Structure
creating a MECE hierarchical structure
Picture this: you're faced with a complex problem to solve. After researching possible solutions and collecting information, you are left staring into a list of tangled, disjointed, and even contradictory facts, opinions, and ideas. To make sense of all this, you need to organize all of these into a hierarchical structure that categorizes similar items into non-overlapping chunks (Mutually Exclusive and creates enough chunks to ensure all items are categorized (Collectively Exhaustive, CE). That MECE structure transforms chaos into clarity.
MECE
The first step is to rapidly gather a sufficient amount of relevant information. At his stage, it is quantity over quality but each piece has to be relevant to the problem at hand. The second step is to filter out what may not be as relevant as first thought to arrive at a satisfactory list.
The second step is to organize the list into nonoverlapping (Mutually Exclusive) chunks or clusters by grouping similar items. You may have to go through several iterations before you have enough no-overlapping chunks (Comprehensively Exhaustive) that can fit all the items.
The last step is to organize the chunks into groups of chunks and continue until you are left with about 3 to 5 super chunks. These super chunky are then organized into the first level of a hierarchy, the sub-chunks being the second level, all the way down to the last level which contains the original items. Again, you may have to iterate this process, even interesting back to the first step to get a satifacorty MECE