Thread by @strategyskills

1/ Many people are interested in the MECE principle.

"MECE" is something repeated so often by ex strategy consultants, that you might think it is a code word for a secret PowerPoint cult

👉MECE = mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive
strategyu.co/wtf-is-mece-mu…

2/ MECE was invented by a bad-ass, Barbara Minto - probably one of the most influential people in the modern consulting industry. Her introduction of the Pyramid Principle and MECE principle quietly reshaped how firms solved problems, first at McKinsey and then at other firms

3/ Today consultants say "MECE", sounding like "mee-sea," however, Minto says its pronounce "meece" like Greece

Why should we listen to her?

“I invented it, so I get to say it how to pronounce it,” she says.

Bad ass. I told you

4/ Back to business. The best example to conceptualize MECE is to think about a six sided die.

The die is a complete set and each of the numbers is an independent and mutually exclusive result. Combined all of the numbers are "collectively exhaustive"

5/ So how do you use this?

In practice, it is a powerful tool for helping you sort and group information.

The best way to think about MECE is as an ideal that can help you sharpen your thinking or communication.

Let's walk through a very simplified example

6/ Example: Social Media Apps

If we define the set as "Social Media Apps" It will be hard to be Collectively Exhaustive without listing thousands of apps.

Lets say for argument sake that we'll define them as mutually exclusive in the sense that they are separate apps

7/ MECE forces you to define your terms.

In the social media example, we could say "Apps with over 1B users" and identify a six-item MECE group.

We can also create sub-groups, but then you also need to make sure that the higher level is MECE as well

8/ Why do all this? Our brains can't remember that much information. The latest thinking says our brains can probably hold three or four "chunks" in working memory.

Grouping items is a way to get to those "chunks"
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

9/ Let’s help a niche consulting firm apply MECE to its services (assume CE)

1.Training & Facilitation
2.Six Sigma Training
3.Agile Training
4.Founder Coaching
5.Leadership Team Coaching
6.Succession Planning Consulting
7.Values & Culture Consulting

10/ To simplify, you’d want to start with figuring out which level of thinking you want to organize around.

Start by identifying three groups – training, consulting & coaching seems to be a MECE way of organizing these

Then I’d group the appropriate services underneath them

11/ With more complex info, you do the same, but instead of writing something as simple as “coaching” you’d want to identify the insight that summarizes the data to fit your story:

Here is a whole bunch of fake information I created to show you what I mean:

12/ The synthesis process is hard, takes lots of practice and is a mix of art and science. I’ll detail this in a deeper dive around synthesizing information. In the meantime, you can explore that topic here
strategyu.co/structure-your…