**Case Interview Fundamentals: Lesson 21 [The Landscape Technique] — Transcript & Summary | SozAI**
Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/case-interview-fundamentals-landscape-technique/

Bruno explains the landscape technique for structuring any case interview, including non-business public sector and NGO cases, using visual analogies and a public education example.

## Key Takeaways

- Non-business cases such as public sector and NGO cases are frequent in top consulting interviews and must be prepared for.
- Effective structuring depends on intuitive, case-specific categories rather than memorized frameworks or generic MECE splits.
- The landscape technique means decomposing a situation into its most important elements and grouping conceptually related ones.
- Once categories are identified, each should be broken into key issues that become testable hypotheses.

## What the video covers

- Recaps prior lessons: the three C's framework, the four-step framework-building approach, and adapting the three C's with issue trees.
- Argues that memorizing many frameworks or using one master framework fails because business problems are too varied.
- Warns that non-business cases (public sector, NGO) are common, with over a third of McKinsey cases being non-business and rising chances at Bain, BCG and other firms.
- Explains that firms increasingly use unusual cases to test structuring skill rather than memorization.
- Introduces the landscape technique: break a situation into its most important, intuitive elements rather than generic opposites like internal/external.
- Illustrates with landscape photographs, showing MECE structures grouped by conceptual relevance (e.g., grouping balloons together).
- Contrasts lazy MECE splits (left/right of road) with insightful, intuitive breakdowns of the scene.
- Notes that the landscape technique underlies the adapted three C's approach used for business cases.
- Applies the technique to a public education case, identifying key actors such as the government, educators, learners, schools and the public budget.
- Demonstrates building categories and key issues per category (e.g., school access, transportation, extracurriculars) and turning them into testable hypotheses.

## Chapters

1. 00:00 Introduction and Recap of Prior Lessons
2. 04:23 Why Non-Business Cases Matter
3. 07:41 Introducing the Landscape Technique
4. 13:13 Landscape Examples and Intuitive Structuring
5. 21:00 Applying the Technique to a Public Sector Case
6. 31:40 Building Categories and Key Issues
7. 35:00 Turning Issues into Testable Hypotheses

Answers

## Questions about this video

What is the landscape technique according to Bruno?

It is a method of structuring any case by breaking the situation down into its most important, intuitive elements. Bruno compares it to describing a landscape by its mountains, valleys and lakes rather than generic terms like land and atmosphere.

Why does Bruno say candidates must prepare for non-business cases?

He states that more than a third of McKinsey cases are non-business, and the probability of getting at least one non-traditional case across a firm's process is high. Firms increasingly use these cases to test structuring ability rather than memorization.

How is the landscape technique applied to a public sector case in the video?

Bruno identifies key actors in an education system, including government, schools, educators, learners and the public budget, then groups them into categories. He then derives key issues for each category and turns them into testable hypotheses.

## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00

Speaker A

Hey there, Bruno here. So, by now you have learned how to create frameworks to any business strategy case.

00:14

Speaker A

You have learned three techniques that complement each other in order to do that.

00:30

Speaker A

You have learned about the three C's framework, our training wheels, so that we have a place to start.

00:48

Speaker A

You have also learned about the four-step approach to build and communicate frameworks.

01:01

Speaker A

And this is key, so your frameworks are complete and address all of your interviewers' expectations.

01:17

Speaker A

Finally, you've learned techniques to adapt the three C's, making your structures more flexible and case-specific.

01:26

Speaker A

This makes the most of that basic tool, the three C's, and helps you create pretty good unique frameworks without having to reinvent the wheel every time.

01:33

Speaker A

By using these three pieces of knowledge, plus mastering issue trees, it is possible that you can structure every single case and get an offer at a top consulting firm.

01:53

Speaker A

You're well ahead of most candidates.

02:02

Speaker A

Most candidates will either try to memorize a dozen different frameworks, or they'll try to come up with a master framework that kind of solves any case, and obviously that doesn't work.

02:14

Speaker A

If you try to memorize a dozen different frameworks, you're going to leave too many gaps.

02:25

Speaker A

There are hundreds of types of business problems, not just a dozen.

02:46

Speaker A

And if you try to come up with a master framework, you will be repeating a generic structure over and over again.

03:04

Speaker A

Who would hire a consultant that solves every single problem with the same methodology?

03:13

Speaker A

I wouldn't.

03:29

Speaker A

Still, even with your new-found skills of creating a customized structure to any business case, I'd say you're still in a very risky position to go to your interviews.

