Introduction to MECE - Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive

0:00Hey there, welcome to the next section. In this section we'll talk about Misi. Misi is an acronym that stands for Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive, and it's a simple but powerful tool that will help you synthesize structure and organize information. At first, it might seem like it's pretty obvious and simple, but when you apply this, it's often challenging, especially at first. Over time, it becomes intuitive to use Misi as a sort of model and test when you're first looking at information. And in the next module too, we'll also combine it with the Pyramid Principle to talk about how we can use it at different levels of abstraction.

0:43At the basic level, it's really just two things. Mutually exclusive when ideas are separate and independent. So if you're talking about two countries, maybe the United States of America and Canada, they're mutually exclusive. As you can see at the top, if you define the group as the United States and North America, North America already includes the United States, so they'd be overlapping and therefore not mutually exclusive. However, if you look at the bottom, you would see that the United States and Canada separate when we're defining them as countries, and they're mutually exclusive.

1:26And then we go to collectively exhaustive. This is another sort of test which says, have we included the complete set of information? What's missing? And again, we can use a country example, if we said something like North America, the simplest version of that is that there's three countries, Mexico, United States, and Canada. Some other definitions say there's many more countries, but let's just say there's three countries. So then if we had United States and Canada, it's not collectively exhaustive. We're missing that third part. If we were working in a team, we might take a step back and say what's missing.

2:09We would then define it as US, Canada, and Mexico. We now have something that's collectively exhaustive.