Is Your PowerPoint a MECE document?

McKinsey & Company would like to claim the credit for coining the term MECE (pronounced as mee-see). However, this abbreviation of "Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive" is almost as old as statistics. I recall this is how we used to define statistical events when I was studying mathematics as an undergraduate. You can find a lot more about mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive events on Wikipedia.

Let us discuss how do we apply this "MECE" principle to the preparation of presentations and documents. I'm sure that you have heard about death by PowerPoint. This refers to the death of ideas that were killed because of a badly prepared presentation. Your ideas are important. There are three simple ways to avoid high mortality rate of ideas:

1. Each slide must be "mutually exclusive"
2. Presentation as a whole must be "collectively exhaustive"
3. Make your presentations less verbose, more pictorial

How does mutual exclusion apply to slides? It is important that thoughts presented on each slide are non-overlapping and please don't repeat yourself (DRY). A DRY presentation keeps the viewers interested. Overlapping slides represent confused thinking. If the thoughts that you plan to present have to be grouped under categories, make sure that the categories are non-overlapping and that each thought is grouped under one and only one category.

The second point refers to the importance of exhaustively dealing with all the possibilities and outcomes related to the topic of your presentation. Leave no stone unturned. One way of validating collectively exhaustive property is to look for all the inputs, outputs, processes and risks and analyze alternative scenarios. This will be some real hard work. Who said ideas are cheap!

Last point is unrelated to MECE but important to remember that a story is best told through pictures.

By the way, this is not a "collectively exhaustive" blog about improving your presentations. I was just discussing about "MECE". So you still need to follow other rules of a good presentation, for instance, understand your audience, present facts and use emotional appeal, follow the rules of writing a good story, et cetera.