Many strategy consultants highlight “MECE thinking”—ensuring no overlap (ME) and covering all possibilities (CE). While this framework can help structure analyses or categories, it sometimes leads to artificially **excluding** options that could be combined advantageously. For instance:
- Increasing Revenues vs. Reducing Costs: There is no inherent reason you must choose *only one* if doing both is feasible. This pair of approaches are *not *mutually exclusive in the strict sense (you can do both simultaneously), nor do they interfere in the sense that doing one automatically prevents doing the other. Thus, they are “independent” in practical business terms.
- Mutual exclusivity is usually dictated by real-world constraints (budget, time, physical impossibility), not by a rigid analytical mindset.