Law of Triviality
Teams spend the most time on the decisions that matter the least — because everyone feels qualified to have an opinion on them.
Why PMs should care
Parkinson's original example: a technical committee approves a £10m nuclear reactor in fifteen minutes because nobody around the table understands reactors well enough to push back. Then they spend three hours arguing about the colour of the staff bike shed, because everyone has an opinion about colours.
Every product review since has been some version of this. The mechanism is simple: people engage with decisions they feel qualified to have an opinion on, and 'what colour, what copy, what icon' is something everyone feels qualified for.
Your job is to notice when a meeting has drifted into the bike-shed zone and redirect it. Not by dismissing the trivial decision, but by parking it with a specific owner and a deadline — and surfacing the real decision nobody's engaging with, because the real one is intimidating and the bike shed is fun.
Example in product work
A steering committee reviews a new data platform. The architect presents the technical design — service boundaries, data flow, migration plan — in eight minutes. Two clarifying questions, nods, 'looks good, let's proceed'.
The next agenda item: the wording of the email subject line announcing the platform to internal users. Forty minutes of debate. Three rounds of iteration. Two follow-up emails and a Slack poll.
The PM watching this has two choices: let it happen and quietly grieve, or say 'let's assign the subject line to comms with a deadline of Thursday and use the remaining twenty minutes on the rollback plan, which we haven't discussed'.
Option two is the senior PM move. Option one is how decisions get made in most companies.
What to do when you see it
- A £10m technical decision passes in 15 minutes because nobody understands the technology well enough to push back.
- A bike-shed colour, a button label, an email subject line attracts three hours of debate because everyone has a view.
- Your job is to notice when a meeting has drifted into the bike-shed zone and redirect it.
- The move: park the trivial decision with a specific owner and a deadline, and surface the real decision nobody's engaging with because it's intimidating.
Sources & further reading
- Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress — C. Northcote Parkinson, 1958The book in which Parkinson introduced the bikeshedding parable alongside his famous time-management law.
- Why We Bikeshed — Poul-Henning KampThe FreeBSD developer's classic essay that popularised 'bikeshedding' in software culture.