03:49

Speaker A

Why?

04:09

Speaker A

Well, because you're counting on the likelihood that all the cases you will get are business cases.

04:28

Speaker A

And that means that with what you've learned so far, you have no idea how to structure a public sector case, an NGO case, or other less common case types.

04:45

Speaker A

But non-business cases are super common.

05:03

Speaker A

Here's a fact.

05:20

Speaker A

More than a third of McKinsey cases are non-business cases.

05:31

Speaker A

Here's another fact.

05:39

Speaker A

If you do six interviews with a consulting firm that only applies public sector cases in 5% of their interviews, simple statistics will indicate that you have a 27% chance of getting at least one public sector case with them.

05:47

Speaker A

At Bain, at BCG, and at other top consulting firms, your chances of getting a non-traditional, non-business case is higher than 5% per interview, which means that the combined probability that you will get at least one non-traditional case during your process is higher than a third.

06:04

Speaker A

Maybe it's uh 50%, 2/3, who knows.

06:19

Speaker A

It depends on the firm, it depends on the office.

06:32

Speaker A

But it's a high probability.

06:50

Speaker A

Now, in the past years, Julia and I have helped more than a thousand candidates, and we have noticed a pattern.

07:01

Speaker A

Consulting firms are relying on public sector and strange, uncommon business cases that cannot be solved via traditional frameworks more and more.

07:21

Speaker A

Why?

07:40

Speaker A

Simple.

07:47

Speaker A

Because they know candidates are preparing more and more, and they also know that many candidates prepare by memorizing frameworks, not by learning proper structuring skills.

08:05

Speaker A

And because they don't want to test your memorization skills, but instead they want to test your ability to structure a problem you've never seen before, they're making their cases less and less common.

08:21

Speaker A

Now, don't get me wrong.

08:34

Speaker A

The majority of your cases are still going to be of common types: pricing, market entry, profitability, growth, everything that you could solve potentially by adapting the three C's.

08:51

Speaker A

But the chances that you'll get at least one case of a non-traditional type in each firm that you apply to is very, very high.

09:06

Speaker A

And when the recruiting process is so competitive that you can't afford to fail a single case in order to get the offer, you want to prepare for that, too.

09:22

Speaker A

So, what's a way to structure any case, no matter how different, unusual, or strange?

09:32

Speaker A

The landscape technique.

09:49

Speaker A

Let's jump into it.

09:58

Speaker A

You've been using the landscape technique already.

10:15

Speaker A

You just didn't realize it.

10:34

Speaker A

Remember when I said that you needed to learn the three C's really well before you learned to adapt it, and that you needed to learn to adapt it before I could teach you to structure any case from scratch?

10:46

Speaker A

That's because the technique that I've shown you on how to adapt the three C's is the landscape technique applied specifically to business strategy cases.

11:00

Speaker A

But before we get into the specifics of how to structure any case, let me take a step back and show you why I call this technique the landscape technique.

11:15

Speaker A

Imagine you were shown this picture of a landscape, and you had to create a structure to describe it.

11:22

Speaker A

Now, you could say that there's the land and the atmosphere, but that wouldn't be a good way to describe this landscape.

11:34

Speaker A

It says nothing about it.

11:52

Speaker A

It's not specific.

12:00

Speaker A

In a case interview, this is like structuring a case using opposite words, such as internal factors and external factors.

12:16

Speaker A

It's better than nothing, but it's not good enough for a complex problem.

12:31

Speaker A

It doesn't describe that specific problem.

12:39

Speaker A

It describes any problem.

12:48

Speaker A

And let's be real to each other.

12:57

Speaker A

It's not even an intuitive way to describe it.

13:14

Speaker A

I mean, if you looked at this picture, would you say that it is divided by the land and the atmosphere?

13:30

Speaker A

It's not intuitive.

13:38

Speaker A

What's an intuitive way to describe this picture?

13:47

Speaker A

To me, it's quite obvious.

13:53

Speaker A

There's the mountain range, the valley, and the lakes.

14:09

Speaker A

Depending on the goal of this description, you could also add the beautiful blue skies and the road with the bridge.

14:25

Speaker A

The first three categories that I've described are essential to have a MECE structure, and the last two, the skies and the road with the bridge, are not essential.

14:43

Speaker A

Your structure is still MECE even if you skip them, unless the reason why you're describing this landscape requires you to describe them.

14:52

Speaker A

So, what did I do here to create this structure?

15:02

Speaker A

I basically broke this landscape down into its most important elements.

