MECE principle

This article is about the principle of "mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive". For the settlement in Croatia, see Mece.

The MECE principle, pronounced 'me see', is a grouping principle for separating a set of items into subsets that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.[1]

The MECE principle is useful in the business mapping process where the optimum arrangement of information is exhaustive and does not double count at any level of the hierarchy.

Examples of MECE arrangements include categorizing people by year of birth (assuming all years are known). A non-MECE example would be categorization by nationality, because nationalities are neither mutually exclusive (some people have dual nationality) nor collectively exhaustive (some people have none).

The McKinsey Way

The principle is one of the foci of a series of three books about McKinsey & Company: The McKinsey Way,[2] The McKinsey Mind,[3] and The McKinsey Engagement.[4]

Criticisms

MECE has been criticized for failing to satisfy itself.[5]

Also, MECE thinking can be too limiting as mutual exclusiveness is not necessarily desirable. For instance, while it may be desirable to classify the answers to a question in a MECE framework so as to consider all of them exactly once, forcing the answers themselves to be MECE can be unnecessarily limiting.[6]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Spencer, Tom (January 30, 2013). "MECE Framework". Consulting Frameworks (TomSpencer.com).
  2. ↑ Rasiel, Ethan (February 1, 1999). The McKinsey Way (1 ed.). McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-053448-3.
  3. ↑ Rasiel, Ethan; Friga, Paul (September 26, 2001). The McKinsey Mind: Understanding and Implementing the Problem-Solving Tools and Management Techniques of the World's Top Strategic Consulting Firm (1 ed.). McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-137429-3.
  4. ↑ Friga, Paul (November 24, 2008). The McKinsey Engagement: A Powerful Toolkit For More Efficient and Effective Team Problem Solving (1 ed.). McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-149741-1.
  5. ↑ van Gelder, Tim (June 4, 2010). "What is MECE, and is it MECE?".
  6. ↑ "MECE vs ICE".
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