The Latest Hype in Management Country

Lately the MECE principle has been propping up a lot more in arguments and feedbacks in consultancy. For those of you who haven't been acquainted with the principle yet: it's an acronym that says Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive. In my day job, people use it to give feedback on all kinds of decisions. As in:

"This memo is not very MECE."

"I think your analysis of these two options must follow MECE."

Of course when you first hear about this principle from your manager, you feign you know what it's about, but immediately you start looking for the wikipedia page, when he's not looking.

Then you read the page, and try to use what it says: when you present a collection, you must present attributes that are exclusive and exhaustive. In this way you keep the argument clear, pertinent and precise.

Unfortunately, when applied to consultancy, MECE as a principle is fundamentally flawed. The goal of the principle is to avoid ambiguity, but if anything, a consultant thrives on this. A consultant can be as exclusive and exhaustive as he wants to be. In fact the MECE principle in consultancy has more to do with political exclusivity and exhaustion, rather than logical.

I'm sure the MECE hype will blow over, once the consultant confront his manager with a MECE-approved memo, which proves to be unreadable, extremely difficult to follow, and ends up leading people to the wrong decision.