15:18

Speaker A

I didn't do a generic breakdown, such as land and atmosphere, and I also didn't speak about each specific feature of the terrain, no matter how irrelevant it is.

15:35

Speaker A

Let me show you a couple more examples.

15:51

Speaker A

This landscape could be described as balloons versus non-balloons, but that would be lazy.

16:08

Speaker A

Instead, a better way to structure or describe it would be the mountainous terrain, the balloons, the sunset, and you could also add the sunset skies if you wanted to.

16:17

Speaker A

Here I did the same thing as the last one.

16:33

Speaker A

I broke down the whole picture into its most important elements.

16:45

Speaker A

I also grouped all the balloons together because even though they're each an individual uh feature or element, conceptually, they're part of the same group of elements.

17:02

Speaker A

Now, this is not photography class or anything, so I'll just give you one more example before I make my point and bring this back to case interviews.

17:19

Speaker A

How would you structure this landscape?

17:25

Speaker A

A candidate trying to be MECE but not relevant might say, "Well, everything to the left side of the road and everything to the right side of the road."

17:45

Speaker A

And while this is MECE, it's not really insightful, right?

18:00

Speaker A

It doesn't describe the picture.

18:10

Speaker A

A better candidate would say that there's a road, and then there's desert plains on both sides of the road.

18:18

Speaker A

There's a big mountain in front of the road, and there are other mountains behind it.

18:29

Speaker A

They might also add that there's a car driving down the road.

18:48

Speaker A

Now, you're certainly asking yourself, "Why the hell is Bruno showing me pictures of places and landscapes and asking me to structure it?

19:04

Speaker A

Does it even make sense to structure a picture?"

19:22

Speaker A

Well, I did this for two reasons.

19:32

Speaker A

The first is to show you that you can get something complex, as any of these landscapes are, and break them down intuitively just by looking at it.

19:37

Speaker A

Really, a six-year-old could describe these pictures as well as I did, and they're complex enough to make a robot or an AI have trouble describing it in a way that makes sense.

19:53

Speaker A

At least nowadays.

20:11

Speaker A

I mean, maybe five years from n

20:24

Speaker A

The way Julia and I call these resulting structures of this process is context-driven structures, because they're structures that break down the problem by finding the key elements of its context. There are other ways to structure problems as well, many of

20:41

Speaker A

which we cover in our advanced course on structuring. Still, I particularly like context-driven structures because they're easy to understand, they're easy to keep MECE enough, and they're easy to build using the landscape technique.

21:00

Speaker A

Now, let's go a little deeper and integrate the landscape technique with our four-step approach. I'll show you the example of a public sector case, I'll find the key categories with you, and I'll show you how to come up with

21:14

Speaker A

issues and hypotheses for those categories. All right, I'll show you in this example how to create a full structure for a public education case using the landscape technique. We're not going to use any pre-made frameworks, just our logic and intuition. And we're going to

21:33

Speaker A

end up with a pretty good framework, good enough to get an offer at McKinsey.

21:39

Speaker A

Let's do it. So, first the case question. The Minister of Education of a developing mid-income country wants to develop a long-term plan to improve basic public education. What areas would you analyze in order to help her create this plan?

21:58

Speaker A

Okay, so let's assume that the interviewer doesn't give us any extra information. But the way that this question is phrased, this is clearly a long-term strategy problem. That means that we should not use an issue tree to diagnose what is the current problem.

22:17

Speaker A

Instead, we'll use a conceptual framework. It also helps that this problem is qualitative. Even though there are numerical indicators that can be used to help us understand how good an educational system is, no indicator can describe the whole picture. All

22:36

Speaker A

right, so how to create this framework? I'm going to take things one step at a time here, so that you can see my whole thought process. Most of this that I'm going to show you happens very quickly in my head as I build the framework.

22:52

Speaker A

The first thing I do is to try to think of the most basic structure of an educational system to help me think through this. Is it someone offering a service to someone else like in the city cleaning example? Is it something

23:07

Speaker A

happening within an arena with an external arena that serves as context as in the football match example? Is it something else?

23:16

Speaker A

To me, education is basically supply and demand. Some people called students demand education, while other people called teachers supply education.

23:30

Speaker A

In fact, the most basic educational systems need nothing more than students and teachers. Now, these are the two key categories that we will certainly have in our framework. So, let's add that.

23:45

Speaker A

And actually, let me rename this supply-demand name so that it's clearer to us what we're talking about here.

