve it. But what I'm hearing you say is that that's not always necessary. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.
And we have that flexibility as the problem solver. And I love that idea that the problem solver is the most important tool in the toolkit. And in the second half of the book, you shift from talking about finding answers to making things happen.
Why is that transition from sort of problem solving to execution, strategy to execution, such a common stumbling block for leaders? And are both sides of that equation equally important?
Chris:
Yeah, it's a great question. And it's really why I've structured the book that way into those two parts. I think often, actually, books or literature on this topic focuses on one or the other.
It either says, oh, look, here's some tactics to solve problems. And it almost treats it like a maths problem. If you've got the answer, then you're done.
But business is not like that. The solution to a business problem is not an answer. It's an outcome.
Answers are not that useful unless you can translate them into outcomes. So both sides matter. And what's interesting is that they require very different skills.
To find an answer may be quite an analytical process, a lot of data and review of options and so on. But outcomes are really not like that. They're much more about getting things done through people, about persuasion, about persuading the skeptics, as I call it.
Who are the people that aren't on board with your answer, even if your answer is right? Being right is not nearly enough. You need to persuade people that it matters and that they should do something about it.
Most organizations and most individuals, I think, are much better at one of those things than the other. And my thesis here is that we need to be good at both. And not only that, but the two steps are really not completely separate.
Because as you start to think about execution, you might want to revisit your answer. You might realize that bits of it really aren't very practical. And so there's that iteration between solutions, answers, and what's practical in the real world, that iterative piece of it.
So I provide some advice on how to think about that. But my main message to the reader would be, look, what matters is the outcome, not the answer. So start with that in mind.
And think as early as you can about what's likely to be needed to make these things happen in the real world, in your business. And it's what I call the results-first approach, which is as you're staring at your proposed answer, think about what will be needed to convert that into something that's real in your business, real and sustainable. And pretty quickly, you'll realize there's a whole bunch of things that you're going to need to do to make that so.
Scott:
Excellent. You talked about iteration, and that's a really good segue. I like to shift gears to the writing process. How did you find it?
What was the biggest challenge or surprise in translating your decades of consulting experience into a book?
Chris:
It was fascinating, Scott. There's a lot of things that I thought I knew, and I knew how to do, but I realized I couldn't really explain what I do. For example, people say, oh, look, you should just find the crux of the problem, or you should develop a good hypothesis.
And they say, oh, that sounds like a really good thing to do. And plenty of books will tell you you should do those things. But I could find almost no literature that tells you how to do those things.
And I realized, for me, a lot of that was, I think they call it unconscious competence. You sort of do it without realizing what you're doing. And so as I started to write things down, I realized I couldn't explain them very well.
And maybe I didn't understand them even myself quite as well as I thought I did. And so I really enjoyed the process of writing down what I thought mattered, and then reading that back and realizing it wasn't very clear, and iterating, and often sometimes having to go off and think more about examples I'd worked on, or even reading some other books and getting a little bit deeper on the issues so that I could really describe things as best as possible and make it easy for the reader to understand.
So I hope I've done that. And that process took months, really, of iteration and also with the help of some early readers saying, well, I don't really know what you mean here, and reacting to that and trying to make it clearer.
Scott:
Yeah. What are your goals for the book? How are you using it within your business or to support your broader professional goals?
Chris:
My main goal, Scott, is just to try and help people get better at this. I think the world is getting harder. The problems are getting harder.
Things are moving much more quickly. I guess humans have been saying that forever, probably, but it is more true now than ever. And so we all need to be able to solve problems from first principles, problems that we haven't seen before.
The AI evolution here, radical evolution, is giving us all both opportunities and problems we've literally never faced before. And so my goal is to try and provide some problem-solving skills that you can use in any setting, even if you've never seen the problem before. I was actually talking to a friend of mine at Google yesterday who's interested in learning a bit more about the book.
And he was saying that at Google, a lot of the product managers, they're really deep on a domain. They might know a lot about cybersecurity, for example, but to elevate or to grow through the organization, to become more senior, they need to find a way to solve problems that they're not deep on, that aren't about their particular narrow niche. And those are these more horizontal problem-solving skills.
And so my goal with the book is to share with people, hopefully in a very readable way, not a dry textbook kind of a way, some of those tools. And the measure of my success would be just if people enjoy it enough to recommend it to others. That would be what I'm looking for.
Professionally, mainly, I'm looking at this as a little bit of an adventure, a chance for me to do some new things that I haven't done much of, like podcasts or bookstore events and a few other things. Just talking about the book and using that as a vehicle to share my thoughts and also to engage with people. How do they react to the book?
And what are their comments? What do they find useful? That's what I'm looking forward to.
Scott:
Oh, yeah. And your goal for your reader, I would say that you've definitely achieved that. It's certainly the book that I would have loved to have when I was a young consultant starting out in the industry.
Because a lot of the alchemy that happens in consulting, you really learn as you go. And this is a great primer, a great resource for not just people who've been solving problems for years, but those who are just starting out. A lot of folks listening to this podcast are interested in potentially writing a book, but they haven't taken that leap yet.
What advice would you give to them?
Chris:
I would say just start. Just start. You don't have to feel you're writing a book.
I certainly didn't start in that way. Just start to write the things that you're interested in or just enjoy the opportunity to write without a filter. Don't feel that, I mean, I always thought the best advice I got was just write for yourself.
You're probably a tough judge. And if it's good enough for you, then maybe it'll be more than good enough for others. And I found that really liberating because I stopped self-editing, self-criticizing, worried about what people might think and just say, I'm just going to say what's in my head.
And sometimes you don't even know what your fingertips are going to write on the keyboard. In fact, that's often the case. It's amazing what will come out of your head.
But just start and don't edit yourself. And I think if you do that and you focus initially on the topics that give you most energy, not on, at least for me, I know some people do this differently, but not on, look, here's my perfect outline. I've got it all mapped out.
I know exactly what chapter one, two, and three need to be. No, I didn't do that. I just started with what I was excited to discover and to share and to craft.
And that, I think, gave my book more energy because I was writing about things I loved and was curious about. And so then over time, I started to feel like, well, this really could be a book. And then I did start to apply more structure and editing and so on to make sure that it made good sense from start to finish.
But that'd be my advice. Just lean into the bits you enjoy, the topics you are most excited about. That'll leap off the page, I think, if you start with that.
Scott:
That's really excellent advice and a very practical, tangible way for somebody to get started. What is the best way for people to get in touch with you or learn more about you and the book and the work that you're doing?
Chris:
Well, I've had a relatively low profile as a consultant over the years. We're often sort of backstage, not on stage. So I don't have a lot of social media profile.
But I'd be very happy to hear from anyone who's had the chance to read the book or has questions for me just by email, chris.harrock at bain.com, B-A-I-N, bain.com. And I'd be very happy to engage in that way. I'm on LinkedIn, and you can find me there.
So those would be the two main vehicles.
Scott:
Excellent. Well, we'll put those links in the show notes so that it's easy for people to find you. Chris, thank you so much for joining us.
And congratulations again on the book. Really a fantastic resource for anyone who wants to think more clearly and get better results when the stakes are high. And it was an incredibly rewarding book to publish.
And I know your readers will get a ton of value from it.
Chris:
Thank you, Scott. I appreciate that.
Scott:
As we wrap up this episode of Entrepreneur to Author, remember this. Now is the time. Time to write, time to publish, and time to grow.
I'm Scott MacMillan. Until next time.
