How to organize your thoughts with MECE

Are your PowerPoint presentations too long? Is your audience getting bored? Do you need a better way to organize your thoughts for business?

I would like to introduce MECE, a consulting framework to help organize your thoughts. In today's video, I'll explain the framework, it's origins, why you should consider using it, and where you can apply it.

Resources

https://strategyu.co/wtf-is-mece-mutually-exclusive-collectively-exhaustive/

Transcription

Hi, it's Xavier Chang, Principal of XC Consulting. Today we're back with another episode of Xcel With Xavier, and today we are diving into the framework called MECE. MECE is an acronym for Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive. It is a framework popularly used by strategy consultants, and I wanted to share this with you because I think you don't need to be a strategy consultant to use the framework.

So let's dive into an article from StrategyU, and they talk about the MECE Principle, and I really like how they break it down. So when we want to think about MECE, we should really break it out into two parts. The first is mutually exclusive, and the article says that mutually exclusive is a concept from probability theory that says two events cannot occur at the same time. So if you think about a die that you roll, the die has six outcomes, and it's either one, two, three, four, five, or six. You cannot have a one and a three. That is not mutually exclusive, so that is the first concept for MECE. The second concept is collectively exhaustive. Going back to our die example, the die has six sides. There's not a seventh, eighth or ninth side. So making sure that you have captured the six options, that is collectively exhaustive.

We've got a nice diagram here. First column is mutually exclusive, and whenever there's overlap, that's not a good thing for the MECE test, right? So you want to have your idea one and your idea two as separate. And then for the collectively exhaustive concept, if you have three ideas but you are only talking about or capturing ideas one and two, it's not collectively exhaustive, so that also will not pass the MECE test.

MECE was first founded by a strategy consultant. Her name was Barbara Minto, and she worked at McKinsey in the '60s and '70s, and she came up with MECE, so we're very thankful for Barbara because this makes our lives a lot easier and helps us to really think about how we're collecting data and how we're organizing it.

Okay, so another example, let's think about something completely different. We now have a grocery list, and the grocery list has nine items, something that you might find on your next grocery store visit. Thinking about nine items is really hard to remember and to rattle off off the top of your head. If we try to organize it, we can also use the MECE framework to make sure that it's mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.

So if we start to group our nine items into these three categories, it might make things a lot easier. We've got our bakery items, we've got frozen fruit, we've got fresh fruit. First test is mutually exclusive. So the bakery items won't be found in fresh fruit, for example, and the frozen food, rather, won't be found in the fresh fruit section. So right there, there's no overlap. There's no Venn diagram, if you will, for this example. So it passes the M and the E. Collectively exhaustive, we had nine items on our previous list. Now, if we are able to categorize all of these, that is collectively exhaustive; that is making sure that we have all nine items into that list.

So why MECE, why should we even be thinking about MECE? And the article has a great response to this. The answer is that information will be much more memorable and persuasive to an audience you communicate your message to. Remembering three things is easier than nine. And this goes back to our grocery store example. Remembering nine items is really hard, but if we try to group it into categories or sections of the supermarket, that makes things a lot easier. If we flip that around and apply this to business, if you are presenting to the CEO, to the board, to an advisor, it might really be hard to rattle off 25 specific items, but if you're able to crystallize those items into three categories, that is much more memorable. Just make sure it passes the MECE test.

Okay, putting it into the practice, this is the last section I'll talk about. Simplifying a long list of data or information into a smaller set of ideas, that is the grocery store example. Another application is breaking down a problem statement into a MECE set of hypotheses. Yes, scientists use this to make sure that they can test all of the different experiments and have this as part of how they conduct their research. Number three, breaking down a list of information into groups, very similar to the grocery store example. And the last one is simplifying an article with many different sections into a smaller number of high level themes. You see this in marketing all the time where it could be a longer form content piece, like an article or a long form video, and breaking that out into smaller pieces of content, either if that's a social media post or if that is a short video, but making sure that it still passes the MECE test.

So that is a bit about MECE, the origins of it, how you can apply it, the rules of MECE. It's not just for strategy consultants. This is a really helpful framework for executives, people that are doing the work, people that are managing; making sure that their thinking is MECE. So thanks for checking out this video. I am looking forward to seeing you at the next one. Thanks so much.

Thanks for watching another episode of Xcel With Xavier. I've got new episodes coming out every Thursday morning. Please don't forget to like this video and subscribe to my channel to receive notifications of new content. Thanks again, and I hope to see you again next time.