23:53

Speaker A

I'll call it the educator side and the learner side. All right, now let's think of who else is a decision maker in this system. One obvious that comes to mind are the actual schools. You can think of schools

24:09

Speaker A

as decision makers if you think about the people who run these schools. You could also think about the schools as needed infrastructure. Both are important, and it doesn't really matter if you think of the schools primarily as decision makers or as infrastructure.

24:26

Speaker A

The important thing is to know that schools comprehend these two aspects and that they're critical in the educational system. Back in the educator side, there are few other players. Suppliers of school materials, school administrators, and the government in general. And on

24:47

Speaker A

the learner side, an important decision maker that could change the results of the whole educational system are the families of the students.

24:57

Speaker A

All right, so this covers all the decision makers that I can think of. Now, let's think interfaces. I see three key ones. The first is transportation for students to reach the schools. This could make or break a developing

25:13

Speaker A

country's educational system. The second, whatever tools the teacher uses to teach students. I'll call these textbooks, materials, and methodology.

25:24

Speaker A

And finally, a critical interface between governments and the schools is the public budget. This is what's going to give the schools the resources, the financial resources that they need. All right, so now we have a lay of the land.

25:40

Speaker A

We have the key elements of our public education landscape. Now, the next step is to select which ones will become actual categories in our framework. We just want the key elements that can change the system. For example, I don't

25:56

Speaker A

think suppliers qualify for that. A government can find suppliers for school materials and textbooks, and that should be no problem. I'd also put some of these things together. For example, teachers and administrators should probably be grouped together as it's

26:15

Speaker A

difficult to completely separate their actions. Same for students and families, especially for basic education, which is mostly children and teenagers. I'll also group schools and transportation as these are pieces of infrastructure, and government and budget for obvious reasons. As you see, there is some

26:38

Speaker A

flexibility to how we do this. It's not black and white, nor there is one right answer.

26:46

Speaker A

It's just like describing the picture of a landscape into the elements you see. Some people would do it differently than others. Some people will say that there's one mountain range or two, and they might group them together or not,

26:58

Speaker A

but everyone can do it, and most people would describe the landscape pretty similarly and as accurately to each other. Now, let's translate this into the categories of our frameworks.

27:12

Speaker A

We have the teachers and administrators as our first category of analysis. Their key role is to teach, of course. And to do that, the system needs to have the right people with the right attitudes and the resources to teach. We also have

27:31

Speaker A

students and their families as a key area to understand. And their key role is to be in school and to make an effort to learn.

27:39

Speaker A

And to do that, they need to have the right attitudes and the resources to go to school. Then we have to understand the infrastructure, schools and transportation.

27:50

Speaker A

Their role is to support teaching, and to fill its role, we need enough infrastructure in good condition. Our fourth bucket is the materials, textbooks, and methods.

28:03

Speaker A

First thing about this is we should have materials and methods for our teachers and students. Second thing is that they should be proven to work. We're a developing country, there's no need to create new teaching methods to teach,

28:18

Speaker A

say, math or science that we don't know if it's going to work or not. So, we need proven stuff. And finally, the government needs to send enough money and oversee the system to help it work well. Now, let me pause for a quick

28:35

Speaker A

second here. You don't usually see people who teach case interviews online giving so much emphasis to this step of figuring out what's the role of each category of your framework before you come up with your key issues and

28:51

Speaker A

hypotheses. And the reason for that is that even though every consultant does it, they do it in a split second in their heads. In fact, everything I did until now is something that I can easily do in 10 to 15 seconds in an interview.

29:09

Speaker A

This is not to scare you in case you're not able to do that yet. You will be able to do it, too. This is just to make you aware that when I'm building a framework from scratch, I'm not actually

29:22

Speaker A

drawing the map on the left side of the screen in my head. All I'm doing is letting my intuition find the categories that might be useful for the case and adding them to my paper. I just draw the

29:35

Speaker A

buckets on the right side. But where does this intuition of what categories to add come from, and how to develop?

29:43

Speaker A

Well, the exact logic is on the map on the left side of the screen. That's why I'm showing you that. If you practice building enough frameworks using that logic, eventually your intuition will be developed as well, and you'll be able to

29:59

Speaker A

simply write down the categories as they come to you. Also, as I add these categories in my paper, I try to understand why each category is critical to the case, and what needs to be true for our client to

30:13

Speaker A

have a successful strategy. And this is exactly what's written in italics on the left side of the categories in my framework. I don't really write that down in the interview. It's something that I think really quickly as I write

30:27

Speaker A

down the category. As the why of each category comes to my mind, I can easily think of key issues I want to add to my framework. And because these key issues are rooted on a why, it's actually pretty easy to make sure

30:42

Speaker A

that they're relevant and insightful. So, most of what I've shown you until here actually happens quickly and intuitively to me. What I did in this part of the video is to show you the systematic way to think about that

30:59

Speaker A

intuition. Your goal is to develop that intuition, too. And the way to do that is to practice building frameworks in this systematic way that I'm showing you. All right. Now, time for the key issues. The only thing that I have to do

31:14

Speaker A

is for each category, come up with the key issues that will help me understand how to have that category behave in the way we want it for the system to work.

