Instructor: Let me show the MECE principle on an example
and if you go to Shape format in PowerPoint
while having two items selected,
you can see under Merge Shapes there is something similar
but it isn't related to the MECE principle,
the MECE principle is more theoretical.
Mutually exclusive means that two ideas
should be grouped separately,
they shouldn't overlap each other.
This is how in a business presentation
you should treat separate topics.
For an example, if you had continents,
one continent would be Asia,
the second continent would be Africa,
you have two continents divided into those separate topic,
this is okay.
But if I would give you an information
that I'm doing a presentation about continents
or some statistics and then I'm making something like Asia,
Asia and Europe or Eurasia, this isn't really MECE
because they aren't mutually exclusive.
Asia is both in the first group and the second group,
I need to keep that in mind
when I will pull any statistics for you.
Then going one step further,
we already know what ME stands for, but the CE,
Collectively Exhaustive means all ideas together
should paint the full picture of what you wanna say.
If I would write here, "World sales by continent,"
and then I just show you sales in Asia and sales in Africa
this probably wouldn't be collectively exhaustive
because in order to exhaust a topic,
when you deliberately use the word "World",
I would need to paint the full picture.
The proper way of arranging information
would be show you all continents
and then maybe the two best performing
or any kind of statistics
but this would paint the full picture
and this is exactly what the MECE principle is all about,
you need to paint the full picture
but topics shouldn't overlap each other.
In the next lecture, I wanna show you an outstanding example
of the MECE principle in a real world product.