What is the 80/20 Principle exactly? Well the concept of 80/20 is based on the work of Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto done in the late 1890s. It was popularised in the 80s by author Richard Koch with his book The 80/20 Principle.

80/20 is about almost invisible divisions or patterns that exist in most things. It's based on the idea that 80 per cent of results flow from just 20 percent of causes. If you start to identify these patterns and their significance, 80/20 can help you to focus in on what's really important and not worry so much about the rest.

So how does it work, practically? Let's take the example of learning a piece of software - specifically learning an e-learning authoring tool like Articulate Storyline. Typically, when we're faced with the prospect of using a new piece of software like this, we can feel rather daunted. So much to learn, so little time to learn it, as the saying goes.

In other words, we tend to look at the whole and convince ourselves we will only be truly competent when we know everything there is to know about the software.  And a good many people will beat themselves up about not knowing all the features well enough.

Equally, many managers and supervisors love to peddle this thinking and terrorise people over their inability to be good at absolutely everything in the software. Only when you reach perfection, their thinking seems to go, will you be considered a worthy employee.

80/20 thinking, by contrast, is much more pragmatic and quite counter-intuitive. It's starting point is that aiming for the 100% is a terrible waste of your time and energy. You'll definitely burn yourself out in the quest for perfection. And you almost certainly won't get the best result approaching things this way.

Much better to identify the significant 20% and focus more of your effort on that. By definition, this significant 20% ensures you will get a better return on your efforts. And by the way, the division doesn't have to be exactly 80/20. It'll depend very much on what you are looking at. Your 80/20 could be as much as 60/40 at one end of the scale or as little as 95/5 at the other end.

And in case you're wondering, this is not an excuse for sloppiness. It's about the smart allocation of time and resources. When you focus on the significant 20%, you do it to the absolute best of your ability and give it your all - in recognition of the fact that this is where your time and energy is best directed.

So back to learning Storyline. Where does this leave us? Well it means that the way we conventionally think about learning software is guaranteed to lead to heartache and strife. Typically, we think we should start at the beginning and work our way through from beginner to advanced.

Applying 80/20 thinking, however, paints a very different picture. It highlights the fact that we only use about 20% of the authoring tool's features to produce about 80% of the results. In other words we only need to be really proficient in a relatively small number of key features that we use over and over again to get most of the results

For the remaining 80% of the features (that only bring us 20% of the results), we should take a much more pragmatic approach. Because we use those features infrequently, we should be prepared to use a 'just in time', performance support-style approach to using them.

So, in fact, you don't need to spend 5 days of training, learning every last detail of your new authoring tool. You will have forgotten all those cool, obscure features by the time you come to use them, anyway.

Much better to get really proficient at the 20% you'll use over and over and worry about the rest as and when you need it. By the way, for an authoring tool like Storyline, I'd estimate it's more like a 70/30 division - but as I mentioned earlier, the principle remains true regardless of the actual percentages.

And doesn't that feel good? No need to beat yourself up about all the things you can't do. Instead revel in the fact that you are now highly productive, because you have become super-efficient and effective at using those features that really deliver the most bang for your buck.

If you've got a bit of time of the next few weeks, I can't recommend Koch's book highly enough. And of course you can apply 80/20 to reading it, - Koch encourages you to do this, by the way.

No need to read the book from cover-to-cover. Identify the chapters or parts of chapters that you think will deliver you the most benefit and focus in on those.

In times gone by I have heard some people wax lyrical about 80/20 and others rant about how stupid it is - hence my Marmite nickname for it. In my experience it rings true and provides an elegantly simple solution to how best to allocate your time and effort. And although it divides opinion, I've heard far more people praise it that damn it. So I guess the 80/20 principle applies to the division of opinions about it too.


If you want some Articulate Storyline training and you can see the benefits of applying 80/20 to that task, check out our in-house Storyline modules. We guarantee not to teach you every last detail of Storyline!

Great excitement and anticipation recently, as Netflix started to show the last 8 episodes of the US TV drama series Breaking Bad.

If you're a fan of this award-winning series, you'll have followed Walter White's epic journey from high school chemistry teacher to creepy drug kingpin who 'cooks' the best crystal meth known to mankind.  The creator of the series Vince Gilligan describes this as a journey from 'Mr Chips to Scarface'.

I've been a fan from the very first episode. And I'm sure, fellow fanatics reading this, can't wait to discover how the series finally twists and turns to its conclusion.

If you've never even heard of Breaking Bad and you enjoy quality TV drama, then I'd encourage you to check it out. I'm pretty sure you won't be disappointed.

And if you are already wondering what on earth any of this has to do with e-learning and instructional design, then let me explain.

Like any good Breaking Bad fan, while I was watching the last batch of episodes on DVD, I just had to look at all the special features, too. The first one that caught my eye was called The Writer's Room.

And how interesting it turned out to be. Apparently, on average, it takes a team of writers around three weeks to hatch an episode of this series.

I'll just repeat that, in case it didn't sink it the first time. It takes approximately 8 people, 3 weeks to come up with just the outline for 45-50 minutes of television drama.

The actual writing of that episode takes another 7 days or so. And the filming of the episode takes about 15 days.

I have no idea how this compares to other TV series, but it  really highlights how  creating a quality product is a major task.

But most striking of all? The three weeks it takes to work out what is going to happen in the episode. And this is just working out the plot. Satisfying yourself that you are creating credible actions and reactions for the various characters involved.

Of course, I couldn't help but draw some comparisons with how people typically go about creating a piece of e-learning.

For a single episode of Breaking Bad, in very rough percentage terms, that three weeks of creating the plot ( effectively the instructional design equivalent of analysis and design)  accounts for about 45% of the total development time. That's pretty astonishing.

Try selling that percentage of analysis and design time to an e-learning client, internal or external. Chances are you'll be laughed out of the room.

Very few people would be happy to accept that percentage of a project's time devoted to analysis and design.

Of course, plotting out a TV series is not the same as doing the analysis and design for a piece of e-learning. For e-learning, you probably don't need 45% of the time devoted to these activities. But you could comfortably spend quite  a bit more time on this stage, percentage-wise, than most people usually do.

So often, skipping over the analysis and design is the norm. Everyone would much rather skip over that and go straight to development.

Which is strange. Because as consumers of TV drama, we all know a poorly plotted film with a crumby script that rushes to production is a disaster.  Yet we are quite happy to live with a poorly designed, badly scripted piece of e-learning that gets rushed to development. With predictable results.

As I wrote last week, as long as we allow authoring tools to frame the e-learning development conversation (and process) we are in trouble. With this approach and mindset, we will be turning out the e-learning equivalent of B-movies or a TV series destined for the afternoon schedules. And we know how embarrassingly bad most of those end-products are.

For the minority, who are willing to get deadly serious about the analysis and design of their e-learning, popular, performance-improving courses are the gratifying end result.

With just a small shift in thinking and approach, more Breaking Bad quality e-learning is perfectly achievable for a lot more people.


If creating great e-learning is currently top of mind for you and you'd like to get a sense of how your e-learning stacks up against some best practices, then take a couple of minutes to complete our Discover Your E-Learning Impact scorecard to find out how you are doing.