31:25

Speaker A

So, for example, our first category is teachers and administrators. We know that we want the right people with the right attitudes and with the resources they need. So, my first question might be, are there enough teachers?

31:41

Speaker A

And are they well hired and well trained? This covers whether we have the right people or not. But I also want to know if they have the right attitude. So, I might ask, are they incentivized to teach and motivate students?

31:59

Speaker A

And finally, I want to know if they have access to the resources they need to teach effectively. For students, I want to know if they're motivated to learn and study, and if not, why?

32:11

Speaker A

I want to know if they have the right support systems in place, which includes everything family and housing related.

32:19

Speaker A

And also, I want to know if their health and nutrition is in good conditions, because we know that malnourished kids don't learn as well. Now, let's tackle infrastructure. I'd love to know if there are enough schools and if they're

32:33

Speaker A

in good conditions. I want to know if schools are close to students and if transportation is accessible. And finally, I want to know if schools offer extracurricular activities in case these are important to our client, the Minister of Education.

32:50

Speaker A

For our materials and textbooks, our concern is that there are enough materials available and that the methods work. So, for the first question, I'd ask if textbooks and materials are available. And then for the second question, I'd ask if they're using

33:05

Speaker A

methodologies within parameters of international standards, especially for math and language, because these tend to be the most important things that you learn in school. And finally, I want to know if they properly test students, because we need to know if these methods work with

33:24

Speaker A

our students in our culture, not just students in other nations, right? And finally, on the government side, I want to understand what's the total cost of the system versus the budget versus benchmarks of other countries' educational systems. Just to see how

33:42

Speaker A

costly the system is and if the government is affording it. I'd want to know if the money actually gets to the school system. And I'd also want to know how the bureaucracy interacts with the system.

33:57

Speaker A

Now, because I know the function and the reason why each of these questions is here, I'd have absolutely no trouble formulating a hypothesis for each of these issues.

34:09

Speaker A

And because I know how to create a testable hypothesis, I'd have no trouble testing each hypothesis.

34:16

Speaker A

Now, eventually, after exploring these areas of analysis, I'd be able to actually help this minister formulate a long-term strategic plan to improve basic education in her country, which is precisely what our interviewer is looking for. Now, a few points to

34:34

Speaker A

notice. Number one, this is not the ultimate structure for education cases. It's simply a pretty good structure for the case we were given, and a unique one at that that was created on the spot. No other candidate's going to have the same

34:51

Speaker A

structure as we have here. Number two, most of the ideas here are common sense, which is a good thing.

34:59

Speaker A

Your interviewer's not interested in testing your knowledge in educational systems. Instead, they're interested in seeing if you can structure common sense ideas and questions to come up with a robust plan to help your clients. In the projects that you do once you get in the

35:19

Speaker A

consulting firm, you'll have access to all the knowledge and technical details that you want. The challenging part is to be able to structure that in a logical way.

35:30

Speaker A

Number three, if you're able to intuitively have a model of the landscape of the problem like I did on the left side of the screen in your mind, coming up with the categories in 10 to 15 seconds is going to be easy.

35:47

Speaker A

You can develop this intuition through practicing building a lot of frameworks. And if you're able to understand the role of each category in solving the problem in the system as a whole, coming up with insightful issues shouldn't be a

36:03

Speaker A

problem either. And that's it. This is the landscape technique to create frameworks from scratch. It works for any problem, although I recommend using it in strategic problems. For simpler, shorter-term problems, using an issue tree to dissect the root cause of the

36:24

Speaker A

problem is a better, more efficient way to work. If you want to learn how to create issue trees from scratch, again, go check our guides to issue trees in our website. All right. Now, let's put all of this into practice. Right after

36:40

Speaker A

this video, there's a public sector framework drill so that you can apply your new skills into a realistic case example. I'll see you in the next video.

Topics: case interview landscape technique consulting interview structuring MECE public sector case framework three C's issue tree McKinsey

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