-: Let me show you a real business example.
"The Economist," I'm sure you've heard about it,
has something like the Economist Intelligence Unit
who does their own research on certain topics.
Every year they release a global livability index
for certain cities where they try to quantify
which cities are interesting to live in
and which cities rank high in this index,
and cities that get a score of 80 to 100,
there are few, if any, challenges to living standards,
and cities that get a rating of 50 or below
aren't considered as interesting to live in.
Then they explain their entire methodology.
This is subject to change,
but currently they have five categories,
stability, healthcare, culture, education,
and infrastructure.
Mutually exclusive categories,
beautifully divided into separate topics.
Now, they're exclusive, yes,
but are they collectively exhaustive?
Do they paint the entire picture of a city?
For example, do they take into consideration
that I like a city where my friends and family are,
or, I like to play football,
so I especially value cities who have football fields?
This is just an example.
Well, no, because when you do a research or a presentation,
you cannot possibly exhaust every option there is
on the world.
This is why, at the beginning of this document,
they specifically explain their methodology.
They explain their categories,
they explain what comes into each category.
For example, in education,
they consider access to private education,
access to public education.
With the infrastructure, they talk about things
like public transport, roads and other availability,
and each category gets its own weight,
with stability being very important.
For example, infrastructure gets 20% of importance.
With the amount of data they bring in
with respect to their own methodology,
they are able to draw a collective conclusion
as to if a city is interesting to live in
or has high standards or not.
For the sake of their own publication,
they are being very transparent about it
and they drafted the categories, in my opinion,
in a MECE fashion, they are mutually exclusive,
but collectively paint a really good picture
of the quality of life of given cities.
Keep that in mind in business presentations,
because there will be a point where you will start to think,
"Am I going too much into detail?
Am I being too granular?"
And then you need to think what will paint
the collective picture, pick the topics,
and consider moving forward with your content.