Issue Trees MECE

Question

Hi,

I'm currently training with a couple cases and am trying to do an Issue Tree. However, I'm struggling a bit with the MECE concept.

The case is about a hospitality business which is about to open in the middle of the COVID pandemic and the manager asks you to prepare for the situation. I don't have any further information for now.

Smart basic question: How can the Hotel mitigate the negative impact of the pandemic on financial and non-financial performance in the two years following its opening?

Next step is to create the Issue tree.
For the financial part, this is quite straight-forward:

1.) How can costs be reduced?

1.1) How can variable costs be reduced?
1.2) How can fixed costs be reduced?

How can Income be improved etc…

However, the non-financial aspect is a bit more complex. I'm not at all sure how to structure this issue in a MECE way. I was thinking about an internal / external split, but I'm not sure if this works.

How would you tackle this problem? Is there a good MECE framework for non-financial aspects or should I use a completely different basic question?

Thanks a lot in advance and best regards

Answer 1

Hi there,

I think you are on the right track. On the revenue side, you can think of a range of levers (e.g. how to attract customers, pricing, discount strategy, etc.).

Other topics you may want to consider other than revenue and cost could be regulation (e.g., lockdowns). This will of course impact costs and revenue so it may be easier to break it down into revenue loss and increased costs and then insert that into the above buckets.

as part of presenting the case, you may want to have an element around risk mitigation and how you would implement the required flexibility.