Hello everyone. From this time, along with the general flow of problem solving from “as-is (current state analysis)” to “to-be (future state design)”, I would like to write about how to proceed with the “as-is”.
In a previous post, I wrote that this “as-is” is where you show off your skills as a problem solver! For that reason, it was important to “grasp the stakeholders’ hearts” by uncovering facts that they “did not know” or “unthinkable”.
In order to “grab the stakeholders’ hearts”, it is important to make “as-is” contents persuasive, and the keyword for that is “Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive”.
MECE : “Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive”
This MECE is a familiar word for consulting firms:) This is the basic concept of “logical thinking” that is also familiar to consulting firms as well. I would like to write about logical thinking in this blog later.
MECE is an abbreviation for Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive, and is pronounced as “Mee-cee”.
The idea is, let’s say you’re doing a consumer survey for a problem-solving project. The target is metropolitan consumers. In this case, what kind of survey design would you specifically do?
Because it is a metropolitan area, we will target “Los Angels, San Diego and San Jose! If that’s the case, I’m sure you would be asked by stakeholders like, “Is that all right?”:) In this case, it should be better if you first break down like the largest states -> California, Texas, Florida. And then breaking down each of them further, such as “California: Los Angels, San Diego and San Jose” would be more persuasive.
In order to make “as-is” persuasive, it is important to show the “whole picture” of the as-is analysis “mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive” in line with the MECE concept. And the tips to showing this “mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive” is to utilize “frameworks”.
Bear the “frameworks that already exist” in your mind
Some of you may be wondering, “What is a framework?”, but in the field of problem solving, I think it would be better to think as “it is for organizing and classifying things”.
In the above example, we have at first broken down the metropolitan area into “the largest states -> California, Texas and Florida”. This “the largest states -> California, Texas and Florida” would be a framework as well. By using a framework that already exists in such a world and that many people have heard of, you can be more persuasive.
There are various frameworks in the world, but I think the representative ones are like below.
I think there are many more. Bear these in your mind and try to use them more and more. This “trying to use ” is important. You can make them your own. By increasing the number of frameworks, your skills as a problem solver will also be improved.
That’s all for this time, and I would like to continue from the next time onwards. Thank you for reading until the end.