Today I would like to introduce you to two thinkers who might help you to see things from a different perspective.
The first is Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto. We will just call him Pareto. He was an Italian, born in France and died in Switzerland in 1923. He made many contributions to our understanding of economics, but today let’s focus on the Pareto Principle. You may know it as the 80/20 rule. It states that for many outcomes roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes. It recognizes that there is an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs. Let’s look at some examples.
As we work, we may be tempted to give all our tasks an equal or proportional share of our time. But Pareto suggest that 20% of the things we do will yield 80% of the benefits. A farmer might find that if he or she gives equal amounts of land, irrigation and tending to all possible crops, some 20% of the crops will bring 80% of the return on his investment.
Some people criticize the 80/20 ratio. But Pareto meant it as an example. If 30% of your workforce produces 70% of the useful work, that is still consistent with the Pareto Principle even though the ratio is not the same.
The bottom line is that we should always look for those investments of time and resources that will produce higher than average return on investment (ROI). In that way we will not become bogged down tending to activities, people and capital resources that will producing disappointing results.
Now we must travel back to the 13th and 14th century to meet an English Franciscan friar by the name of William of Occam. He gave us Occam’s Razor which is the problem-solving principle that "entities should not be multiplied without necessity." But we know it today with a much simpler formulation: the simplest explanation is most likely the right one.
This principle goes back at least as far as Aristotle, who wrote "Nature operates in the shortest way possible”. Others have sought to make it understandable over the centuries, some successfully and some not so much. To quote Isaac Newton, "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. Therefore, to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes."
Bertrand Russell offers a particular version of Occam's razor: "Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities.
The common thread you will see here is that we should not unnecessarily complicate things. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But Occam did not mean to suggest that his Razor always led to the correct conclusion, only that before considering more complicated answers to a question, see whether the answer is right there in front of you.
There are many everyday sayings which support Occam’s Razor: Keep it short and simple and don’t overcomplicate things are just two of them.
I hope you enjoyed meeting Vilfredo Pareto and William of Occam and that their ideas may give you a chance to see things in your work and in daily life from a different perspective.
- Herb