20% of team members can communicate 80% of problem definition, solutions
80% of team members can only communicate effectively 20% of the time
20% of the volume of communications (meetings, emails, docs) communicates properly 80% content. 80% of the meetings are redundant.
80% of the money spent on a project has 20% ROI.
I always fall into this infinite depth problem when I start thinking of the Pareto principle too. I resolve it by identifying the principle as a soft guideline for prioritizing work, not as an objective truth of everything
You can please 80% of the people 20% of the time, or you can please 20% of the people 80% of the time, but you can't please 80% of the people 80% of the time.
Those ratios probably vary widely on the real world. Many are probably near 80%/20%, while a few may be around 99.9%/0.1% or 50%/50%.
As you get more data points, your generalization fails more and more often, and some failures are severe, adding more planning risk than everything else added.
Or, in other words, the rule works most of the time. And you can rely on it at all.
there is a common conceit that if you repeat a word often enough it stops making sense, but in this case the statements are, as often is the case with percentages regarding tech, meant to sound meaningful but are probably not as clear as they could be.
