Albert Einstein once said,

“If I had one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and only 5 minutes finding the solution.”

If the direction is wrong, the problem will not be solved no matter how correct the method is. When faced with questions that are difficult to clearly and quickly determine the answer to, I would suggest business owners can use the MECE analysis method. MECE is a thinking strategy used to solve complex problems. “Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive” systematically breaks down the problem into non-overlapping blocks, and tries to list all possibilities. To make subsequent thinking more organized, the most important thing is to capture the core of the problem and find an effective solution.

Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive

MECE is developed by the first female consultant at McKinsey, Barbara Minto. She wrote in “The Minto Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing, Thinking, & Problem Solving” and raised a very important analysis rule. Mutually exclusive is to divide a complex problem into several small items for discussion, and pay attention to whether the small problems overlap with each other. Mutually exclusive means that if A occurs, B must not occur, and vice versa. Collectively Exhaustive means that complex problems can be completely solved by combining all small problems.

MECE application steps:

1. First confirm what problem you want to solve and what purpose you want to achieve by solving the problem.
2. Find the entry point that meets MECE, that is, according to what standards to classify, the listed factors must be complete and independent, and there should be no intersections or omissions in the relationship between each factor.
3. After completing the classification, check whether there are any duplications and omissions.
4. Think in layers, examine each one by one, and come up with tackling approaches.
5. Draw conclusions and propose overall solutions to the problem.

3 principles of the MECE pyramid:

1. In the pyramid structure, the views at any level must be the sum of the views below.
2. Horizontal views must have the same characteristics.
3. The vertical perspective must follow the same logic.

Case Study: How to shorten customer waiting time?

A restaurant is very popular, but due to staffing constraints, customers often have to wait for a long period of time. The restaurant management discusses the countermeasures, hoping to shorten customer waiting times and improve service quality. In addition to the reason for lack of manpower, when thinking about the problem, you can think about many aspects, including whether the efficiency of meal preparation is good enough? Are the manpower inside and outside the kitchen fully utilized? Are there too many meal options? Can meal options be streamlined?

Combined with the MECE concept, we use the four aspects of “people, processes, meals, and management systems” to think about the entire restaurant’s operating status from a macro perspective.

Take a pause, and think twice

I believe that many business owners are extremely smart, but when they are trying to solve problems, most of them rely on intuition, resulting in many blind spots in thinking and falling into a vicious cycle of dealing with affairs superficially rather than substantially. The lack of a logical analysis process has caused many issues in corporate development. Business owners may take a pause and think twice about the root cause of the problem through MECE logical analysis, and then come up with ways to solve the problem. I hope MECE logical analysis can help business owners have more direction when solving problems in the future!