#642 仕事の速さでも､鋭い分析でも､論理的思考でもない…一流のコンサルなら必ず持っている"たった1つのスキル"

A consultant's value reduces to one thing: framing the right question

Hiroaki Sugita (杉田博明), professor at Waseda Business School and former BCG Japan representative, states it plainly in his book *Why Was I Able to Change?* (Kodansha): "The capability demanded of a consultant is, in large part, reducible to the single point of framing the right question."

Hypotheses, analysis, and slide decks generate no value on their own. Everything depends on first establishing what question you are actually trying to answer. When the question is off, no level of skill can keep the work from spinning in place. What makes this especially dangerous is that high-precision tools make it harder, not easier, to notice the drift. A watertight logical argument can make a meeting feel productive; a confident stance can bring the room to order. But neither of those is an answer to the real question.

The consumer-finance entry project—what was making the conversation not connect

Just before the 2000s, Sugita joined a project centered on whether a financial company should enter the consumer-finance business. The assignment looked straightforward: should the client enter consumer finance or not?

The market, dominated by the four major consumer-finance companies at the time, was growing fast—high yields, strong growth, an untapped revenue source. On the numbers alone, entry looked rational. Sugita brought a hypothesis from Day 1 and set about building it out with facts. Yet the client's response was muted. Meeting after meeting the client said some version of: "I get that the market is there, but that's not what I'm trying to find out." The logic was sound and the analysis was polished. Still, at a fundamental level the conversation never connected and the discussion refused to advance.

The turning point—'money isn't one color'

What broke the deadlock was a single remark from the executive who owned the project. A veteran of foreign financial institutions with years of inside experience in personal financial services, he said: "Money isn't actually one color. The meaning of a financial service changes completely depending on why someone is borrowing."

That comment sent the team into consumer interviews. What they found was that borrowing motivation split into two distinct types: ① money to bridge a temporary shortfall—wedding costs, a sudden expense—before the next paycheck; and ② money to keep servicing debt, with a real risk of spiraling into multiple indebtedness—money borrowed for the sake of money. Both sat under the label "consumer finance," yet the motivation, behavior, and business risk were entirely different in nature.

Updating the question—from 'how do we win?' to 'should we be in this at all?'

At that point the team rebuilt the central question from scratch. Instead of "how do we win in a high-growth market?", it became: "What kind of market have the major consumer-finance players created, why were they able to build it, and is this a business our client should be running?" Sugita reflects that this was the central question all along.

After deliberation at the executive level, the verdict was no-go. The decision weighed credit-management infrastructure, business-model compatibility, and the bank's overall risk profile. Reality subsequently validated the call. When the grey-zone interest-rate problem came to light, consumer-finance companies were hit hard by overcharge-refund claims and suffered severe reputational damage. Had the team stayed with the original question and hypothesis, the conclusion would have been "enter"—by answering the right question, they arrived at the exact opposite.

The client's response to the final report: "This is exactly what I wanted to know." For Sugita, the experience was a decisive turning point—one that forced him to fundamentally question his long-held belief that a consultant's value lies in forming hypotheses quickly and pushing decisions forward.

The universal risk of a misframed question

Editor-in-chief Hoshino (星野) uses the case to argue that the damage caused by a misframed question extends well beyond business. In Japan's Pacific War decision-making, the senior military leadership included many brilliant minds, yet enormous energy went into "how do we prosecute the war advantageously?" while the question "why must we fight this war at all?" was effectively suppressed—even though the leadership privately understood that a conventional war effort would certainly end in defeat.

Hoshino also points to flea-market apps such as Mercari, Yahoo Auctions, and Rakuma: originally conceived around the idea of circulating unneeded goods, they have been gradually transformed by rampant reselling of fraudulently acquired items. This too, he argues, is the result of deferring the essential question—a textbook case of bad money driving out good. Continuing to tolerate the situation because it is currently profitable, he warns, will produce far larger blowback down the road, just as it did in consumer finance.