McKinsey's Sustainable Future Labs game: guide

Overview

Sustainable Future Labs is a text-based project management module added to the McKinsey Problem Solving Game (Solve) in March 2026. Unlike the numerical Red Rock Study and the optimisation-focused Sea Wolf, this module contains no calculations, data journals, or spreadsheets. Instead, it evaluates how you make decisions in ambiguous, fast-moving team situations — assessing project leadership, crisis navigation, stakeholder management, and judgement under severe time constraints.

You are placed inside an environmental research team and asked to make decisions as a project evolves. Themes rotate: some scenarios involve coastal habitat recovery, others focus on air quality or wetland restoration. The science content is a backdrop — what McKinsey actually tests is how you navigate team dynamics, respond to new information, and handle trade-offs when no option is clearly right.

Format & question flow

The module runs exactly 20 minutes (1,200 seconds) and contains 13 sequential questions. There is no pause button — the timer runs continuously from the moment the briefing appears.

• Question 1 — Prioritisation ranking: A single drag-and-drop task where you order four operational actions from highest to lowest priority. This tests whether you establish a hypothesis-driven direction early or default to gathering more input first.
• Questions 2–13 — Action questions: Twelve sequential multiple-choice decision points, each with 2–4 options presented as full-paragraph descriptions starting with "You recommend…" or "You decide…". Each option represents a distinct course of action.

With roughly 90 seconds per question on average, time management is an implicit evaluation factor throughout.

What it tests

Sustainable Future Labs evaluates five core behavioural traits. McKinsey is not scoring right-or-wrong answers — the assessment measures how consistently you respond as situations evolve across the 13-question sequence. Each trait appears multiple times, distributed throughout the module.

1. Prioritisation — your ability to focus on what matters most and sequence actions effectively. Strong candidates establish direction early and concentrate effort on high-impact factors.
2. Decision-making under uncertainty — your ability to move forward when information is incomplete. Strong candidates maintain direction while staying open to new signals, avoiding both analysis paralysis and overreaction to a single input.
3. Interpreting messy information — how well you extract meaning from conflicting data, determining which discrepancies affect conclusions and which can be set aside.
4. Balancing trade-offs — your ability to handle situations where multiple valid perspectives exist, making trade-offs explicit and considering multiple definitions of success before committing.
5. Team and stakeholder effectiveness — how you engage with others under pressure, balancing progress with inclusion and maintaining credibility with stakeholders.

Key decision-making principles

The module rewards candidates who demonstrate four consulting mindsets consistently across the 13 questions:

1. Pragmatism and impact over perfection. Favour rapid execution and client impact over analysis paralysis. An 80% model that saves critical project days beats 99% accuracy at the expense of deadlines.
2. Hypothesis-driven thinking. Prefer trial-and-error, rapid prototyping, and acting on plausible assumptions over waiting for exhaustive research.
3. Communicative inclusiveness and stakeholder management. Engage sub-teams, leverage specialist strengths, and protect stakeholder relationships without allowing the team to become an indecisive debating club.
4. Balanced compromise. When trade-offs are extreme, lean toward middle-ground options that satisfy critical compliance or safety needs while maintaining operational velocity.

Does your invite include it?

Not every candidate receives Sustainable Future Labs. McKinsey rolled this module out in phases starting in early 2026, and as of mid-2026 most offices have adopted the 85-minute Solve format:

• 85-minute invitation — you will face all three modules in this fixed order: Red Rock Study (35 min), Sea Wolf (30 min), then Sustainable Future Labs (20 min).
• 65-minute invitation — Red Rock Study and Sea Wolf only. You will not encounter this module.

Check your invite email carefully. If it specifies 85 minutes, you should prepare for a behavioural project-management component alongside the analytical games.