MECE principle
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The MECE principle, pronounced 'meesee', mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, is a grouping principle for separating a set of items into subsets, the choice of subsets should be
- mutually exclusive -- i.e., no subsets should represent any other subsets("no overlaps")
- collectively exhaustive -- i.e., the set of all subsets, taken together, should fully encompass the larger set of all items ("no gaps").
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).
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[edit] Use
The MECE principle is referenced extensively in approaches used by many management consulting firms.
[edit] Example
If two friends need to physically meet each other and they are geographically distant, they have only three MECE options: (a) friend A goes to friend B's location; (b) friend B goes to friend A's location; (c) both friends meet at a location that is not their original ones.
[edit] See also
- Case analysis
- Partition of a set for a mathematical treatment
