Photograph by Alexey Lin via Unsplash

A designer’s guide to Parkinson’s Law of Triviality

Daniel Burka
GV Library
5 min readJun 27, 2016

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What to do when your team is focused on unimportant details

Last week, I met with two companies that are building incredibly complex, ambitious medical products. One of the companies is trying to fundamentally improve cancer outcomes in a way that could save millions of lives. The other company is trying to eliminate an entire class of diseases — not improve treatment, not cure a specific disease, but to eliminate a whole set of diseases. Wow.

I’m a pretty experienced designer, so when I talked to these companies’ leaders I expected to discuss the complexities of their product design challenges. Instead, the first company wanted to talk about what shade of carpet they should choose for their new office and the other company wanted me to work with them to improve their PowerPoint master template.

Wait, what?

These companies aren’t ignorant about the power of design. My team at GV has worked with them before and previously we worked on big, strategic projects. So, why were they focusing on such surface-level design challenges this time around?

Back in 1957, a guy named C. Northcote Parkinson observed that people often give disproportionate focus to trivial projects at work. As an example, Parkinson described a team that is creating a nuclear power plant. During the planning stages, a big debate breaks out about the design of the shed where employees will park their bicycles. Instead of arguing about the details of power mechanisms, cooling systems, or waste fuel storage, it seems like everyone’s focus is on what material should be used for the bike shed roof.

And, no wonder. At work, you’re expected to have intelligent opinions and propose smart solutions to problems. But, when you’re working on something that is very complex, it’s intimidating and exhausting to have opinions on the biggest challenges. It’s so easy to focus your attention on the issues that are easy to grok and which won’t (literally) blow up in your face if you’re wrong. So, it’s understandable that people schedule meetings about the roof of the bike shed so that they can voice their opinions and feel useful and heard.

This idea became known as Parkinson’s Law of Triviality or “bikeshedding” and there’s an excellent Wikipedia article that explains it in more depth if you’re curious. So, now that you’ve got a name for the phenomenon, what can you do about it when everyone is breathing down your neck about the carpet color or the PowerPoint design?

Here are the key things I’ve found that help when people start bikeshedding:

Embrace the attention

Be patient and look on the bright side. Wow, everyone is suddenly focused on your little corner of the world! Sure, it can be frustrating when many people voices their opinions, often unasked-for, but it’s also your chance to shine on a project of perceived importance. Grab this opportunity by the horns and keep your frustration under check. Try to embrace the mindset that every project is important — even the PowerPoint deck or the choice of carpet color. You have everyone’s attention and if you can pull the team together and choose a great roof for this particular bike shed, they’re going to be thrilled with you.

Listen carefully

If you’re the designer who is responsible for the project, the first thing you need to do is take the time to listen to everyone else. We know what’s driving this sudden interest in a seemingly trivial project: people feel overwhelmed by a different, complex issue and your project has become an escape valve. In some ways you’re now a therapist. Listening and accepting input is valuable in itself because you’re offering people an outlet. And remember, just because people offer direction and advice doesn’t mean you have to do everything they suggest, so take the time to absorb everyone’s contributions.

Ensure that people feel heard

This is the most important part. It’s not good enough to just listen to people, you also need to make sure they know they were heard. This is part of your role as a designer/therapist. I’ll repeat what I said earlier, you shouldn’t necessarily literally do what people suggest. But, when you choose Franklin Gothic for those PowerPoint titles, explain where this decision came from and show how people’s feedback helped you reach this choice. Your teammates will feel like you’ve accomplished something important together, even if you personally feel like the project is a distraction.

Timebox the project

Setting a deadline for your “bike shed” project has two benefits. First, it will help you spend an appropriate amount of time on the project. You’ll get the job done but quickly move on to more important efforts. And second, a deadline can actually produce better results. We’ve seen again and again how time pressure helps teams create great solutions together.

Gently refocus people’s passion

It’s often really difficult to redirect people’s focus back onto larger problem, but sometimes it is possible. One way to be successful is to lean in and work on the hard problem yourself. Of course, you may not be qualified to make decisions on something as complex as a nuclear power plant’s power supply systems, but you may be able to step in as a facilitator to help move that decision-making process along in a healthy way. Now that the big, tough issue is unlocked and moving ahead, people will hopefully turn their focus away from your simpler project.

And, in the end, it’s often simply helpful to have a name and an explanation for things. The next time you’re caught leading a 2-hour meeting about fabric samples, you’ll be that person who laughs knowingly… we’re bikeshedding here, people.

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