It is interesting to see how much impact this program at Stoa has started making in my daily life, tiny bits and pieces of information adding and contributing to the evolving thoughts towards a 360-degree view on things at Work and Home.
The First Sprint - Structured Thinking and Problem Solving does exactly that by giving me and my fellow cohort-mates tiny information slips that make you stop and think about how we can apply concepts we learn in day-to-day life!
Previously, we dived deep into the Four Hat Exercise which essentially allowed us to understand how information can be collected, cleaned, and presented in a systematic manner to grasp it easier and better. Today, as I came back from work the Stoa Daily Newsletter for the same had me hooked on understanding a different take on Negotiations at Workplace. So hooked that I missed my stop at the metro that I was supposed to get down at and proceeded to reach 2 stations further.
Upon reaching home, I opened the prompt for the day - Fundamentals of MECE with a cup of coffee to recatch my energy and focus on the concept at hand for the day - Understanding the MECE Framework.
Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive Framework
“Took me a bit to not switch the places of the words Exclusive and Exhaustive while talking about it, Man!” - Fellow Cohort
The MECE Framework picked up right from yesterday’s learnings of Note making and Collective information using the Four Hats Exercise. However, it was different in the context that it provides a systematic organization of the collected information with a tad bit of hypotheses play to it.
The MECE Framework works in the principle of dividing and categorizing different segments of Information into Meaningful Buckets that can further drop-down multiple lines of information and questioning on that specific category. Ideally, the concept of Issue Trees comes makes an entry at this point to support the MECE Framework and make it visually more appealing to any stakeholders.
For Example,
We wish to understand whether we want to open up a new thrift store offering thrift fashion options to customers. Let’s try shaping the same up with the concept of an Issue Tree and a Solution Tree to counter the problems identified.
An Issue Tree focuses on the broad angles of the problems as opposed to nitpicking very specific and small aspects to it. Again, as repeated from the Four Hats Exercise - I believe an approach towards gathering information like a Madman helps in identifying a wide variety of problems that seem probable.
For ease of my understanding, I approached this in a different way and I’d like to breakdown the Issue Tree, into its components -
Branches
Some of the problems that might be identified through this are -
Our Locality of the Thrift Store is not generating enough footfall
Our Projected Volume of Sales seems to be on the higher end than the industry standard
We are unable to maintain the quality of the thrift clothing fashion product
Sub Branches
The Sub-Branches take shape from how the problems of the Main Branch are and often are smaller problem hacks backing up the Main Branch to cater to within a bigger space. In my head, it looks like this -
Understanding the Market of Thrift Fashion in that respective location to dive deep to either shifting base or to a different medium of conducting the same.
Understanding the spending volumes and return on spend volume spent on Marketing the Thrift Clothing Store would be beneficial to see discrepancies on
Understanding the requirement of hygiene and quality of thrifted fashion products by the customers, in terms of making an effort to clean/iron or steam the fabric of thrifted clothes.
The Leaves
If problems do not have a solution, it doesn’t solve any issue tree purpose. The solution to this example would be to further branch down the sub-branches into leaves, which contain the answers to that specific problem and the priority/impact of the problem. Of course, there’s not one specific answer to a problem, but narrowing down on the hypotheses angle and not getting overwhelmed with multiple hypotheses and narrower-nitpicking seldom does more harm than good in the case of problem-solving.
The idea of the MECE framework is fascinating in the sense that it helps us to create multiple buckets of the main problem, take sub-buckets of the problem’s reasoning, and multiple mugs of solutions till the information is used to the fullest.
Hopefully, I make the fullest use of this Framework in the coming week and think in a fairly decent structured manner.
Also, a new cool word learned in a new context - “Why-Trees”. The questioning remains the same, but what if we could see the tree as branches of crisp, precise problems and solutions?
Amazing ...this gave me more insights into the MECE framework 🙌