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How to Tell a Business Story: Using the McKinsey Situation-Complication-Resolution framework for business and personal decisions

Updated: Apr 18

Hi all!  My name is Jeff Hulett, I am a decision confidence builder.  I am a behavioral economist and have been in banking and financial services most of my career.  I am also a faculty member at James Madison University, and I am a personal finance author. 


About the author: Jeff Hulett is a career banker, data scientist, behavioral economist, and choice architect. Jeff has held banking and consulting leadership roles at Wells Fargo, Citibank, KPMG, and IBM. Today, Jeff is an executive with the Definitive Companies. He teaches personal finance at James Madison University and provides personal finance seminars. Check out his new book -- Making Choices, Making Money: Your Guide to Making Confident Financial Decisions -- at jeffhulett.com.


April is negotiation success month.  All month long, we will explore, dissect, and show you best practices for being a confident negotiator.  Not surprisingly, the best negotiation is the product of information leverage and decision process.  Having a process for curating information and deciding “what is important to you” or your organization about an upcoming decision is essential.  Partnering with the best technology is also a big part of negotiation success.  Using Definitive Choice IS the negotiators’ first choice when preparing to decide and negotiate among alternatives.




The Situation-Complication-Resolution Framework is a straightforward and effective reasoning approach. Management consulting firms such as McKinsey & Company often use SCR for consultant training. Reasoning approaches like this have been around for millennia, going back to the ancient Greeks and even before. The best part about SCR is that you can start using it quickly and easily by implementing these three problem descriptions:

  • Situation,

  • Complication, and

  • Resolution

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