Organizations give disproportionate weight to trivial issues they can all understand.
Parkinson's 1957 committee spends two minutes on a nuclear reactor and forty-five on a bicycle shed, because everyone understands sheds. Also called bikeshedding in software culture.
In practice
- A board spends five minutes on a £40m acquisition and fifty on the office coffee contract.
- A committee approves a technical standard without discussion and debates the wording of the announcement for an hour.
- Standing
- Also called the law of triviality, or bikeshedding.
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- How organisations behave when nobody is steering