The MECE principle (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive) is a grouping principle for separating a set of items into subsets that are mutually exclusive (ME) and collectively exhaustive (CE). It was developed in the late 1960s by Barbara Minto at McKinsey & Company and underlies her Minto Pyramid Principle,

Criticisms

The MECE concept has been criticized for not being exhaustive, as it does not exclude superfluous/extraneous items.

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.

Another attribute of MECE thinking is that, by definition, it precludes redundancies. However, there are cases where redundancies are desirable or even necessary.

Acronym pronunciation

There is some debate regarding the pronunciation of the acronym MECE. Although it is pronounced by many as , the author insisted that it should be pronounced as .

Historical Antecedents

In 1937, Indian Librarian S. R. Ranganathan published "Prolegomena to Library Classification" in which he presented a set of classification principles to guide library cataloging activities. Among principles were the following:

The Canon of Exhaustiveness: The classes in any array of classes should be totally exhaustive of their common immediate universe

The Canon of Exclusiveness: The classes in an array should be mutually exclusive.

See also

  • Proof by cases or case analysis
  • Partition of a set for a mathematical treatment
  • Work breakdown structure for application in project management
  • Algebraic data type in programming, which makes it possible to define analogous structures
  • Carroll diagram in logic, which divides a set into partitions of attributes

References

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