Pareto triage
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Office anthropology™
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Pareto triage
pəˈreɪtˈəʊ ˈtraɪɪʤ (n.)
A JC coinage to capture management’s slavish devotion to the Pareto rule.
To exercise “Pareto triage” is to move beyond the observation that, in a given period, eighty percent of your revenues may be attributed to twenty percent of your clients, and vice versa — which is just one of those unfortunate, immutable characteristics of any large group of uneven numbers— and to use it as a business action plan to impose order upon the intractably messy universe.
The logic — if one could call it that — is this:
We have observed that one fifth of our customers provide four fifths of our revenue. We have spreadsheets to prove it. That means the remainder of our customers — eighty percent of the blighters! — generate just twenty percent. These people are hardly worth the bother. We would be much better served just foregoing that marginal revenue — or, at any rate, paying not the blindest bit of attention to keeping it — and instead concentrating on that lovely twenty percent segment who bring in all the rest of our income.
Here is a variation on the same argument, rendered in more plainly averagarianist terms:
“Half our clients generate more revenue than the other half. We should therefore ditch the lower-revenue generating half.”
Now, unless your customers are materially identical in size, shape and interest for your goods and services — and while the gormless denizens of data modernity urges us on, we’re not there yet — it is statistically certain that one half of your clients will buy more of your goods and services in a given period than than the other. “Given”, here, means “arbitrary”: however you define that period, and however you assemble your client roster, it will remain true.
For this is no wondrous insight into the mystic citadel of homo sapiens, but a basic property of a group of different numbers. You can arrange any group of random numbers into subgroups such that one will have a greater average than another. The key fact is that you are arranging them that way . That was your intellectual choice. That this should holds for your client revenues is unremarkable. It would be extraordinary if it did not hold, for any period you chose, and any subgroup of your customer base you chose. Because it is a property of the group, not of any individual in the group. The same individual may be in the majority of one group, but the minority of another. It depends which other individuals you choose.
This is to say that an average of is an emergent property of all the members of the group, and not any individual members. Isolate that single member from the group and that “average” evaporates. There is nothing about that individual that designates the average of which it seems to be part.
This is the logical error of jobsworthism. It is to mistake a mathematical property of variable set of data for a hard, determinate, property of artefacts in the real world.
Pareto triage doesn’t look like averagarianism, but it is. It is arbitrarily to divide a group into uneven portions by reference to the average emerging from each portion. The average drives selection for the group, not vice versa. The tail wags the dog.
That a group can be sorted according to the Pareto rule is a property of the statistical variance of that group. Variance is also an emergent property. It has no meaning at an individual level. It changes depending on who else is in the group.
The “eighty” and the “twenty” segments of your client base are no more homogeneous then the whole. The Pareto rule will apply equally to each of them.
That Pareto principle is, therefore fractal. It scales down and up. If you cut off the “bad bit”, you will see, to your horror, your new, concentrated, high-value, but radically down-sized “good bit” still requires Pareto triage: there are still twenty percent of its population generating eighty percent of the revenue. The revenue pot is just smaller, that’s all.
This is a Xeno’s paradox for our age: If we chase a Pareto triage we will end up with 20 percent of nothing.
It follows that if an average is not a property of an individual, then it will not travel through time or space with the individual. Just because an individual customer falls into “the gilded 20%” in one measurement period does not mean it will be there in another. Some customers may well do that, but it won’t have anything to do with Pareto triage.
Time
Nor does Pareto triage tell you anything about the forward value of your client base. Whatever period it covers, your data is a historical, averaged, snapshot: it will tell you nothing about the development of client data over the sample period. We are prone to averagarianism here, too. A client whose revenue has increased exponentially over a decade will, thanks the the Bill Gates on a bus effect, that revenue averaged over the decade will seem tepid. A client whose revenue has recently fallen off a cliff will look heroic.
And even if you can see that historical trend, of itself it doesn’t tell you anything. Remember the compliance refrain: past performance is not a reliable guide to future return .
There are any number of reasons a client’s revenue profile might change. They may be internal to the client, a function of market, a reflection of your product, or a result of poor sales coverage. It may be harder work than crunching a spreadsheet, but looking into why a specific client is not buying much product it will give much better basis to make the decision to terminate it.