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When trying to figure out any problem in banking, including strategic planning, it helps you to understand the system you are dealing with. Oftentimes bankers apply the wrong mental model to a problem and come up with a suboptimal answer. System thinking is the ability to recognize a pattern before you act so that you…

In banking, complex problems often have many moving parts: regulatory change, technology shifts, customer behaviors, competitive dynamics, pricing pressures. It’s tempting to jump into solutioning the primary visible symptoms (e.g., “our margins are shrinking”) and assume you’ve solved the issue. But what if you’ve only tackled the tip of the iceberg? When it comes to…

The “5S Framework”  is a methodology for solving banking problems that banks can apply to determine the best strategic path forward. We outlined the background and the first couple of steps of the framework in Part 1 (Here). In this article, we cover the remaining three “Ss” of “Solve,” “Stress,” and “Sell” while looking at…

The reality is bankers are fantastic problem solvers. It’s in their blood. The problem is that, as an industry, we leave much to be desired about DIAGNOSING the right problem. Present a challenge to a banker, and they will quickly switch to solution mode without first analyzing what the issues are. They don’t fully understand…