All Saints Hospital

The English writer C Northcote Parkinson is best remembered for his adage that “work expands to fill the time available”, however it was not his only biting observation about the irrationality and ridiculousness of business life. ( Though, in actual fact if it truly had taken him his entire career to come up with Parkinson’s Law, that would have been a diverting demonstration of Parkinson’s Law. ) A less well known but similarly spot-on dictum is his Law of Triviality, which he illustrates with a non-existent story in which a firm’s managers meet to talk about 2 new projects : an atomic reactor and a company bike shed. The reactor is complicated and bewilderingly pricey, and non-experts risk humiliation if they speak up, so it is getting licensed in 2 and a half mins. But everybody knows about bikes and bike sheds, and everybody has a standpoint.

The bike shed, Parkinson writes, “will be discussed for an hour and 1 / 4, then deferred for call to the following meeting, outstanding the gathering of more information”. This has come to be called the color of the Bike Shed Phenomenon : the time expended on any item will be in inverse proportion to its cost and importance. Strenuously , the unimportant squeezes out the non-trivial.

The reactor may suffer from a disintegration due to some overlooked technical matter, but never mind : take a look at the overwhelming letterhead stationery we spent so long getting right! Parkinson’s point, which can be applied to politics and the media, too, isn’t simply that smaller matters are less intimidating to cope with. It is that when the members of any group are driven in part by private egotism as all of us are their interests collaborate, without them realising, to keep the target the unimportant. Each wants to show, to the director or to themselves, they’re taking part, listening, making an impact, “adding value”. But with complicated subjects about which they are ignorant, they cannot : they risk shame. They could also not dwell on their consultant subjects, preferring not to have the non-experts pry too closely. ( In Parkinson’s story, the nuclear expert keeps quiet : “he’d have to start by explaining what a reactor is, and nobody there would admit that he didn’t know already.

Better to assert nothing.” ) So what gets debated is exactly what isn’t important. “In Denmark we call it ’setting your fingerprint’, ” notes Poul-Henning Kamp, a programmer who has helped popularise the maze lately. “It is about private pride and status. It is about having the ability to point somewhere and say, ‘There! I did that’… Just think about steps in wet cement. ” Similar effects where little stuff preoccupies us because it’s little course thru our lives. The Law of Triviality also calls to mind the caustic comment, typically accredited to Henry Kissinger, that “educational politics are so vicious as the stakes are so small”, which is surely a fair take on most office politics, too.

I fear that something related is also what’s transpiring whenever I am getting that delusional sense of feat from having powered through multiple unimportant items on my task list, leaving untouched the few jobs that actually count. Taken together, Parkinson’s 2 laws amount to a devious but most certainly not unimportant alert : the work we do expands to fill the time available and, 1/2 the time, it isn’t even the most significant work.

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