Mutation Game App

Click ‘Show Instructions’ if it’s the first time you’re playing the Mutation Game.

Mutation Game Exercises

Here are sample solutions to the Mutation Game exercises, submitted by fellow readers of “How to Be Strategic”. For recollection, these exercises ask you to, respectively, uncover more ideas in the existing sentence & grid to help diversify McKinsey in Brazil, and to create a brand new sentence & grid to achieve the same outcome. You can click on any of the templates below to print or download them. Scroll down the page to find the sample solutions. As usual, please do the exercises yourself before you look at the solutions! You can send us your own sample solution by clicking here.

Mutation Exercise #1: Haruto’s take on diversifying McKinsey Brazil

Are you sure you want to look at solutions yet? … Why don’t you go back up the page, print the blank template, and have another go yourself first? When you’re done, the sample solutions below will still be there - and they’ll be a lot more useful to you after you’ve had a go at the exercise on your own!

Mutation Exercise #2: Your take on diversifying McKinsey Brazil

Other Mutation Game Examples

This first example below was an exercise carried out in 2018 by Fred Pelard with a client. The question was: “what should IKEA do to re-invent its ‘big blue box’ store concept”? Please note the “IKEA second-hand market” idea towards the bottom right corner of the photo. As it turns out, IKEA did launch a second-hand pilot store in October 2020 (see here for BBC article) … a full 2 years later than Team C had the idea!