Alice makes a typical mistake of candidates when explaining her influence skills. She does not break down the conversation where she convinced a colleague to support her.
Since Alice does not adequately demonstrate her ability to influence key members of her team, Kevin looks for this skill within Alice’s work on the Bain engagement.
Kevin wants to see if Alice is merely logical or is able to apply business judgment to generate a unique insight. He tests for this by asking Alice to break down her insights.
Since Alice focuses heavily on logical problem solving, Kevin is forced to dig deeper, to the 2nd and 3rd order of her reasoning, to determine a unique insight she developed.