Do you wonder why your management team spends an hour discussing what color to paint the reception area, but approves the next year’s capital budget after a few minutes’ discussion? This effect was noted by Naval Historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson in 1955 and elaborated on in his book Parkinson’s Law in 1957, the main topic of which was his most famous law, that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
Parkinson’s Law of Triviality states that “The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.” The bikeshed reference comes from the example given by Parkinson in which just after approving capital expenditure for a nuclear reactor in two and a half minutes, the committee spends 45 minutes discussing which material to use for the roof of the new staff bicycle shed.
The reason is easy to understand, and one that you need to be careful about. People will talk at length about topics with which they are familiar and feel that they can contribute. Most people can understand what a bikeshed is, but few are familiar with the detailed design aspects of nuclear reactors that need consideration. If the meeting is not well controlled the more trivial items will garner the most attention.
What should happen is that the important matters need to be properly explained and discussed. This means giving much of the talking time to experts who can explain the important decision and its nuances. Ideally, someone else with expertise should question the proposer and raise any matters that may be of concern and explain to those with less expertise so they can understand well enough to make an informed decision.
This clearly does not happen well enough around some big decisions. Monumentous matters can be agreed with little discussion, while trivial matters get examined in detail. And this allows an influential person or group with an agenda to dominate major decisions. It is probably because most people are too embarrassed in a management group to admit that they do not understand a major issue.
This is why we see so many mistakes in big matters. Before 2000 a major concern for many companies was the Y2K bug, the fear that critical systems operated by computer would fail catastrophically when the clocks changed from 23:59 on December 31 1999 to 00:00 on January 1, 2000. The reason given was that in earlier times when computer memory was limited two-digit dates were often used.
This basic concept about the calendar was easily understood so management committees spent huge amounts of time and money updating systems or testing them. What was less easy to grasp was the underlying computer science of how exactly this calendar change would cause such problems especially at the exact time when most people would not be working but would be partying to celebrate the new millennium.
But most management committees did not listen to anyone who questioned the danger. Indeed in 1999 a vice president of information technology at a company with which I am familiar was fired because, in the opinion of his superiors – not computer scientists, he was not taking the Y2K bug seriously enough.
And of course, all the great work to protect information systems worked and there were no Y2K catastrophes. But in Italy and other countries, where little or nothing was done to prepare for Y2K, there were no catastrophes either.
The same problem has been repeated since humans first started forming societies. Countries have become involved in disastrous wars because all sides of the major issues were not properly discussed. For instance, now many governments and large companies are undertaking costly efforts to reduce their carbon footprint to protect the Earth’s climate. But how many decision makers understand the climate science or exactly how the decisions they make are going to help? Proper discussion of the topics does not happen on this and other major issues. Typically, the important contrarian opinions are silenced.
In your role you are probably not going to have to make major decisions about war or energy policy. But there are topics that are important in your sphere of influence that you need to fully understand. The following are steps to take to ‘keep out of the bikeshed’.
- Allocate discussion time at the meeting in proportion to the amount of money involved.
- Make sure that you have adequate experts available to fully explain the topic.
- Have at least one expert who can present the opposite view. Use a devil’s advocate if necessary.
- If you don’t understand a topic properly ask questions.
- Postpone the big decision until it is fully examined.
It is essential that the biggest topics receive the most examination. If you make the wrong decision about capital expenditure it will affect your organization’s future. The color of the bikeshed roof will not.