Chris Harrop on The Problem Solver's Playbook: Your Field Guide to Solving Hard Business Problems

Chris Harrop spent three decades advising CEOs at Bain & Company before writing The Problem Solver's Playbook. He talks about why framing a problem is a choice rather than something handed to you, the taxonomy of cruxes he built because he could not find one, and why he thinks a simple hypothesis works better on complex problems, not worse.

Your book argues that solving hard business problems well requires great problem framing. After three decades advising CEOs, what convinced you that this is so important?

Business problems never come neatly pre-packaged, even if they seem that way.

It is easy to feel that hard problems are your master. You are the slave, the problem is in charge. Actually it is the other way around. You can decide which problems to solve and how you want to tackle them. When you change your mindset so that the problem works for you rather than the other way around, you open up a whole array of different solutions and options.

Framing is the shorthand for that process: setting the boundaries, identifying the key issues, and deciding how you are going to look at the problem. That is something you can choose, something you have agency over. It is a fundamental difference between the approach experienced problem solvers take and the one newer problem solvers feel they have no option but to pursue.

"Finding the crux" is the idea at the heart of the playbook. How hard was it to put that on the page, given that after 30 years you were probably doing it half by instinct in a room full of executives?

As I wrote this book, I found that so many of the things I talked about, and used in my own shorthand language, were quite hard to describe. Finding the crux is a good example. You will hear people talk about finding the crux of the problem, or getting to the crux, again and again in any problem-solving conversation. But if you ask them what the crux actually is, and how they know they have found it, most people do not have an answer. I realised I did not have an answer either.

So I spent a lot of time in self-discovery, thinking about how I do it. I realised there is a taxonomy of different types of cruxes, and I could not find anyone who had ever laid one out. So I built one. Put simply, a crux is the thing that makes the problem hard. But there are very different ways that problems are hard, and I describe what they are.

Knowing the crux will not solve the problem for you, but it helps to put your finger on it and call it out, so that you know explicitly what issue you are trying to crack, and everyone in your team does too.

Thirty years of client work is confidential, situational and usually delivered with a team behind you. How did you decide which examples earned a place in the book, and how did you translate them into something a reader working alone can actually pick up and use?

I had to make a choice about how to handle examples from my client work as confidentiality is important, and there is also a risk that people will feel you have misrepresented their situation.

I realised the reader does not ultimately care which company I am talking about. The message, the story, the anecdote matters more than the label. Once I understood that, I was comfortable not using company names. I chose the examples to be entertaining and relevant, rather than ones that carried extra weight because they came from a well-known brand.

Did writing the book change your own practice? I am curious whether any framework you had used for years looked different once you had to defend it in print to a reader who could not ask you a follow-up question.

Writing this book really did change my practice. Maybe not fundamentally how I go about solving problems, but certainly how I go about describing that to others. It forced me to develop far greater clarity and specificity about how and why I take certain approaches. And I realized that even my own knowledge was often full of holes.

When I started to write things down, I realized that there were real gaps in my own understanding. I found it a really interesting process to force myself to say, "Well, hang on, what is a clear, coherent way of describing my approach here? And how do I do that in a way that a reader will find common sense to follow?"

Now that the book is out in the world, what are leaders asking you about it that you did not anticipate? And does a CEO read it differently from someone five levels down who has been handed a messy problem and no mandate?

The interesting thing about problem solving as a topic is that everybody has their own experience of it and deals with their own version of it in their work. It doesn’t matter what you do in your work or your personal life: you are dealing with problems of some sort every day. So everyone comes at it with their own view, and most of us just learn as we go, rather than learning a set of tools to help.

Two things I did not anticipate. The first came up when I talked to nonprofit leaders about genuinely difficult problems. How do we tackle poverty? How do we tackle racial discrimination? These are very big questions, and people would say that my approach to forming a hypothesis seemed too simplistic for such a complicated topic, that these are systems issues and need a systems approach to make any progress. I did not expect that, and I think the opposite is true. The more complex the problem, the more powerful a simple approach is, because it forces you to start somewhere. That is not to say the problem is not complex. But taking a simple hypothesis-based approach, and then identifying the things you would have to believe to support that hypothesis, will work for any problem, including the world's most difficult ones.

The second thing I found interesting is that many people I talk to have never been trained in problem solving. Many of them are deep experts in their own specialisation, but have never learned how to solve problems as a discipline in itself. When they are given a problem outside their immediate domain they can find it very hard to tackle, and so the toolkit I lay out in the book is valuable for people who have grown up in a deep specialty and are now trying to tackle issues outside their core knowledge area.

Tools can now generate answers at speed, which arguably makes the quality of the question the scarce skill. What would you say to an experienced operator who thinks structured problem solving is a consulting ritual rather than something they need in 2026?

Structured problem solving is going to be more important in the future, not less. We are all facing situations and challenges we have never seen before. Things are moving so quickly that we often encounter things for the very first time - and not just the first time for us, but the first time for anyone. In that world, the problem-solving toolkit matters more than ever, because it gives you a thoughtful, practical way to tackle things you have no experience in.

Secondly, applying effective problem-solving tools, first principles thinking and good framing will be highly valued in a world where data, knowledge, facts and answers are widely available, almost as a commodity. What is it that differentiates any of us as leaders, as managers, or just as people? I think it is the ability to decide what problems matter, to frame them well, and to have agency over problems rather than simply confronting whatever comes at you. That is a very valuable and important thing for all humans in the years ahead, and certainly for all business people.

What did writing the book teach you about your topic?

Writing the book has equipped me to talk much more authoritatively about my topic. Even though I already considered myself an expert on these issues, I now have a clearer and deeper understanding of my own subject.

Writing it made me read more widely, and I discovered a whole range of authors writing about issues I had thought about for years but had never read about. It was a gift to see ideas I had developed myself expressed by others, often expressed beautifully in ways I had not thought of. It was also a gift to discover that some of my ideas did seem to be genuinely new. I loved that process of discovery.

The outcome is that I now feel more authoritative on the topic, because I have deepened my own thinking and broadened my knowledge of how others have tackled it.

The Problem Solver's Playbook: Your Field Guide to Solving Hard Business Problems is available from Amazon.

You can connect with Chris on LinkedIn.