How many cases should I do?
"It really doesn’t matter how long [you practice]. If you practice with your fingers, no amount is enough. If you practice with your head, two hours is plenty.” Violin Professor Leopold Auer
One of the most important skills a consultant needs to learn and demonstrate is asking the right questions.
Of course, I frequently get the question, "How many cases should I do?" This, my dear friends, is not the right question.
It's almost always a means for an aggressively Type A person (the kind of person who gravitates towards consulting as an industry) to plan out their recruiting season, set benchmarks for themselves versus their peers, and make sure they're doing everything they need to get an offer. But this kind of question can't yield a useful output because there is not a straight line between "doing more cases" and actual improvement.
Most people view any experience with a task as a form of practice. Sure, you may learn things on the edges, but effective practice is deliberate practice. If you're unfamiliar with the concept, deliberate practice is a framework developed by Anders Ericsson to explain how expertise is developed among world-class performers. The five key pillars of deliberate practice are:
Pushing beyond your comfort zone.
Working towards specific, well-defined goals.
Focusing intently on practice activities with high-quality feedback.
Receiving and responding to high-quality feedback.
Developing a mental model of expertise.
Which of these do you accomplish through "doing cases" with non-experts?
If you are casing with people at your general skill level, you probably won't substantially exceed your comfort zone.
Sure, you can read casing books and define goals, but on your own, will you really know whether you hit them?
If you're just "doing cases," you may struggle to identify specific areas of improvement and struggle more to practice them in a targeted way.
If your feedback comes from non-experts, odds are it will not be of high quality.
How will you know what expertise looks like from the outside?
Learning how to case is a process of developing a number of hard and soft skills, learning new ways of thinking, and managing all of this new information so you can execute effectively every time you need to. The development of these skills, thought processes, and means of executing effectively can take time to build, but this process can be accelerated by leveraging deliberate practice techniques.
So, how many cases should you do? Enough. More importantly, how should you do them? Deliberately.