Prospect Enemy Cluster-Busting With Pareto-rona Ratio

The UK ‘nudge unit’ (founded in 2010 after the breakthrough behavioural science book of Sunstein & Thaler) assessed coronavirus transmission. Results reported towards the end of November found the infection’s version of the Pareto ratio;

60/8.

Whereas Pareto back in the day may (or may not) have found Italian property ownership as a now fabled 80/20 split, it seems that;

eight per cent of individuals accounted for over sixty per cent of transmission risk in a study conducted by the Behavioural Insights Team.

Other surveys seem to suggest that approximately ten percent of people account for as much as eighty percent of transmission. An eye-popping 80/10.

There are knock-ons for contact tracing.

If volumes or capacity mean you cannot trace everybody that may have been in proximity with someone infected, then focus hard on those freshly infected with the most close contacts.

Break the chain from the superspreaders. In what is called ‘cluster-busting’.

Further findings also intrigue.

Three-quarters of people have self-isolated to such an extent that they have either no contacts at all, or else only one or two. Comprising just one percent of all transmission risk.

Transpose these numbers onto your prospect organisation.

In the old days, was it true that eighty percent of their internal airtime around your proposal would be generated by twenty percent of those involved?

Whether integral or on the fringes, are these voices in your favour or acting against? And are you assessing or managing their broadcast?

Are you also looking at ‘backward tracing’?

Who is everyone with whom you speak talking to not just today, but yesterday?

Can you too cluster-bust?

If the virus figures match up, then with twelve people impacted at your prospect, the risk is that just one of them will be responsible for sixty percent of all communications around your bid.

Quite the thought.

Do you know who this is? What they are saying? And what they need to say…?