Bikeshedding Is Your Enemy

Have you ever heard of bikeshedding?

It doesn’t matter if you have or haven’t, because you have observed bikeshedding and probably experienced it yourself.

Have you ever delayed writing a report or involved email? Instead, you wasted an hour cleaning off your desk or organizing files. Have you found it difficult to find the time to put together a new piece of furniture or equipment? But you had time to scroll through social media or browsing through the same emails for the third time.

In 1955, British naval historian Cyril Parkinson wrote an article in The Economist titled “Parkinson’s Law or the Pursuit of Progress”. In it he proposes various management theories that he developed from his experience in the British Civil Service. One of his illustrations was of a fictional finance committee tasked with three agenda items: a contract for a $10 million nuclear reactor, a $350 bike shed, and a $21/year allowance for meeting refreshments. 

The reactor contract was passed in two and a half minutes. The bicycle shed was debated for 45-minutes. Changes were proposed that resulted in a savings of $50. The refreshment allowance was tabled until the next meeting in order to gather more information. Parkinson’s explanation for the different results was the more complex and expensive an agenda item is, the less time and energy people contribute to it.

Another term given to this phenomenon is the Law of Triviality. A nuclear reactor is so involved, it is expected that others know what they are doing and will get it done. However, a bike shed is easy to imagine and a project that anyone can contribute to. The same with the refreshment budget.

I have fallen prey to this law and experienced bikeshedding in my own experience. It is a lot easier to test out different graphics in a slide presentation than to actually write the presentation. I would rather schedule coffee with a friend and discuss a conflict I have with another person than have a hard conversation with the person I’m at odds with. I would rather glide through an agenda meeting as opposed to thoughtfully planning a strategic discussion session.

This phenomenon of bikeshedding occurs with individuals, in marriages, businesses, politics, and teams. It is not uncommon for a family to spend months planning a vacation, yet never get around to creating a strategy for retirement. A council committee will dedicate meeting after meeting to round-about proposals at intersections, but quickly place a “band-aid” solution on the community's meth epidemic. A team will take up the majority of a meeting to agree on the name of an event, when there are doubts over the purpose, even validity, of the event in the first place.

Are you committing the mistake of bikeshedding? Are there minor tasks, relatively unimportant issues, and/or easy discussions you are prioritizing, while more important (albeit harder) considerations are being ignored? The trivial is always less demanding. The shallow is typically less intimidating. To steal a title from Ben Horowitz’s book, the hard things about hard things is they are harder. If you want to deal with things of significance, issues of consequence, and what matters, you will have to resist caring about what color to paint the bicycle shed.